Nothing particularly interesting

I have been reading a lot about Shaun Tan in recent weeks.  His illustrated books are extraordinary things, and well worth a look.  Equally interesting though, is what Tan himself says about them - particularly in relation to his recurring themes of migration, displacement and belonging. In this keynote speech from the 2012 IBBY cogress (a full transcript of which is available on Tan's own website ), Shaun Tan explains about the themes of migration, identity and belonging in his books - and in particular in his book The Arrival. Tan highlights the relavance of stories of migration by suggesting that children develop a sense of their own identities by being able to measure it against 'otherness'. " Culture, nature, family, belief, work, play, language " Tan says, " are flexible realities, something we realise especially when we travel overseas, and discover that the commonplace is exotic and the exotic is commonplace, depending on what side of the tour-b...

In the forthcoming semester, I will be embracing something NEW and teaching a module on children’s literature – a significant shift from my areas of specialism in eighteenth-century literature, American drama and cultural theory. This is something I have been wanting to do for some time – before, indeed, I had the pleasure of becoming and parent and finding myself reading Maurice Sendak and Julia Donaldson so repetitively that at times I find myself reciting ‘a mouse took a walk through the deep dark wood’ to myself as I walk down the road, like a Gruffaholic zombie. It has always interested me largely because it seems to interest my students so much. Of all the dissertations I have supervised (and despite my best efforts to get people to write about Tristram Shandy) children’s literature has probably been one of the most recurring topics. Not surprising given the explosion of critical interest in the field, rather nicely demonstrated by this ngram chart: Indeed, it is e...

For this task, due on 10th June, you will be writing an essay – but not just an ordinary essay. Remembering that one of the learning outcomes for this module is to “[d]evelop skills in crafting writing for specific purposes, both academic and non-academic”, this essay is going to centre on a more creative approach to the subject. This essay will therefore chart your development of your own idea for a piece of children’s literature. Hopefully it will not take you long to realise that such a task is far from simple. It will require a number of complex processes, of critical awareness, and an understanding of how language can be narrowed in order that the reader has multiple pathways of possible expansion. This assignment does not require that you actually write a children’s story (although if you wanted to do so, you could add it as an appendix). What it requires is that you demonstrate a process of shaping a story – thinking about it in terms of its ideas and their relationship...