Tag Archives: imagination

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Inanimate Objects and their Significant Role in Our Imagination’s

We talked a bit last week about how Little Black Sambo seemed to have this “familiarity” to it and I feel the same can be said for The Pasteboard Bandit. As I was reading I found myself remembering the book (but honestly, mostly its movie adaptation) The Indian in the Cupboard, and how its central fantastical theme was this idea of bringing inanimate objects to life. In psychology there’s this term known as “animalistic thinking”, which denotes that children within a certain age frame believe that inanimate objects are real. This theme is rampant when it comes to children’s entertainment, especially when we consider television and movies (Barney, Toy Story). We can reach a little further with this idea when it comes to myths and legends. When we are told as children that Santa Claus exists and that the Boogieman lives under our bed, we, as children, are quick to believe it, even with no proof. This resonated with me as I read “The Land Behind The Sun” within The Brownies Book, and remembering my irrational fear of something living in my closet just because my older cousin told me it did.

Obviously, as we get older we realize the folly of our thought processes as children, but we never forget what it was like to believe outlandish and fantastical ideas. I honestly believe that if this was not the case, that literature and entertainment of the more ‘imaginative” sort would not be possible. Having moments in life in which you believe the impossible is possible, whether it’s believing that the tooth fairy exists or that your dolls or figures are real, is a requirement to having, let alone developing, an imagination.

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My Qualms with “Why Are American’s Afraid of Dragons?”

I sit here looking to add substance to my blog about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by reading Ursula LeGuin’s “Why are American’s Afraid of Dragons”, but find myself basically snubbed by her assumptions within the essay and am now more inclined to talk about that than anything else. I took this class because by plan is to someday write for children’s television shows someday, so taking a children’s literature course was kind of obvious. However, I never developed my love for writing from books (in fact I really don’t like to read at all), instead it came from television. To this day I’d rather see the new episode of Once Upon a Time on ABC, rather than watch the Jets lost another game during the football season. I’ve read graphic novels and comics since I was a kid and was never into many sports, westerns or detective stories (unless it involved Batman). What I’m getting at here is that I basically live in my imagination, and for someone who is now working toward developing it further in hopes of making a living using it, I find myself somewhat perplexed and vexed by Ursula’s thinking.

She grounds our forsaking of imagination in our assimilated roles within our genders and uses bases like the needs and gains of our financial responsibilities and attainments as a way of supporting this. However, this was done in 1974, so I would hope that our development and use of technology in the genres of film and television have enabled the general American populace to embrace and strengthen both our own, and opinions about, imagination. Now thinking about it, I just read the entirety of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz online from a miniature tablet, which would not have even been imagined to exist 10 years ago, let alone 38 years ago! Our development of things such as C.G.I and digital libraries have allowed us to push and fulfill our imaginations passed the stars and into the beyond, with no current end in sight. This essay might have made some sense then, but it makes a lot less sense now.

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Alice in Wonderland

The stories of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland have always been a favorite of mine. I was excited to read Lewis Carroll’s book again from a different perspective now that I am older. One of the first things that surprised me was when Alice was drinking the “drink me” potion, and eating the “eat me” cake. Alice checks the bottle to see if it says poison, and when she sees that it doesn’t she drinks it. When I was younger this didn’t strike me as odd. Now, I think of all the different things that could have happened to Alice other than a change in size. In todays society it does not matter if a drink says poison or not because it could very well be drugged and very dangerous. The fact that Alice drinks and eats what she finds led me to start thinking about how crucial it is that Alice is a child. Any adult in Alice’s position most likely wouldn’t have followed a strange rabbit down a hole in the ground, let alone drink and eat random things they find along the way. A child can sometimes be seen as curious, and naïve. Alice doesn’t imagine this drink as dangerous at all as soon as she sees that it is not marked poison because she is naïve enough to believe that no one would purposely deceive her in such a way. Alice is also a very curious child, but still believes in things many people believe are impossible. Alice’s imagination and curiosity bring her to the amazing world of Wonderland where nothing is impossible. All of her adventures in Wonderland only happen because she doesn’t question whether or not this strange talking rabbit is real or not, but simply, where is he going?

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“How to Read Children’s Literature”

Children’s Literature is a peculiar genre in that its intended audience is imagined and its writers are far removed from the readers. When writing/creating a character, it’s easiest to draw from one’s own life to shape his/her experiences. I would imagine that there would be a lot of backlash if the entirety or great majority of African American literature was written by upper/middle class white men. Sure, there’s a great deal of imagination that goes into writing a story, but when the voice of an entire minority is being represented in literature by those in power, erasure happens. Children’s Literature is characterized by a lack of proper representation of those it portrays. Adults write for children and thus, assume this abstract reader. In Jonathan Klassen’s “How to Read Children’s Literature,” the reader adult writers imagine is called the “implied reader.” Klassen explains that the implied reader is “a role the text implies,” but what happens when the child isn’t the reader we assumed him/her to be?

What happens when adults imagine this nonexistent child and it doesn’t match up to the actual children who are reading? If children are seen as “other” and yet are seen as lacking sovereignty over themselves, completely dependent, and inferior to the adults they will one day become, this “implied reader” does no justice to the real child reader whose mind and imaginary worlds are viewed upon with condescension. What would it mean for our society to fully accept children as conscious citizens rather than wild animals that need to be tamed and how would that reflect in children’s literature and how it’s viewed?