Constructing Age for Young Readers

Joosen, Vanessa

doi:10.3366/ircl.2021.0409

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This discussion may be traced back to both Hunt's (1984) and Rose's (1984) texts, but also to more recent theoretical and conceptual approaches to the power hierarchy between children's and adults as in Nikolajeva's (2009) concept of "aetonormativity", a neologism that refers to the normativity of the adult, Marah Gubar's (2013) "kinship model" that oppossess to the notion of the child as having a deficit to be compensated, Deszcz-Tryhubczak's work with children in participatory approaches (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2016) and Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer's (2022) proposal to look at children's literature as "joint venture" of adults and children. The power imbalance between children and adults (and child readers and adult authors) has also motivated an interest in young authors and the circulation and appraisal of their works (as in the work of Joosen, 2021;Wesseling, 2019, andTodorova, 2017) and different understandings about how intergenerational relations hide a potential for transformation (as gathered in Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Jacques, 2021;Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Kalla, 2021). More recently, Vanessa Joosen has also taken up John Wall's childism as an analytic framework for textual analysis of ageism in children's texts (Joosen, in print).…”

Section: Escaping Adultismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

García-González

2022

Child Lit Educ

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A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and new materialist epistemologies could reorient our critical practice in and with children's literature. Using the concept of childist criticism (Hunt 1984(Hunt , 1991 and Maggie MacLure's (2013) notion of the "wonder of data," I follow different encounters between children (and researchers) and the book La madre y la muerte/La partida (Laiseca et al., 2016). This book tells a macabre story about a mother that cannot bear to have her child taken away by Death. By following the book's agency (García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020) in the research assemblage of different projects, I propose possible affective methodological orientations to post-representational research for children's literature criticism.

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Section: Escaping Adultismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

García-González

2022

Child Lit Educ

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“…"2The code is available in open access via the following link: http://textua.uantwerpen.be/app/cafyr. A prototype of this parser was used by VanessaJoosen (2021b) in "Research in Action: Constructing Age For Young Readers" to study adjectives in Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage. See this article for a brief introduction of previous studies conducting analysis with other implementations of automatic syntactic dependency parsers.…”

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confidence: 99%

Shuffling Softly, Sighing Deeply: A Digital Inquiry into Representations of Older Men and Women in Literature for Different Ages

Geybels

2023

Social Sciences

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When gender is brought into concerns about older people, the emphasis often lies on stereotypes connected to older women, and few comparative studies have been conducted pertaining to the representation of the intersection between older age and gender in fiction. This article argues that not only children’s literature, traditionally considered to be a carrier of ideology, plays a large part in the target readership’s age socialization, but so do young adult and adult fiction. In a large corpus of 41 Dutch books written for different ages, the representation of older men and women is studied through the verbs, grammatical possessions and adjectives associated with the relevant fictional characters, which were extracted from the texts through the computational method of dependency parsing. Older adult characters featured most frequently in fiction for adults, where, more so than in the books for younger readers, they are depicted as being prone to illness, experiencing the effects of a deteriorating body and having a limited social network. In the books for children, little to no association between older adulthood and mortality was found in the data. Ageist stereotypes pertaining to both genders were found throughout the corpus. In terms of characterization, male older adults are associated more with physicality, including matters of illness and mobility, while character traits and emotions show up in a more varied manner in connection to female older characters.

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Constructing ‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach

Joosen

2024

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging

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Most literary scholars and age scholars have thus far relied on narrative analyses through close reading to comment on the age norms that books convey. This chapter explores what digital tools have to offer to support and enrich this type of analysis. The chapter focuses on children’s literature, a discourse that is defined by age and often thematizes intergenerational relationships and processes of growing up. After offering methodological reflections, it presents the results of a digital analysis of explicit and implicit age norms for older age in a corpus of 193 books by British, Dutch, and Flemish children’s authors. The scripts lay bare patterns that may escape human attention, such as the large number of explicit reflections on age or the substantial percentage of dialogue that older characters contribute to adult direct speech. The explicit reflections on older age are largely negative when isolated from context, but when supplemented with close readings they can direct researchers to debates about age that usually add nuance. The findings on the implicit age norms in direct speech in the corpus suggest that older characters speak more often in the past tense and about religion than young and other adult characters.

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Constructing Age for Young Readers

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

Shuffling Softly, Sighing Deeply: A Digital Inquiry into Representations of Older Men and Women in Literature for Different Ages

Constructing ‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach

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