Hey guys! For the first reading response my position is the Intertextual Response, so I thought it would be interesting to research information on Maurice Sendak and his books subsequent to Where The Wild Things Are. As I began to dig deeper and deeper into his past, the articles revealed astonishing clues to the meaning behind his wonderful pictures and text. Thus, I began to question the motives behind all children's literature.
From genre to genre, children's literature can be categorized an endless amount of ways. As a future teacher, however, I feel it is imperative to focus on the books that are placed in the children's section, when indeed they should not be. The beauty of children's literature, from the elaborate artwork to the corky stories, is allowing kids to elaborate on their own thoughts and infinite imaginations. Books such as The Giving Tree--one of my favorites as a kid--have underlying meanings aimed for a mature mind. Although I feel it is important to expose kids to figurative pieces of literature, I think it is overlooked as adults. Now I find myself reading into everything I ever read as a child! I would never want to doubt the mind of a child but I think it would be interesting to get their perspectives to compare and contrast.
I don't know if anyone has any experience with children in this field but let me know what you think!
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3 comments:
That is a very interesting idea to think about. I don't think, however, that books that have deep meanings should be taken out of the children's sections. I think that adults should be encouraged to read with their children and then they will be able to gain exposure to these enlightening texts. Even though children may not get all of the intended meaning out of a text, they can still enjoy the reading. Parents can also take what they as adults are able to see and discuss it in more detail with their children. Teachers can also do this. In a first grade classroom that I help in the teacher always reads a pleasure book for the children and just asks them what they think about it.
Do you think that Sendak wanted Adults to pick up on these subtle cues? Or do you think that as Adults, we are completely overanalyzing children's texts. Sometimes I laugh at little things we pick out in class, because It is so overanalyzed to the point where I question if Sendak actually thought about these things while illustarting the book. I guess there is no way to find the answer unless one speaks to Sendak him/herself. If some books do indeed have hidden meanings, I think its ok to keep them in the Children's section because most children to not look into texts as
adults do.
This might seem strange, but I don't know if it really matters what Senack intended... Since I'm coming from a reader response perspective (that idea of meanings come from reader-text-context, I think that he is just one reader, with one interpretation! (And people may disagree!)
This means that I also think it's ok if kids take something different from a book than adults might. For me, the line between analysis and over-analysis is more about pleasure. I think there's pleasure in seeing new things in text, but I also think that you can "peel the onion away to nothing", to paraphrase Atwell.
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