Whether it’s re-reading childhood favourites such as Harry Potter, enjoying Young Adult fiction well into adulthood, or discussing the Barbie movie on social media, engagement with youth culture is not limited to those under eighteen. As critic Deborah Stevenson puts it, children’s literature’s ”most powerful children are ex-children”: it is adults, after all, who are primarily responsible for writing, illustrating, editing, publishing and buying children’s books. Over the course of the semester we will critically examine our relationship with children’s and Young Adult literature from our positions as adult readers, scholars, critics and teachers. Using a variety of theoretical and critical approaches, we will navigate the complicated issues of memory and nostalgia; analyse texts we may know better in their remediated forms (as films or television programmes); consider the role fan culture plays in our understanding of children’s and YA  literature; and explore what uses we can make of concepts of kinship, in order to connect our child, adolescent and adult selves over our reading lives. Primary texts under discussion will include Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (1940), L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964). Students are encouraged to read these in advance.

Kurs im HIS-LSF