Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

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Lauren Bosc — 2019-08-15

Ten Goslings, Six Plus Four: Who Will Get the Highest Score?

Heather R. Snell — 2019-08-15

“Agent of Revolutionary Thought“: Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human

Maria Kromidas — 2019-08-15

In “Gorilla, My Love,” Toni Cade Bambara’s Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon’s utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel’s unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present.

Visualization and the Vivid Reading Experience

Margaret Mackey — 2019-08-15

Many teachers’ guides about teaching reading suggest that actively creating mental pictures is important or essential to comprehension. This article approaches the idea of the priority of visualization from three perspectives. It presents self-description from undergraduate readers of varied backgrounds, whose analysis of their own reading processes includes a range of approaches, from creating detailed imagery to developing a provisional schema to rejecting visualization altogether. A substantial review of current literature in neuroscience and cognitive poetics reinforces the viability of a more plural framework of interpretative strategies. Finally, the article explores how authors contribute to variation in readerly tactics through foregrounding and other narrative strategies, by means of an analysis of the opening three chapters of Philip Pullman’s novel La Belle Sauvage.

“Are You Preparing for Another War?”: Un/Just War and the Hunger Games Trilogy

Roxanne Harde — 2019-08-15

Drawing from the body of just war theory, this article analyzes Suzanne Collins’s discussion of warfare in the Hunger Games trilogy, tracing the ways in which decisions about war unfold along the lines of the love triangle plot involving Peeta and Gale. Although there are important issues about social injustices driving the trilogy, a fair amount of scholarship has focused on romance in the novel. The more interesting tension in the narrative is not Katniss’s romantic entanglements but the conflict among Peeta’s adherence to the principles of just war, Gale’s disregard of them, and Katniss’s continuing moral dilemmas about them. Arguing that Katniss’s deliberations about war—both joining the rebellion and fighting in the war against the Capitol—are aligned with the foundational principles of just war theory, this essay traces the mandates of jus ad bellum as set out in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, where Katniss, influenced by both Gale and Peeta, considers rebellion, and then reads in Mockingjay the ways in which the ethical demands of jus in bello lead her to choose Peeta.

Writing with Impunity in a Space of Their Own: On Cultural Appropriation, Imaginative Play, and a New Ethics of Slash in Harry Potter Fan Fiction

James Joshua Coleman — 2019-08-15

As defined by Ika Willis, slash is “fiction written by women involving man-on-man (m/m) sexual and/or romantic relationships” (290). Refracted through the contemporary theories of moral philosophy, this paper names such slash as cultural appropriation; however, it further contends that such cultural appropriation is not inherently unethical but instead represents a generative imaginative space in which new configurations of gender and sexuality might be theorized. Building upon this premise, this paper argues that slash’s appropriative nature only becomes problematic when it generates misrepresentations that decouple the gay community from its histories, both joyous and painful.

Girl-Animal Metamorphoses: Voice, Choice, and (Material) Agency of the Transforming Female Body in Young Adult Literature

Tharini Viswanath — 2019-08-15

This article draws on theories of material feminism and children’s literature scholarship to examine the relationship between the metamorphing adolescent body and language in two texts that deal with girl-animal metamorphoses: Justine Larbalestier’s Liar and Peter Dickinson’s Eva. In particular, it examines how the materiality of the characters’ transforming bodies gives them agency when they are silenced on the level of the human, and more important, how the liminality of the metamorph’s body influences their access to human language, which in turn enables them to survive in their respective societies.

Introduction: “Indigenous Comics And Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography”

Camille Callison — 2019-08-15

With contributions by Niigaan James Sinclair, Sonya Ballantyne, Jay Odjick, Taylor Daigneault, and Amy Mazowita.

NOTE: This is an introduction to the open access online resource, “Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography,” posted at <http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc/resources>.

Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography

Taylor Daigneault (Métis) — 2019-08-15

The primary focus of this Annotated Bibliography is comics by self-identified Indigenous creators and publishers working in Canada and the United States, although where possible we have included Indigenous comics from outside North America. We have attempted to include as many titles as possible up until March, 2019, but this will always be an incomplete list and we regret any omissions or oversights. We regard this Annotated Bibliography as a preliminary work and hope it can serve as the basis for more in-depth work in the expanding field of Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels.

For a more extensive guide to comics and graphic novels featuring Indigenous characters and stories (including those by non-Indigenous creators), see the Mazinbiige Indigenous Graphic Novel Collection at the University of Manitoba Library: https://libguides.lib.umanitoba.ca/mazinbiige.

For more information about this project, see Introduction: "Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography” in Jeunesse, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp. 139-55 (2019).

This resource will be updated twice a year, in July and December. Please send any suggestions for additions or revisions to Candida Rifkind (c.rifkind@uwinnipeg.ca).

“There but Not There:” Representations, Roles, and Experiences of Children’s Embodiment in Literature and Culture

Caroline Hamilton-McKenna — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Harde, Roxanne, and Kokkola, Lydia, editors. The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2018.

Connecting Generations, Connecting Disciplines: Intergenerational (Im)Possibilities in Popular Media

Madeleine Hunter — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Joosen, Vanessa, editor. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media. UP of Mississippi, 2018.

Intermedial Borders and Global Fairy-Tale Cultures

Michelle Anya Anjirbag — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Greenhill, Pauline, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, editors. The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures. Routledge, 2018.

Digging in to the Alphabet Soup: Exploring Trends and Embracing Change in LGBTQ+ YA Literature

Robert Bittner — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Jenkins, Christine A., and Michael Cart. Representing the Rainbow in Young Adult Literature: LGBTQ+ Content since 1969. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Redefining African American Children’s Literature before 1900

Jill E. Silvius — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Capshaw, Katharine, and Anna Mae Duane, editors. Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

“Doing” Gender Differently: Exposing the Porous Nature of Gender Norms through Children’s Literature

Michelle Jeffries — 2019-08-15

Review of:

Mike, Nadia. Leah’s Mustache Party, illustrated by Charlene Chua, Inhabit Media, 2016.

Fullerton, Alma. Hand over Hand, illustrated by Renné Benoit, Second Story, 2017.

Cassidy, Sara. A Boy Named Queen. Groundwood Books, 2016.

About Jeunesse

Lauren Bosc — 2019-08-15

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Masthead

Table of Contents

Ten Goslings, Six Plus Four: Who Will Get the Highest Score?

“Agent of Revolutionary Thought“: Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human

Visualization and the Vivid Reading Experience

“Are You Preparing for Another War?”: Un/Just War and the Hunger Games Trilogy

Writing with Impunity in a Space of Their Own: On Cultural Appropriation, Imaginative Play, and a New Ethics of Slash in Harry Potter Fan Fiction

Girl-Animal Metamorphoses: Voice, Choice, and (Material) Agency of the Transforming Female Body in Young Adult Literature

Introduction: “Indigenous Comics And Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography”

Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography

“There but Not There:” Representations, Roles, and Experiences of Children’s Embodiment in Literature and Culture

Connecting Generations, Connecting Disciplines: Intergenerational (Im)Possibilities in Popular Media

Intermedial Borders and Global Fairy-Tale Cultures

Digging in to the Alphabet Soup: Exploring Trends and Embracing Change in LGBTQ+ YA Literature

Redefining African American Children’s Literature before 1900

“Doing” Gender Differently: Exposing the Porous Nature of Gender Norms through Children’s Literature

About Jeunesse