Carnivals, the Carnivalesque, The Magic Puddin', and David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy: Toward a Theorizing of Children's Plays

This article seeks to extend current children's literature criticism into children's plays and children's theatre. The article uses Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding as a prose introduction to an idea of a theatrical carnivalesque. Building on the practical experience of being involved in a large program of original drama for children, written and produced within the university context, it develops a theory of plays-as-the-performance-of-texts, relating this to the current debate on performance and performativity. It adopts the idea of performativity as performative belonging and identifies some distinguishing characteristics of children's plays. Applying some of these ideas to David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy, it notes the idea of moral psychic reorganisation as part of the essence of carnival.     

The continuum of listening

The distinction between apophatic and cataphatic listening is defined and analyzed. Apophatic listening is more or less devoid of cognitivist claims, whereas cataphatic listening involves cognition and questioning. Many of the papers in this volume are discussed along the continuum determined by these two types of listening. Haroutunian-Gordon’s claim is that every act of listening involves the listener in questioning, thus listening is solely cataphatic. We discuss apophatic listening as a limiting ideal case and conclude that not every act of listening involves a question. Though in acknowledging this limiting case we disagree with Haroutunian-Gordon’s assertion, we are indebted to her work and believe her model forms an important part of any comprehensive theory of listening.

Tale of an Innocent

The British novelist Nicky Singer talks about becoming a writer, the role of editors and about who decides what can—and what can’t—be published either side of the Atlantic. Her three novels explore territory which can make publishers nervous: Feather Boy (initiation rites and domestic violence), Doll (self-harm) and The Innocent’s Story (terrorist suicide bombing). The sharply contrasting responses from publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States are described. Through Nicky Singer’s sometimes extraordinary experiences with publishers runs the implicit question, perhaps as important now as it has ever been: What constraints should there be on what is explored in books for young readers?     

Prisoners of Childhood? Child Abuse and the Development of Heroes and Monsters in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ender’s Game</Emphasis>

Alice Miller’s work provides a theoretical framework to assess the effects of child abuse and its relationship to the development of creativity, hatred, and violence in the novel Ender’s Game. Analysis focuses on the extent to which children are manipulated in order to meet the needs of adults, the presence of behaviors such as the repression of feelings and memories, the idealization of perpetrators, blind obedience to authority, and the expression of repressed feelings in destructive acts, and identification of a helping witness as predictors for the actions and outcomes in this story.

创建“中国马克思主义学术史”学科的开拓之作——评吴汉全5卷本《中国马克思主义学术史》

吴汉全主编的5卷本《中国马克思主义学术史》以学科建设立论，将建设中国马克思主义学术史学科作为基本任务，梳理中国马克思主义学术历史进程，提出了进一步推进中国马克思主义学术史研究的努力方向。5卷本《中国马克思主义学术史》对于推进马克思主义学科体系的发展也有重要的启示：一是多学科研究马克思主义理论；二是"立足中国"来研究马克思主义理论；三是高度重视并发掘马克思主义理论研究的学术基础；四是注重史料的积累及整理。     

Story as a Bridge to Transformation: The Way Beyond Death in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass

In The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman extends the psychological depth of literature for young readers by presenting in palpable terms a confrontation with death met by the human capacity for dealing creatively, through story, with personal mortality. Pullman's portrayal of the power of storytelling is placed within the context of the Platonic tradition and neo-Platonic, 19th-century Romanticism. The co-protagonists' descent into the Land of the Dead, Lyra's freeing of the ghosts by the power of story, and their shared emergence into the sunlit land of the living draws on key elements of 19th-century Romanticism, specifically, the ideas of two poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley's concept of the creative imagination as the instrument of moral good, and John Keats' notion of negative capability and his metaphor of the world as a vale of soul-making. All told, Pullman's fantasy portrays young protagonists transcending the dualism of good and evil and learning to live creatively in the face of life's contradictions, complexities, and, most potently, their own mortality.