Perry Nodelman

A is for... What? The Function of Alphabet Books:

This article is an exploration of the large repertoire of knowledge and strategies for meaning-making that reader/viewers must possess (or be in the process of learning to possess) in order to make sense of the relatively simple information provided by even the simplest of alphabet books. The complex relationships between real objects and concepts, their visual images, the sounds that represent them in language, the visual symbols that represent those sounds, and the names we provide for those sounds make the act of decoding any alphabet book a form of puzzle–and thus, allow creative writers and illustrators to produce intriguingly sophisticated versions of the genre.

The Young Know Everything: Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales as Children’s Literature

Oscar Wilde offered contradictory statements about whether the stories in his two collections of literary fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), are literature for children. Many commentators deny that they fit that category based on their perceptions of the tales’ complexity and their acceptance of common assumptions about the limited knowledge and ability of youngsters. Nodelman proposes instead to consider the tales in relation to his analysis in his book The Hidden Adult of the conventional characteristics of children’s literature. His close readings of the tales explore how they both express those characteristics and offer ironic commentary on them.

Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives: Individuality

Novels constructed by means of narratives that alternate tend to share thematic and ideological concerns with each other. In this chapter, Nodelman follows Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that literary forms are inherently expressive of specific ideologies by focusing on one particular register of cultural difference, offering close readings of novels with alternating narratives about Indigenous North Americans. The readings focus on ideas about property: Who owns the land? The chapter concludes with suggestions for further research on aspects of novels with alternating narratives.

Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives: Connection and Community

Novels constructed by means of narratives that alternate tend to share thematic and ideological concerns with each other. In this chapter, Nodelman follows Fredric Jameson‘s suggestion that literary forms are inherently expressive of specific ideologies by offering a consideration of how alternating narratives tend to communicate similar ideas about relationships between individuals and the construction of communities. The chapter also offers a survey of how novels use alternating narratives to explore connections involving representatives of specific cultural registers like race, class, and sexual orientation.

Alternating Narratives and Represented Writing

Nodelman focuses on novels in which one or more of a set of alternating narratives represent forms of writing by the novel’s characters—forms such as diaries, journals, and letters. As well as exploring how novels in which one narrative describes a character reading the writing presented in the other narrative offer young readers instruction in how to interpret what they read, this chapter considers the degree to which characters and readers can trust the truth of what the characters write to each other.

Alternating Narratives as Puzzles

Nodelman considers a range of ways in which novels with alternating narratives provide young readers with help in figuring out how their various parts fit together: sections labelled with characters names, differing fonts and orthography, contrasting uses of past and present tense and first-person and third-person narration. While describing how these features aid in solving the puzzles these novels provide for their readers, Nodelman also considers how the solutions to those puzzles bring these apparently unusual novels closer to the conventions of mainstream fiction for young readers.

Fictional Collage as Alternating Narratives

In this chapter, Nodelman focuses on novels that expand the range of alternating narratives to include a range of real or invented items—newspaper clippings, memos, advertisements, homework assignments, etc.—and thus represent a fictional equivalent to what is identified as collage in visual art. As well as considering how epigraphs at the beginning of sections and chapters relate to the narratives that follow them, the chapter describes the archival effects of novels that alternate narratives about characters with ones representing other documents.

Alternating Narratives: An Introduction

By means of a close reading of Kevin Henkes’s Words of Stone, Nodelman offers an introduction to the subject of alternating narratives in fiction for young readers: what they are, how they have emerged as an acceptable form of writing for this audience, how they represent and depart from conventions of fiction for young people, what kinds of problems they might create for their readers, and what ideologies they support or undermine.

Alternating Narratives as Variations of Each Other

By considering events, characters, and images, Nodelman describes ways in which the alternating narratives in novels for young readers act as variations—different but related versions of each other. Some novels represent different but related characters as something like case studies, representations of specific forms of a larger category. A consideration of variational form also reveals the coherence of some novels with alternating narratives that seem to lack it.

Distance Education: The Readerly Effects of Alternating Narratives

Acting as cognitive maps or schemata for each other, the alternating narratives in a novel can help young readers learn how to move beyond the basic reading practice of identifying with a focalized character. Nodelman considers how, in offering an alternative version of what happens, alternating narratives in novels for young people mutually cast doubt on the validity of the perception of the characters focalized in each of them, and thus encourage a more distant and more thoughtful contemplation of characters that might replace an involved identification with just one character with a more distant form of empathy for a number of them.