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Canadian Review of American Studies | 2005

Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children's Culture

Kerry M. Mallan; Roderick McGillis

Camp is associated with a particular kind of performance in which the overt meaning of what is performed is subverted or inverted by drawing attention to the fact that it is a performance, and thus a kind of lie (drag being a perfect example). Thomas 103 French: Se Camper.To Posture or Flaunt In exploring camp and children’s culture, we raise the following contrasting viewpoints. The conventionally accepted view, derived from Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, is that ‘‘camp’’ is a style or a sensibility (275–7). More recent queer accounts of camp see it as an oppositional critique (of gender and sexuality) embodied in a ‘‘queer’’ performative identity (Butler 233–6). Camp is also a social practice for many, and a style and an identity performed in many types of entertainment (for example: film, cabaret, and pantomime). In this respect, it is indicative of the competing and conflicting cultural elements within Western societies. Such conflict heightens the visibility of ‘‘difference’’ particularly with respect...


Archive | 2006

Looking in the Mirror: Pedagogy, Theory, and Children’s Literature

Roderick McGillis

The regular and fairly widespread teaching of children’s literature in the university has a relatively short history, something in the order of thirty-five years. Even now, the teaching of children’s literature is not securely placed in a specific academic unit; the subject finds location in English Departments, Faculties of Education, Schools of Librarianship, Foreign Language Departments, Departments of Sociology, and even in a Center for Children and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, and similar centres at such institutions as the University of Reading and San Diego State University. The existence of Centres for the study of children, childhood, and children’s literature indicates that although separate areas of research and pedagogy approach the literature from differing perspectives, and they have done so for a long time, they have not ignored each other; they have cross-fertilized the study of children’s books. The study of children’s books invites interdisciplinary activity. This should not surprise those of us trained as literary scholars because the study of literature came out of its closet thirty years ago when the New Criticism lost its place at the centre of interpretive activity in the Humanities. Of course, some things change slowly and the study of children’s literature remained rooted in new critical reading until quite recently. The focus on plot, character, setting,


The Lion and the Unicorn | 2006

Aesthetic Approaches to Children's Literature: An Introduction (review)

Roderick McGillis

and Jack Prelutsky . . . these writers echo and extend the innovative, playful uses of rhyme, meter, and illustration introduced by St. Nicholas, and their tremendous popularity takes for granted (and perpetuates) a ‘natural’ connection between children and poetry” (189). It is, of course, unwise to make generalized claims that are too large, or to make too direct a claim. Doesn’t the work of Randolph Caldecott too take “standard poetry” at times and “infantilize it,” combining it with illustration that far exceeds what St. Nicholas applied to a single poem? What effect there of the many popular reprints? But the line of argument is compelling, and well shaped. If the matter of Longfellow and Whittier has left the national scene (though recent children’s illustrated versions suggest that it has not, at least in children’s literature), Sorby is suggesting that a national culture might still be perceived in the forms that they embraced, and which are still to be found in children’s poetry. That those forms—and the desire for accessibility—are being resurrected in post-deconstruction times by poets such as Billy Collins, suggests that Keillor might not be far afield in his introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times: “All that I wrote about [poetry] as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure—all that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit’ry, no thanks, pal” (xix). All of the Schoolroom poets that Sorby so well opens here would have agreed.


Childrens Literature in Education | 2002

Getting What We Want: The Politics of Identity in Three Vigils

Roderick McGillis

This article uses Chris Raschkas picture book, Arlene Sardine (1998), as a focus for a discussion of the homogenizing forces of the market economy. The young persons struggle for ‘identity’ must deal with the powerful and coercive forces of the marketplace. Childrens literature and other productions of child culture can aid in such a struggle by prompting critical reflection and critical reading.


Archive | 1999

Voices of the other : children's literature and the postcolonial context

Roderick McGillis


Archive | 1996

The nimble reader : literary theory and children's literature

Roderick McGillis


Archive | 2008

The Gothic in children's literature : haunting the borders

Anna Jackson; Karen Coats; Roderick McGillis


Children's Literature Association Quarterly | 1998

The Delights of Impossibility: No Children, No Books, Only Theory

Roderick McGillis


Children's Literature Association Quarterly | 1997

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn; or Engaging in Critical Pedagogy

Roderick McGillis


Archive | 1996

A little princess : gender and empire

Roderick McGillis

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Kerry M. Mallan

Queensland University of Technology

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Anna Jackson

Victoria University of Wellington

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