The spring issue of The Children's Literature Association Quarterly features an essay by SDSU's resident poetry expert Joseph Thomas. His piece primarily concerns the various versions of Silverstein's Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book: A Primer for Tender Young Minds and Uncle Shelby’s Story of Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back, but it also attends to Silverstein's songs and decidedly adult Playboy cartoons.
Titled "A Speculative Account (with Notes) of the Development & Initial Deployments of Shel Silverstein's Persona, Uncle Shelby, with Special Care to Articulate the Relationship of Said Persona to the Question of Shel's Ambiguous Audience(s)," Thomas's piece speculates on the development and initial appearances of Shel Silverstein's persona, Uncle Shelby, while taking care to articulate the relationship of that persona to the question of Shel Silverstein's adult and child audiences. Thomas argues that the question of audience is crucial to a complex understanding of Silverstein's oeuvre, as it is often unclear just who Silverstein is writing for: children or adults. This ambiguity is something akin to Uli Knoepflmacher & Mitzi Myers's notion of "cross-writing," but with a difference. Thomas concludes,
Check it out in the new issue of the ChLA Quarterly, volume 6, issue 1, pages 25-46. And be sure to cite it in your work! Nothing jazzes up an essay quite like referencing a paragraph-long title, especially when the title is longer than the quotation that follows. Imagine:with the suggestion that Shel Silverstein and his persona, Uncle Shelby, provide us with a more robust way to think about children’s literature, reminding us that the line between texts for adults and those for children is far more blurry than we generally like to believe, as is the line between child culture and adult culture, even though we like to police that line with ever-growing determination [...]. Uncle Shelby and Shel Silverstein help us to de-fetishize the ever fraught and socially constructed distinction between child and adult, but they do so without asking us to naively dismiss audience completely, showing us, instead, that our conception of audience informs our relationship with literature, diminishing certain understandings while emphasizing others. The author isn’t dead after all, despite claims to the contrary, and the author function operates hand-in-hand with his implied audience. The text, far from being static and unchanging, rather, works much like those optical illusions in art textbooks: at one moment we see an old lady, the next a lovely young girl; one moment a vase, the next two human profiles.
This flickering perception, this stuttering flux, is ultimately a part of the text, not epitextual not peritextual not intertextual: it is part and parcel of the work itself, as important as the words on the page. Our persistence of vision and the ideological preconceptions underpinning it render the strobe invisible. We ignore it at our peril, and we’ve ignored this element of Silverstein’s work for too long. (40)
As Joseph Thomas writes in his essay, "A Speculative Account (with Notes) of the Development & Initial Deployments of Shel Silverstein's Persona, Uncle Shelby, with Special Care to Articulate the Relationship of Said Persona to the Question of Shel's Ambiguous Audience(s)," "The author isn’t dead after all"(40).Wow! Now that's good stuff!
In the picture above, San Diego State University President Stephen Weber (right) honors donors A.K. Jones and Raymond Sabin for their generous gift which will establish an endowed professorship in Children's Literature beginning in 2015. Longtime friends of the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature, A.K. and Ray were featured guests at a dinner hosted at the university's Alumni Center on February 22, 2011.
Participate in the next issue of Extravío. Revista electrónica de literatura comparada: “The endless tale. Writing and rewriting of traditional tales.”
Extravío is an online review dedicated to Comparative Literature (ISSN 1886-4902). It is an annual monographic publication of the Department of Theory of Languages, University of Valencia (Spain), which is indexed in the database as the MLA Directory of Periodicals.
You can consult the numbers issued until to the current date, and all information about the review at:
Paper Call
Extravío 6 year 2011 (in progress)
The endless tale. Writing and rewriting of traditional tales
Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Tom Thumb, Bluebeard, The Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio... they all are traditional stories that can work as a rich base for any comparative study. This is the proposal for the sixth issue of Extravío, the approach to the writing, the rewriting, even the sabotage, of such narratives that constitute our particular endless tale.
Call for papers: please address your proposal to extravio@uv.es. The deadline for abstracts is 31st March 2011 (name and surname, institution, article’s title and a 15-20 lines abstract).
Selection: during May 2010 the deadline for the complete essay will be communicated to those whose abstracts are accepted.
Call for papers:
http://www.uv.es/extravio/pdf5/CFP_extravio6.pdf
Antonia Cabanilles
Profesora Titular de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada Departamento de Teoría
Youth:
Postgraduate Conference April 2011
Following on from the Studies in Youth Culture inaugural conference which took place at the University of Leicester in September 2010, the School of English along with the Centre for American Studies and the Studies in Youth Network are pleased to announce a postgraduate conference on the broad and interdisciplinary subject of ‘youth’. Topics that might be considered are:
Such speculations encourage debate about the nature, experience and depiction of youth – in its broadest definition – across history, culture and disciplines. These questions are a starting point for a topic that will be explored further at the interdisciplinary postgraduate conference at Leicester on either the 4th or 5th of April 2011 (details will be finalised by March). Papers are welcome from all disciplines on any aspect of youth with particular emphasis on, but not restricted to, theatre, religion, fantasy and popular culture.
The conference will be an invaluable opportunity to learn about other postgraduate students’ research on the subject of youth, as well as to join the Studies in Youth Network, which aims to bring together and encourage academic cooperation between researchers of various disciplines at different stages of their careers. Further details of the network can be found at:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/research/groupings/clusters/adolescence
Proposals of 250 words are welcome from all postgraduates for papers of no more than twenty minutes. A liberal approach to the theme is encouraged. Please send abstracts along with the application form to Anjna Chouhan (ac222@le.ac.uk) by the 1st of March 2011.
We look forward to hearing from you,
Anjna Chouhan, Irina Kyulanova and Sonia Suman
