Tween Lit and Culture

Chronotope

temporal and spatial relationships expressed in literature. Different genres will have different chronotopes. Some are timeless like wonderland, and neverland. With gothic lit, these boundaries are often permeable. (Bod removed from space and comfort of home to graveyard which becomes new home where he learns form people alive in different times._ monuments keep the past in our present, nobody has control over curating a memory

Metanarrative

Narrative that experiments and explores idea of storytelling, brings attention to its artifice. Harriet the Spy could be read as an exploration of writing, processing the world with the unfiltered narrative of a childs perspective.

Social Realism

Realism is a literary technique broadly defined as ‘representation of reality’ or ‘verisimilitude’. Concerned with events, particular settings, characters from all ranks of life. Often plain narrative style with use of detail to particularize time, place, and character. Social realism tends to focus on everyday people and their lives, particularly the working class.

Paratext

Elements that exist on the fringe of a text - introductions, back matter, footnotes, ect. Serve as a threshold or interface between the text and the impact the works repection. Exists between art and commerce.

Metafiction

draws attention to artifice. Think how Snicket wears multiple hat.

Salon Culture

gathering of regularly scheduled time at home of wealthy and respected women. Often hold court in bedroom. Marie Catherine publisher her stories in vernacular of salon culture, one story translates to ‘cunning cinders’ which was a variation on cinderella. Charles Perrault also published stories at same time but pitched them to children

Postmodernism

20th century fairytales often have humble harworking and domestic heroin with a reflection of post WWII gender ideals in north america. In contrast postmodern fairytales will reconsider ignored perspective of marginilized groups. Enchanted puts characters in a ‘real world’ with main character as naive and helpless but through. parody.

Ludic Reading

deep engagement with a text, which invovles an imaginative ‘merging’ of the reader with character and events. Ludic reading tends to take it at face value and engage for purely enjoyment since luto means play. Alternatively, you can have a resistant reading where you resist what the message of the story is.

Pop culture paradox

Pop culture is more appealing to a mass market but loses certains nuances. Sometimes people will attempt to use popular comercial tropes while writing about something interestingly singular and specific to get their message out like the Palestilian Activism where they dressed as the aliens from Avatar. Ends up flattening issue but is the tradeoff worth it to bring attention? With Ella Enchanted, the story subverts some problamatic elements but still has to adhere to the fairytale in the pop culture zeigest by having her marry the prince.

Hegemony

the process whereby a pattern of practices, embodying the ‘currently most honoured way of being’ - legitimating the subordiantion of one class over another like men over women

Tween Prodigy

in a capitalist society, the prodigy is often determined by their ability to make profit. Laws against child labor make this somewhat controversial though.

Transmedia Storytelling

stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. Each medium has distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world. A more integrated approach to franchise development than models based on urtexts and ancilliary products. Can lead to brand synegery with one media conglomerate and multiple distribution channels - think Horizontal Integration

Gothic Literature

end of the 19th century literature. The mysteries of the body began to be explained with science. Many female authors and some scholars argue this is because pregnancy is so dangerous. These losses were an entrance into ‘permannt Gothic subjectivity’. By the 21st century the body is mostly understood. Mysteries mostly come from children who might wonder where they came from and so gothic is appealing to them. The genre explores teh Tension between living and dead with a breakdown of normal order. Graveyard represents this through its ambiguous morality, uncanny character descriptions.

The uncanny (unheimlich)

unhomey, unfamiliar, uncomfortable. Proximity between the strange and homely prevalent in lots of gothic literature. Graveyard book opens with a knife in babies crib - Nodelman viewed home as often a static safe space so this disrupts that expectation.

Gothic thirves amid…

fear of decay or degraded sense of culture and tradition often times attatched to paces of progress. Archetypal settings of gothic fiction include

1) the Run-down estate (noble lineage in fallen state)

2) The underworld (any place aligned with death or fear of the supernatural

fear of crumbling empire common in American Gothic

Doppleganger

Mr Frost vs the man Jack, two different identities that exist within the same individual

Verse novel

short individual poems that are linked by topic, character, and plot. The ordering is important to developing a narrative line. It has a plot rather than just many poems with similar themes. The use of verse makes it feel incomplete and subjective in a way that reflects a memory rather than a fact - suitable for something like a memoir which is a glimpse into a specific period of someone’s live.

Postcolonial gothic

decline of an empire - some people fear its collapse and others fear what that collapse will entail

confessional mode

roots in works of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. It employs first-person to reflect on transgressive autobiographical subjects. In this case Woodson uses it to relate to racism and civil rights.

aetonomrativity

the troubling dynamic where people assume adults experiences are normative and children experiences are not

retrospective narration

tween years viewed not from the perspective of the tween

Bildungsroman

narrative that traces the protagonist’s growth from childhood to adulthood

Kunstlerroman

narrative that traces the development of an artist

Tween

A term that emerged more recently from originally a marketing niche that has become a label for a generation. Typically from 9 - 12 when the individual is in the transitional stage from ‘child’ to ‘teenager’. Western ideas of childhood oriented around innocence and purity while teenage years become complicated, this offers a bridge between them.

Fairytale history

descended from oral traditions before having ever been written down. They tended to be ignored by the elite and more popular with women and children. It wasn’t until the 16th century many were recorded. Had lower class dialect, femael characters, and satirized elites in power.

Vladimire Propp

argued folktales can be broken into plot types. He initiated the formalist school of thought and focused on its structure.

Psychoanalyst

Bruno Bethelheim and other scholars. Beleived fairytales might indicate something universal about the human condition that would need these stories. The skeletal structures of the stories are the same regardless of origin.