Reading Tool Kit

1. Reading Tool Kit Literature for the intermediate reader

2. Material Considerations • Whenever you pick up a book or a poem that has been written for children, you need to learn as much as you can about the context. • When was the book FIRST published and what was going on then? • What do we know about the author? • Who do we think might be the intended audience?

3. Material Considerations • Context, continued: • Are there illustrations? If so, are they by the author or by an artist? • How was the text received during the time of its release? For instance, The Wind in the Willows was panned by critics, as was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Today, these texts are still being read. It’s worth taking the extra time to find these things out! William Steig was both the author and the illustrator of Dominic (1972).

4. So What? • Learning about the context of a work enables you to make better judgments. For instance, if you didn’t know about infant mortality rates in colonial times or if you didn’t know something about Puritan religious beliefs, a text such as Janeway’sA Token for Children (1672) would seem unnecessarily morbid and negative. • Once you have some background information, it becomes easier to undertand why A Token for Children was the most beloved children’s book in colonial America.

5. What Edition Do You Have? Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret – 1970 Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret – 2008

6. What Edition Do You Have? • Sometimes the only difference between an original edition and a later edition of a text is the book cover, as in the example on the previous slide. Other times, a book may be edited to update it or to remove culturally offensive words or ideas. • A few years ago, the Paddington books were edited to remove most of the “Britishisms” – GRRR!!!

7. What’s next? • After you’ve placed your book or story in context, you need to think about issues such as narration, characterization, and overall structure. • While you are reading, you should (of course) experience the pleasure of “losing” yourself in a work, but as a beginning critic, you also have to be on the look-out for how an author uses technique in order to create meaning. And are there some downsides to such experiences of “losing oneself in a good book”? • While there are many other ways to analyze a text than through its formal properties, this is a good place to start.

8. Narrative Technique • The Author’s Choice of Narrator • Personified • Impersonal and omniscient • Narrative Perspective • First person • Third person • KEY TERMS: point of view; focalization; focalizer First person perspective in Drum, Chavi, Drum! ¡Toca, Chavi, Toca! (2003) by Mayra L. Dole and Tonel

9. First Person Narration • For instance, in Drum, Chavi, Drum! ¡Toca, Chavi, Toca!, a bilingual picture book, the author Mayra Dole creates the character Chavi and focalizes the text through her. This is called“first person narration,” and the entire story comes to us through Chavi. Because of her youth and inexperience, Chavi’s account will be that of a child.

10. Remember, in Fiction, the Author is NOT the Narrator

11. The Unreliable Narrator • While all narrators are unreliable, in that they can only give us their view of things, many scholars argue that child narrators are more likely to be unreliable because they do not yet possess a complete world view. • However, authors such as Mark Twain have used this assumption to their advantage. His narrator, Huck Finn, actually believes that he will go to Hell if he frees a slave, but he does it anyway. We know that Huck’s fears are groundless, but they tell us a great deal about the culture at the time. Huck is portrayed as being BETTER than the adults around him.

12. Omniscient Narrators • An author often chooses to use an omniscient narrator in order to provide the reader with information that a first-person narrator could not provide, such as the feelings and thoughts of other characters. • In the Harry Potter series, Rowling usually focalizes events through Harry, but there are exceptions that are very important to the progress of the narrative.

13. Narrative Medium • In addition to traditional narrative forms, authors can utilize narrative media that provide the reader with unique insights: • The Epistolary Novel – letters back/forth between characters • The Diary Novel – a diary account which provides a twist on first person narration (here, the first person narration is readily justified, as the character is writing in his/her diary) • The Multivocal Narrative – a way to provide the multiple viewpoints of an omniscient narrator, but using first person narration • The Graphic Novel – the blending of text and pictures

14. Characterization • The term “protagonist” refers to the principal character in a text. The term “secondary character” can be used to refer to the other characters. • In some texts – and especially with multivocal narratives – there may be more than one protagonist.

15. Character Table

16. Further Thoughts on Character • In most texts written for children, readers are asked to judge characters by the choices that they make. • This sort of expectation is dependent upon our willingness to believe in “right” and “wrong” – and to believe that people CHOOSE to be “good” or “evil.” • Increasingly, authors are questioning these ideas, perhaps as a reflection of our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the workings of the human mind and our knowledge of how cultural forces can shape individuals’ decisions.

17. The Progressive Plot • The progressive plot involves the introduction of a complication and its resolution. • In series fiction, the plot structure remains the same – only the location and the specifics change – which is why children (and adults) may favor this type of literature for their recreational reading.

18. Plot Types – The Romantic and the Moral Romantic – Desires Fulfilled Moral – Growth Occurs

19. The Episodic Plot • As critic Maria Nikolajeva defines it, the episodic plot brings together “single events or short episodes” that are linked “by common characters, settings, or themes.” • For instance, in the Rupert bear series, Rupert remains the same, but the locale of his adventures changes.

20. Bringing It All Together • By thinking carefully about a text – considering when it was written, who wrote it, how it was structured, and how it was received – you can begin to understand the trends in children’s literature.

21. Bringing It All Together • A few years ago, the Series of Unfortunate Events books became extremely popular. • They featured the truly violent and bizarre events that happened to a family of children – there were no happy endings (or at least not as we’ve been taught to understand them).

22. Bringing It All Together • The narrator seemed to delight in telling readers these creepy and dark stories – and did so in extremely complex language (actually a ruse to get kids to look up SAT words, IMHO).

23. Bringing It All Together • When these books emerged and were clearly very, very popular, students and parents continually asked me, “WHY?” • It’s in situations such as this one that having a reading toolkit enabled me (and them) to understand a book that seemed perplexing.