China Children's Lit

Professor Wang Quangen,
Beijing Normal University's School of
Chinese Language and Literature and Alida Allison, SDSU, June 14, 2011; China Children's Literature edited by Prof. Wang

Ni Hao! (Hello) from the new director of our SDSU Center for the Study of Children's Literature---- that would be me above, with Professor Wang.

Wang Quangen has done remarkable things for children's literature in China.With Maria Nikolajeva and board members of IBBY (International Board of Books for Youth), I'd met Quangen ten years earlier at BNU, and the fruits of his decades' endeavors are apparent. Several of his former students now teach or work as editors in the thriving Chinese publishing world, for example as editorial staff for China Children's Press Publishing Group (CCPPG) in Beijing. Wang Mei, Dr. Wang's daughter, is now herself a professor of children's literature at Beijing's Capitol Normal University, and his latest journal edition, China Children's Literature 2010, is an eye-catching, substantial volume (above).Thus, it was a double pleasure to see him again and to also see how well his teaching and writing have evolved.
His and Dr. Wang Lei's graduate students were the audience at BNU for my talk on Fantasy and Fantasizing June 14, along with editors/students from CCPPG whom I'd met the day before at their editorial offices and soon-to-be-opened spectacular kids' bookstore in Beijing (next blog...).
I came back from China with a lot to ponder and a lot to read; problem with the latter, though, is I don't read Chinese. If you're a current SDSU student who can translate or know someone who can, get in touch with me.

Registration Link for Joy Chu's UCSD Extension course on Illustrating Kids' Books

"Illustrating Children's Books, UCSD Extension Course...":

Here is the link to further information, and registration for the class:

http://extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vAction=singleCourse&vCourse=ART-40011

Sept 23 to Oct 2: 2011 Bath Festival of Children's Lit in UK

Of growing importance in the U.K. is the Bath Festival of Children's Literature. Numerous talks and events over a nine-day period, including visits by Roddy Doyle, Eoin Colfer, David Almond, and others.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bath-childrens-literature/8601085/Bath-Festival-Of-Childrens-Literature-2011-programme-Sunday-25-September.html

Alida Allison Takes Over as Director of SDSU's Children's Lit Program

Professor Alida Allison has become Director of SDSU's Children's Literature Program. She replaces Jerry Griswold.

Author of books on Isaac Bashevis Singer and Russell Hoban, Dr. Allison is known for her international initiatives (particularly in India and China) and for her work founding and running the National Children's Book Review Service. Griswold joins the program's other emeritus professors: Peter Neumeyer, Lois Kuznets, and Carole Scott.

San Diego Students to Australian Conference

The International Research Society for Children's Literature will have their biannual congress in Brisbane, Australia, July 4-8. http://irscl2011.com/

Two San Diego graduate students will be offering papers there. Kate Slater will be presenting a paper called "No Safe Place: Terrors of Liminality in the Scary Stories Series." Mariel Romero will present a paper titled "The Anguished Immigrant Child in Chicana/o Children’s Literature" where she explores how the authors of the picture book Gabriela’s Song: How Do I Adapt to a New Place? (2007) and the YA novel La Línea (2006) advocate for storytelling as therapeutic treatment that will help expat children and adolescents confront and overcome a traumatic migrant experience.

2011: The Summer of Mary Galbraith

My summer is devoted to reading literature in the present tense. I have been asked to lecture next year on the stylistic and structural implications of novels being narrated in the present tense, so this summer I’m steeping myself in this style as practiced in English, supplemented with examples translated from German, Russian, and French. I’ll also be getting up to date on the relevant theoretical discussion in narratology and cognitive poetics.

Charles Dickens: Bleak House—1853

Virginia Woolf: Jacob’s Room --1922

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying -- 1930

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies --1951 (French), 1956 (English)

John Updike: Rabbit, Run—1960

Margaret Atwood: Surfacing--1972

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow--1973

J M Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians –1980

Ian McEwan: Saturday--2005

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall--2009

Commentary on Charlotte's Web

SDSU folks pay attention to work about E.B. White's Charlotte's Web because of the scholarship of Peter Neumeyer (emeritus professor) on this classic--especially Peter's Annotated Charlotte's Web: http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Charlottes-Web-B-White/dp/0060882603/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308999961&sr=1-1

Now comes word of a new book by Michael Sims called The Story of Charlotte's Web: http://www.amazon.com/Story-Charlottes-Web-Eccentric-American/dp/0802777546/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309000122&sr=1-1

Reviews have appeared in

• The Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/0624/Editor-s-choice-The-Story-of-Charlotte-s-Web
• The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monica-edinger/charlottes-web-book_b_880418.html
  

SDSU at the ChLA Convention (Virginia, June 2011)

The 2011 Children's Literature Association convention will take place at Hollins University (Roanoke, Virginia) June 23-25: http://www.hollins.edu/grad/childlit/chla2011/index.htm

A number of SDSU faculty, alums, and friends will be there. Please see the list below. And if there are others, please let us know: childlit@mail.sdsu.edu

• I'll be at the conference, tuckered into Chandra's panel on Octavian Nothing. The official title of the paper is "Writing the Child: Composition and Consciousness in Octavian Nothing ” --Martin Woodside
• I'm going to ChLA, presenting a paper on the show "Glee." --Naomi Lesley
• I'll be presenting a paper at ChLA titled "Redress, Rupture and Rememory in Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains."--Kate Slater
• I will be presenting a piece of his in-progress book on "Shel Silverstein, 'The Devil's Favorite Pet': Shel Silverstein, an American Iconoclast" as a part of a panel on Silverstein featuring Michael Heyman and Kevin Shortsleeve, co-editors of the forthcoming Anthology of World Nonsense. My paper is titled, “About Nineteen or so Minutes on the Subjects of Shel Silverstein, 'The Freak', & Freaking Out.” --Joseph Thomas.
• My paper is: “Keeping the Faith: Religious and Ethnic Affiliation as Resistance in Jewish Children’s and YA Literature.” It's on a special Diversity Panel with special topic of “Resisting Americanization.” --June Cummins
• Mary Auxier and I put together an Octavian Nothing Panel and my paper is called "The Rhetoric of Resistance in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. --Chandra Howard
• My presentation will be on reflections of the communist movement in Engelbert Humperdinck's German opera, Hansel und Gretel. I know the Roanoke area reasonably well, since I went to school there for several summers, and I may be able to recommend some good eats out there if we decide to have some kind of rendezvous. The Hollins crowd seemed to prefer dive bars and karaoke joints for drinking, so I can only recommend those establishments for drinks! --Ellen Malven
• Sean Printz is presenting a paper on how procedural rhetoric in video games generate mythic strictures and narratives.
• NaToya Faughnder is presenting a paper on the bias of modernity in the theory of and history of the child.

Sept 30: 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards

The 2011 winners of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards are:

• PICTURE BOOKS: Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Houghton) by Salley Mavor
• FICTION: Blink & Caution (Candlewick) by Tim Wynne-Jones
• NONFICTION: The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, &
  

The awards ceremony--hosted by Roger Sutton and Cathryn Mercier--will take place at Simmons College (Boston) on September 30. Details, including the runner-up titles, can be found in an item in the School Library Journal:
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/home/891084-312/2011_boston_globe-horn_book_award.html.csp

Essays solicited for collection on Materialist Readings of Children’s Literature and Culture

CFP

Materialist Readings of Children’s Literature and Culture:

Classic and Contemporary Essays

Call for papers for an edited collection tentatively titled Materialist Readings of Children’s Literature and Culture: Classic and Contemporary Essays. This collection will consist primarily of new analyses, but will also include previously published essays in order to chart the development of materialist criticism of children’s and young adult literature, culture, and film. The aim of the collection is to demonstrate the significance of historical materialist approaches to children's literature and culture (i.e. Marx, Lukacs, Williams, Eagleton, Jameson, Ariel Dorfman, Jack Zipes, Ian Wojick Andrews, Gayatri Spivak, etc.).

Topics may include but are not limited to the following:

• the way in which children’s literature supports or, conversely, challenges class hierarchies, especially as they intersect with gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity

• the “political unconscious” in works of children’s literature

• cognitive mapping

• class conflict in children’s literature and film

• depictions of the working class, labor history, socialism, and revolution

• children’s literature and the left

• materialist-feminist criticism and children’s literature and culture

• materialist analyses of post-colonial children’s literature and culture

• the political economy of children’s literature and culture

Please direct inquiries and submissions to the editor, Dr. Angela Hubler, at ahubler@ksu.edu. 500 word abstracts, brief biography, and short C.V. are due by September 18th, 2011. Complete essays must be submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word, following MLA guidelines for citation and format, by November 18th, 2011. A potential publisher has expressed interest, and a proposal will be submitted after abstracts are received.

Editor Angela Hubler is Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at Kansas State University, where she teaches courses in feminist theory, female adolescence, and women’s writing and culture. Her recent publications analyze literary representations of collective political action in literature for children and adults. Her essays have been published in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Critical Survey, Papers on Language and Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and edited collections.

Angela Hubler Associate Professor Women's Studies Program Kansas State University Manhattan, KS 66506 (785)537-9008 (home phone--on sabbatical 2010-11 academic year)

3 PhD Scholarships for Study in the UK

from June Cummins...

The NCRCL at Roehampton University is delighted to announce a new Jacqueline Wilson PhD scholarship, generously funded by Dame Jacqueline Wilson. Since her appointment as Professorial Fellow at Roehampton two years ago, Jacqueline Wilson has taught a series of highly successful seminars on creative writing at MA level within the Department of English and Creative Writing. The Jacqueline Wilson scholarship will enable a student to join a thriving community of PhD scholars and to benefit from Roehampton’s proven expertise in children’s literature and creative writing for children. The scholarship is advertised alongside two other PhD scholarships within the Department of English and Creative Writing at Roehampton for which children’s literature scholars are also eligible. For further details and an application form please follow this link: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/about/jobopportunities/page33933.html

2011: The Summer of Virginia Loh

I plan on recovering from my unexpected gallbladder removal surgery and pontificating about the meaning of extra body parts/organs. Gastronomically, I hope to be able to pursue my love of eating hot dogs, sooner rather than later. My personal goals are to read at least 20 books, finish my manuscripts, work up to practicing piano for three hours daily (as recommended by Chopin), and master the Suzuki violin book 1. My husband and I are planning a trip to Vancouver and Victoria this July so I hope to pick up a Canadian accent and explore Canadian Chinatowns. We are also working our way through the TV series "Monk." I would also like to make a huge dent in my Netflix and Kindle queues. In a nutshell, I would like to just be.

2011: The Summer of Jerry Griswold

With a new bike, I expect to spend a great deal of the summer cycling along the coast and taking, now and then, the occasional yoga class. Mornings, there's a book revision to finish, as well as some reviews and essays to write. I don't think there will be much traveling. That's reserved for the Fall when I'll be in Ireland, teaching and lecturing.

2011: The Summer of Jill Coste

With my first year of grad school under my belt, I hope to revisit some of the literary theory that lit my fire this year and start thinking about a topic for my thesis. I will also be working with Alida Allison on the website for SDSU's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature and writing book reviews for the Center. Additionally, I will work full-time for the Coronado School of the Arts Foundation creating publicity materials for the upcoming school year. In July I'll take a break to visit my hometown in the farmland of Pennsylvania, where humidity and thunderstorms await me.

MLA Boston Jan. 2013

Session Call MLA - January 3-6, 2013, Boston
Each year the Children’s Literature Assocation is guaranteed one session at the MLA and can submit proposals for up to two more.* If you would like to propose a session topic, by June 17th please send the ChLA/MLA Liaison (Philip Nel: philnel@ksu.edu): (1) a short description of your proposal idea, and, if relevant, (2) the name of an other MLA-affiliated entity (allied organization, division, or discussion group) you plan to seek as a co-sponsor. The ChLA Board will examine the proposals and select the top three (one guaranteed, plus two additional**) for submission to the 2013 MLA Convention.
*If ChLA chooses to submit two additional sessions, one of those sessions must be a collaborative session with another entity (division, discussion group, allied organization, etc.).
MLA divisions: <http://www.mla.org/danddg>
MLA allied and affiliate divisions: <http://www.mla.org/orginfo_directory>
MLA discussion groups: <http://www.mla.org/discussion_groups>
**The proposals for the two additional sessions are not guaranteed and will be reviewed by the MLA Program Committee. Please see the Procedures for Organizing Meetings on the MLA Web site (http://mla.org/conv_procedures) for further details.

Permanent link here:http://www.philnel.com/2011/06/08/chlamla/

Conference Cambridge (U.K.) Mar 30 & Apr 1 (2012)

The Child and the Book Conference 2012 that will be held in Cambridge, at the Cambridge-Homerton Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature, from 31 March to 1 April.

The conference theme is:

Towards Common Ground: Philosophical Approaches to Children's Literature

See also: The conference pages on the Centre website http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/childrensliterature/childandthebook/index.html

2011: The Summer of Brittany Candau

This summer, life post-grad involves entering the workforce (ahhh!). I am currently writing freelance pieces for a variety of S.D. magazines, including Riviera. I will soon begin working as a ghostwriter and editor at W.S. Publishing, where I will get to create children’s and a variety of non-fiction books. My goal is to incorporate my love of penguins in there somewhere. Also, visiting friends and family will be another highlight in the upcoming months. I already miss SDSU and the amazing professors there, but I’m excited to begin this new chapter in my life!

2011: The Summer of Philip Serrato

With Hope Sandoval CDs playing in the background, the first week of summer has been devoted to a thorough clean up of the flower gardens in the front yard. The rest of the summer will be spent finishing two essays, making progress on my book, reading stuff that I have wanted to read but haven’t yet, and watching The Munsters.

2011: The Summer of Tony Malanga

This summer, I will continue to work on my novel based on the Orpheus myth. It is a reinterpretation set in modern day Egypt and Los Angeles. I am also writing a spec script for the NBC sitcom "Community." Each fall, NBC Universal hires new staff writers for its television shows, and part of the hiring process is to present an episodic writing sample. If hired, new staff writers have the opportunity to pitch an original pilot, which I am also developing. My pilot is a half-hour apocalyptic Boccaccio's Decameron, in which seven survivors of a global pandemic unite in a Napa winery and maintain civilization by working together and by telling tales. I am also keeping my ears open for any local English teaching position. In the words of Galaxy Quest's Commander Nesmith, "Never give up!"