Notes on Dr. Maria Tatar's Lecture: “A 'Damn Mob' of Scribbling Girls”

    As someone encountering Dr. Maria Tatar’s work for the first time during this event, I was not disappointed! Dr. Tatar is a research professor at Harvard University and specializes in children’s literature, modern German culture, and folklore. Her research includes authors like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, childhood reading and cultural studies, and folklore and mythology. Her most recent work, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, takes on the staggering yet hidden history of heroines, challenging the male-centric models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this latest publication, Dr. Tatar flips the script on what it means to be a “curious” young woman, emphasizing how these girls depart from the canon through their compassion and craft. Her interests culminated in the event titled “A ‘Damn Mob’ of Scribbling Girls: From Jo March to Starr Carter,” which explored girls from popular media and literature who find agency within domestic spaces and enact their power, not only to survive, but to care for others. 

Dr. Tatar began her lecture with images of warrior women – cinematic women who are dramatically armed and ready for battle. She highlights their strength that both ornaments and sustains their femininity. Whether glittering in golden armor or fitted in a flowing red dress while riding in a chariot, these young women embody a feminine power that defies the traditional domestic spaces they find themselves in. In this opening, Dr. Tatar introduces her argument: these girls, trained to accommodate themselves in a society of gendered propriety, rebel against dominant power structures through their craft. 

The first literary work Dr. Tatar introduces is Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women. However, she invokes the character Jo March through the film directed by Greta Gerwig (2019) instead of the novel. While Alcott captures all the dimensions of the domestic, the acts meant to make a home comfortable, Gerwig’s Jo March exuberantly displays how reading, writing, and acting are radical acts of rebellion. This emphasis on a young woman’s reach for autonomy allowed Dr. Tatar to identify the potential for heroism within domesticity. She identifies writing as a craft that provides an opportunity for heroism, an action that involves both curiosity and care. Tatar defines craft as cunning design, work that has been carried out in multiple modalities such as knitting, weaving, storytelling, or simply talking. 

In both the novel and the film, the heroes of the story are the fathers heading off to war while the women maintain the home space. Dr. Tatar urges us to ask: Who are our heroes? Our heroines? She grafts onto her argument the concept of the hero from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to assert that women are not the ones receiving the call to action. If anything, this persistence of men at the forefront of heroism has become the Hollywood narrative playbook. It becomes an easy correlation to see men returning from war as a literalized hero’s journey. However, Dr. Tatar reminds us that the return in the hero’s journey is always about healing. Here, in curious and caring spaces, is where women can no longer be silenced. 

The lecture took a poignant turn when Dr. Tatar connected her ideas with the COVID-19 lockdowns we have collectively experienced in the past two years. In lockdown, she notes, we were looking for heroes. We found them in our community caretakers, like doctors and nurses, childcare workers, and educators. More than anything, though, we encountered silence. Like the image of Philomena weaving her tapestry, the concept of heroism faces a cultural reboot during the COVID-19 pandemic. The investment in healing and care work, fields predominantly held by women, found a refreshed prioritization and attention from the public. Dr. Tatar turns to Carlos Fuentes and restates, “Writing is a struggle against silence.” Here, she draws a comparison to the strategy of silenced women. As mentioned before, craft becomes the strategy to find a voice. Through texts and textiles, women speak truth to power. 

One of the tenets of her work, curiosity, is seen as the cardinal sin of women while care is delegitimized on the basis of gender oppressive attitudes. Dr. Tatar moves from writing as a form of discovering identity and self actualization to a desire for immortality. This curiosity thus becomes a commitment to causes these young women are passionate about, concretizing their thoughts and ideas in written word. The literary text Dr. Tatar closes her lecture with is Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. Through the protagonist, Starr Carter, Dr. Tatar realizes that self-actualization and a commitment to social causes are not mutually exclusive. From Anne of Green Gables to Matilda, Anne Frank to Harriet the Spy, the craft of writing becomes a mode of achieving an encounter with an empowered self, a political act that speaks truth to power. 

    I was very intrigued by Dr. Tatar’s inspirations for this work. One of the most compelling was Scheherazade, a major female character from One Thousand and One Nights who is also a scholar and reader. She is a storyteller, and known as a master of cliffhangers, who understands the seductive power of stories. Dr. Tatar also emphasizes that she is a survivor, ensuring that others will be saved and protected from the antagonist of her story. She also invokes the classic tales of Pandora and Eve, two young women whose bodies are sexualized and whose curiosity is read as carnal rather than intellectual. Through these figures, she calls on us to consider replacing empathy with curiosity, craft, and care. Rather than universalizing our characters or their experiences, Dr. Tatar invites us to raise critical awareness about the codes of gender that inform power in these texts and, ultimately, the way we perceive “domestic” activities as passive. As she states in the lecture, “readers often seek their mirrors in books.” Through the close reading Tatar promotes, we achieve tools for learning how to navigate our real world relationships via the representations we find in these stories and move with the mob of scribbling women. 

    Readers and writers in the audience also asked some very intriguing questions about Dr. Tatar’s work. Some listeners asked about the labor of our bodies, the work of our hands, and how to reconcile this with the public arena. Dr. Tatar invited us to compare Jo March with Starr Carter, and the modes they used to share their voices. While Jo March hand-wrote her thoughts, Starr Carter takes on a megaphone and a computer keyboard as powerful instruments for securing justice. Other listeners discussed what it means to “give up” one’s femininity in exchange for strength, or if femininity can be perceived as strength itself. Dr. Tatar invokes examples from modern film and media, like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross) or Snow White from Snow White and the Huntsmen (dir. Rupert Sanders) – both of these young women display strength while also being connected to poetry, song, and art. A few others brought up the question of rethinking passivity from past to present. We’re invited to look more deeply into domestic actions while understanding the circumstances of women like Jo March as narrow. Dr. Tatar inspired me to use that historical past to reimagine curiosity, craft, and care in today’s world. This reimagining allows us to reconstruct our imaging of girlhood while understanding our own writing as heroic.

DN

Join us for “Cinderella Today: Rewriting, Adapting and Translating a Classic Fairy Tale” a talk given by Danielle Teller, Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr., and Dr. Audrey Coussy

Please join us on March 4^th at 1:30 pm in San Diego State University’s Scripps Cottage for 

“Cinderella Today: Rewriting, Adapting and Translating a Classic Fairy Tale.”

The talk will begin with Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr., professor of children’s and young adult literature and director of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, who will talk about the constitutive role that adaptation played from the very origins of Cinderella’s story. Next will be Dr. Audrey Coussy, professor of translation studies and literary translation at McGill University, will talk about her translation of Danielle Teller’s All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderalla’s Stepmother (2018), a contemporary and innovative rewriting of Cinderella (translation forthcoming in 2019, published by Denoël/Gallimard). Finally, Danielle Tell will discuss her book in dialogue with Dr. Coussy. This lecture focuses on translation as adaptation and adaptation as a kind of translation. Teller’s text reimagines the 17^th century French fairy tale “Cinderella,” by Charles Perrault.

We hope to see you there!

(KT)

Dr. Michelle Abate's "Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past

Please join us on Wednesday, February 20^th at 4 pm in Room LL430/431 for “Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past,” a talk by Dr. Michelle Abate, Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Abate will be presenting on Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s critically acclaimed and prize-winning LGBTQ+ young adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Sáenz's powerful historical novel is set in the 1980s. However, it lacks any mention of the AIDS crisis, one of the major crises consuming the United States and the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s.

Abate argues that although the absence of AIDS may initially appear to be a historical oversight, Sáenz is actually offering empowering insight on a completely new way of looking at queerness in the 1980s. Instead of deliberately ignoring AIDS, Sáenz is creating a parallel timeline without the oppression of the existence of AIDS. In doing so, Aristotle and Dante are in an environment where they can live and flourish being queer without the growing stress of the AIDS crisis to create an environment without homophobia-fueled neglect, fear, and apathy. 

According to Abate, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is not to be analyzed as a historical novel, but instead that it ought to be analyzed as a new type of queer speculative fiction in an era otherwise full of fear and misunderstanding towards the queer community. This new insight will allow us to understand this beloved novel in a new and innovative light.

We can't wait to see you at Abate's talk!

(SS)

2017 NCSCL Visiting Scholar: Michael Joseph

“How to Do Things with Poems”

The 2017 NCSCL Visiting Scholar’s Lecture

Event Details:

Who: Michael Joseph

Rutgers University

Date: Tuesday, April 11^th

Time: 3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

Place: Love Library-LeonWilliams Room (430 & 431)

The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature are proud to sponsor this year’s visiting scholar, poet Michael Joseph. His lecture, “How to Do Things with Poems” will consider what Xenephon of Athen’s definition of beauty as “the luminous manifestation of a perfect character of being” has to contribute to our understanding of children’s poetry. Our consideration will take the form of a close analysis of two children’s poems by Robert Graves, an English poet, novelist, critic and classicist.

More information can be found here.

Michael Joseph is a poet, author, critic, and rare books librarian. He received his M.A. in English Literature from the University of Hartford and an M.A. in library service from Columbia University. He is the author of 13 artists’ books and chapbooks of poetry or fiction. Currently, two artists’ books featuring his poems, done in collaboration with artist Sarah K. Stengle, are in VISPO, a traveling exhibition supported by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He is the author of The Teaching Guide to the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature and has published The True History of Puss in Boots on Mars, with illustrator Henry Charles, through Cats in the Basement Press in 2017. His book Inherent Ogres is in press, with a forward by NCSCL director Joseph T. Thomas. In addition to scholarly essays and reviews that have appeared in numerous books and journals­—including The Lion and the Unicorn and The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (to name a few)—Michael Joseph has also taught numerous courses at Rutgers University on various subjects in children’s literature.

He is currently working on a monograph about Robert Graves’ children’s writing.

Check back for more updates as the event approaches!

Thoughts on the Provost's Distinguished Lecture: Featuring Matt de la Peña

Recently, Matt de la Peña came to SDSU to talk about his book Last Stop on Market Street. You can find the full video here on YouTube. Within what seemed like a very short time, those of us in the audience were given a brief history of what led him to write this story and what exactly this book means for children. Last Stop on Market Street is a picture book filled with pages of beautiful illustrations by Christian Robinson and a story that carries with it the weight of many large social issues presented in a way that allows children the opportunity to explore their own perception of what is beautiful within their daily life.

Listening to Matt talk about where he came from, his family, the journey from machismo to literacy, the challenges he faced, what inspired him, and how all of those things created a space for him to become a Newberry Medal winner and Caldecott Honored author, was an experience I won’t soon forget.

Matt and I come from very different sides of San Diego; while he was raised in National City, I was raised an hour east in the mountains of Pine Valley. In Pine Valley, there was only one mode of public transportation, a small bus that only a few people rode with one stop forty-five minutes to the nearest town. Even though country living is much different than city living, there is much to be said about what The Last Stop on Market Street gives readers—it transcends space and place: finding the beauty in the things around you.

While I might not have been raised around tall buildings or busy streets filled with people, I was still raised in a place that was hard to see as beautiful sometimes. One might think that beauty in the mountains must always exist, but it is a life lived far away from people, in the dirt and wilderness, with a single high school for a hundred miles, a side of the mountain that cannot be seen while driving by exists. Many families live well below the poverty line, are often the first in their families to go to high school, learn English as a second language, and the feeling of otherness extends through these mountains and is absolutely undeniable within the classroom. It has been a long time since I left my hometown, but after Matt’s speech, I was left remembering my childhood in a very different way.

As Matt spoke of his father, I thought of mine. A white male from the Midwest, with an affluent family that offered him job security for the rest of his life, he chose to leave the suburbs of Illinois and head for California. His first job in 1980 was teaching at a public elementary school less than ten miles from the border of Mexico in the small town of Jacumba. He taught there for his entire career. He didn’t know Spanish initially. There was no ESL program, the students he served were almost exclusively Hispanic and spoke only Spanish, and despite the barriers that existed between them, my father was determined to teach and his students wanted to learn. He didn’t have a budget; there was no funding. He used his paychecks to buy books, pencils, paper, and provide lunches for his students. He was never taught standard practices for this population, proven ways to increase literacy and improve graduation rates. His degrees were in history and the rigorous teaching curriculum that exist now for those in college to become teachers did not exist then—he would have to work harder and get creative. One year, they didn’t even have a classroom, so he taught outside and under the shade of the trees. He wanted to give his students every chance at success, so he fought an endless fight for funding, for books, but most of all he fought to give them an opportunity to see the worth in themselves and those around them. When he would talk about his days teaching in the mountains, he would swell with pride. He didn’t resent the district for ignoring his students, for leaving them outside in 100-degree weather, in the rain, in the wind, in the cold of the mountains. He knew that learning about the trees and the mountains, the geology and meteorology of the place that they lived, was a gift rather than a curse. I can only imagine what he’d say about Last Stop on Market Street; he’d probably tell me he wished he’d had this book when he was teaching; he’d probably remind me to stop and smell the roses, to revel in the beauty that surrounds us all. I wish he could read this book to my children. His students still remember him. When he died in 2013, my inbox was filled with condolences and memories from students he taught twenty years ago.

Me reading Last Stop on Market Street to my twins.

One of the things that truly hit home for me was the idea that regardless of where you are, there is beauty to be found. During his lecture Matt said that one of his goals as a writer has been to create books with storylines that “had nothing to do, at least overtly, with race or class,” so that young people can see themselves within his books, so they can have empathy for those around them, so that regardless of what they look like or where they come from, the people on the page are not so different from the person in the mirror. Students who feel that his stories are their stories and identify with his characters are given a chance to feel represented, empowered, and this becomes something important, a tool for children to feel proud of their experiences. These experiences provide groundwork for the future. If we give young people an opportunity to see the beauty in their daily life, a beauty that they can identify with, they have the potential to internalize their surroundings with appreciation and acceptance rather than comparison and shame. Last Stop on Market Street is filled with images of the city, the places that carry with them the weight of judgment, while many picture books for children take place in traditionally, aesthetically pleasing places (think: forests, pretty homes, suburban America, etc.). Last Stop on Market Street highlights the beauty in what is right in front of us. The words on the page move beyond the illustrations, beyond any one place, to the place of every child who struggles to see the good and beautiful life happening right in front of them.

Matt de la Peña’s lecture gave me an opportunity to think about the world around me, the world around my children, the world my father experienced and how different and yet equally beautiful each place really is. It is easy to forget to stop and smell the roses, not the roses in your neighbor’s yard or the roses down the street, but the roses, the life, that surrounds you—here and now.

When I think of ways that we can impact those around us, I think of my dad in the same way that I think of Matt de la Peña: They are the bright spots for kids in an otherwise dark and scary world. They raise questions in the minds of all those they reach; they ask us to look around and figure out exactly how we can share our light with anyone willing to listen. What tools do you have accessible to you? How can you take those tools and make them accessible to others? How can you share your experience, the things you are a witness to, in order to provide others with a sense of empathy, identity, empowerment? How can you show people that beauty is not only found in the perfectly clean, well-funded and tended classroom or the ethereal forest but anywhere we are learning or living, even the classroom in the dirt under a tree on a hot day? How do YOU use the gifts you have been given to make the world better? I think CJ’s Nana said it best, “Sometimes when you’re surrounded by dirt, CJ, you’re a better witness for what’s beautiful.”