Beatrix Potter and Jacques Derrida - Problematic Bedfellows in the Teaching of Children's Literature?

This article explores the particular problems of teaching ‘Children's Literature’. First, it is generally seen as marginal; secondly, and relatedly, it is seen as predominantly a women's subject; thirdly, it frequently involves texts to which students have deep attachments; and lastly, there is a reluctance to engage in the usual ‘LitCrit’. It is suggested that these problems are better viewed as opportunities, on the one hand to explore literature in a more committed and engaged way, and on the other, to relate experience meaningfully to the insights of recent critical theory.     

从《科学的艺术概论》看萨空了的艺术观

萨空了的艺术理论集中体现在《科学的艺术概论》中。论著就建立艺术哲学的必要性、艺术和美的一般常识、艺术与社会的关联、新艺术建设的启示、艺术遗产的批判接受及艺术的内容与形式等问题做了系统阐释,理论性和实践性相结合,为从事文艺研究的学者们留下了宝贵的借鉴材料。     

‘Before I realised they were all women… I expected it to be more about materials’: Art,Gender and Tacit Subjectivity

This article discusses a critical discourse analysis research activity undertaken with a group of undergraduate primary trainees with an art specialism. The research activity involved the use of two contrasting texts discussing the work of Karla Black, Becky Beasley and Claire Barclay. The article explores how the positioning of the two texts affected the student teachers’ ability to engage effectively with ‘women's art’ on a personal and critical level, revealing some highly subjective views and raising questions around intertextuality; particularly how an individual's understanding of contexts, meanings and histories can inform collective interpretation and highlight existing subjectivity. The article subsequently identifies that although students were keen to talk about careful selection of texts, the benefits of using multiple sources and the risks of intertextual and ‘subliminal’ contamination, they were unable to reflect critically upon their own gendered reading of the texts. It concludes that this may well be a signifier of the problem – that the student teachers did not really see a problem at all.     

中央苏区与鄂豫皖苏区文艺特征比较研究

苏区文艺是中国共产党领导的早期革命文艺,苏区文艺确立了文艺为政治服务的原则和文艺大众化的方针。中央苏区与鄂豫皖苏区是土地革命战争时期中国共产党创建的最大的两块革命根据地,两个苏区的文艺无论是理论来源、指导思想、文艺制度,还是题材与体裁、表现手法、创作群体等,都具有同质同源的属性,但由于地域差异、地位差别,两者之间也有一些明显的区别。中央苏区文艺相较于鄂豫皖苏区文艺,理论体系更加系统,文艺制度更加完善,组织化程度更高,创作队伍更加庞大,人员更加专业,影响更加深远。苏区文艺作为中国共产党早期所进行的文艺理论与实践活动,其经验与教训对后来的延安文艺及新中国文艺的发展具有重要的借鉴意义。     

试论唐代诗歌中的西域歌舞艺术

唐代中原与西域多有交流,西域的多种艺术形式在唐代文学作品中有充分展示,二者互动并走向繁荣。论文梳理唐代相关文献,考察西域歌舞艺术在唐文学中的表达形式,分析原因,从而总结该时期文学与艺术发达的原因。稳定的社会环境、积极开放的政策与创作心态促成了该时期艺术的繁荣,而文学有了新的表达内容,艺术也在文学中得以传播。     

Sh-h-h-h: representations of perpetrators of sexual child abuse in picturebooks

Children's picturebooks dealing with the topic of child sexual abuse first appeared in the early 1980s with the aim of addressing the need for age-appropriate texts to teach sexual abuse prevention concepts and to provide support for young children who may be at risk of or have already experienced sexual abuse. Despite the apparent potential of children's picturebooks to convey child sexual abuse prevention concepts, very few studies have addressed the topic of child sexual abuse in children's literature. Based on a larger study of 60 picturebooks about sexual child abuse published over the past 25 years, this paper critically examines eight picturebook representations of the perpetrators of sexual child abuse as a way to understand how potentially dangerous adults are explained to the young readers of these texts.     

Language,thought and reality: a comparison of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics with C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards' The Meaning of Meaning

This paper returns to two key texts in the history of linguistic theory: Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning (1923). While Saussure's linguistic model is dialectical and synthetic, with the two elements of the linguistic sign (signal and signification) being compared to the two sides of a sheet of paper, Ogden and Richards' is tripartite and analytic, with the three elements involved in the language situation (word, thought and thing) being represented as the three points of a triangle. Moreover, while Saussure sees language as turning in upon itself, with the sign referring not to things in an extra‐linguistic reality but to other signs within the same linguistic structure, Ogden and Richards see language as referring beyond itself, to a reality outside language. These differences are related to differences in how the human mind is conceived: while Saussure sees thought as embedded in language, and while he invests the mind with the power to order and regulate the chaos inherent in language, Ogden and Richards, writing very much in the wake of the new psychology of stimulus–response behaviourism, separate thought from language, and divest the mind of any power to resist ‘the power of words’. Interestingly, though, Ogden and Richards show signs of an early cognitivism, which raises the question of whether contemporary cognitive science is perhaps more indebted to the stimulus–response paradigm than it would care to admit.     

The multi‐modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies‐related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi‐modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese‐American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip‐hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi‐modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.     

中国化:泥泞的坦途--试论中国当代文论与西方文论的关系

文学理论面对新变化、新矛盾、新课题、新情况,如何解决其"中国化"问题,相当复杂.但是,中国文学理论要自立于世界文学理论之林,就必须发出属于自己的声音.中国的文学理论要有科学的"原创"意识,要努力实现贴近文学现实的"中国化",这是每位有责任感和使命感的中国文论家的惟一选择.     

The Design of Stereotype and the Image

Our everyday life is influenced by an overproduction of images and by an iconogenic surplus that is connected to the proliferation of media. These contribute to both the quality and quantity of communication, but simultaneously amplify the knowledge gap between an audience that is able to critically process messages and another that is affected uncritically by prejudices and stereotypes. Bellino argues for a critical media education to address this gap by encouraging the development of students' critical thinking and social awareness. In this article we will discuss the results of a research‐driven design project in which visual communication design students engaged with theories of cultural stereotypes and critiqued the role of media in their perpetuation. We adopted Kolb's model of experiential learning as recent published research demonstrates that art and design students have difficulties in conventional academic approaches to learning theory. In this regard students learned theories of stereotype through doing and making and embodied this learning in their critical project outcomes.     

Encountering Pedagogy through Relational Art Practices

Two artists involved in ‘socially engaged art’ practice were invited to work with art education teacher candidates and instructors in an effort to rethink notions of teaching, learning and art. We initiated this residency, which we called ‘The Summerhill Residency’, to examine how learning encounters might create environments for meaningful exchanges between the ways in which artists and secondary art education teacher candidates learn to think about pedagogy and the nature of artistic learning. Drawing upon Bourriaud's theory of relational aesthetics, we consider, yet trouble, the relational aspects of the processes and products of the artist residency, and examine the crisis of imagination that permeated teacher candidates' experiences. Throughout the project, a/r/tography offered a rich form of living enquiry that opened up possibilities for learning within a community of enquirers.     

Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism,Everyday Talk,and the Analysis of Public Discourse

This article answers critical and theoretical calls for the study of ordinary talk by analyzing a transcribed speech in which Alvertis Simmons, a member of the Denver, Colorado, African American community, engaged a panel of school board officials on the topic of racial stereotypes in an elementary school science experiment. Simmons's discourse can be shown symbolically to reorganize features of integrationist and nationalist ways of speaking-two dominant strands of mid- to late-twentieth century African American public address. Building a theory of "oratorical influence" from these intertextual relationships, this essay concludes that the force of public discourse may reside less in a speaker's ability to persuade an audience than in an audience's willingness to recycle and revise figural aspects of a speaker's discourse in their everyday talk. An interpretive stance such as this can encourage rhetorical critics to expand their objects of critique, to include more ordinary ways of speaking that follow after highly styled public texts.     

周作人文艺思想的学理来源与主体整合

传统的中国本土文化,西方人道主义文艺理论资源,大和民族的世俗文化和社会改良理想,是周作人文艺思想的主要学理来源。正是在此基础上,周作人形成了独特的个人主义人本主义文艺思想体系,提出了在现代文学史上颇有影响的“人的文学”理论,同时也为中国传统文艺理论走出“诗言志”和“文以载道”的二元抉择作出了新的贡献。     

What's got two heads and no nose? Young British and Chinese children's representations of unreality

In this study, two samples of 4‐year‐old Chinese children were given two drawing tasks, one very familiar task and one novel and challenging task. The first sample was drawn from a nursery that taught art in a similar way to that widely used in the West, with an emphasis on individual expression. The second sample was from a nursery where drawing was taught explicitly and directly in the traditional Chinese way. Results were compared between the two groups and with a British sample given the same task. Some very significant differences were found with both tasks, and these are discussed in the context of different ideas about young children's drawing and art education.     

马克思主义文艺学的体系之困

新时期以来,中国艺术理论界一直试图构建马克思主义文艺学的学科体系却收效不大。原因首先在于马恩等代表人物没有建立文艺学学科体系,其次该学科本身缺乏严谨的学理基础,第三是学科建设没有形成通约性的学术观点。所以,构建马克思主义文艺学学科体系的条件尚不成熟。当下的首要问题是,继续以马克思主义文艺学的经典文本为立足点,以古今中外,尤其是当下中国的文艺实践为出发点,大力发展马克思主义文艺学,解决马克思主义文艺学面临的诸多问题,为建设社会主义文化强国提供理论支持。     

'England Expects Every Man to do his Duty': The gendering of the citizenship textbook 1940-1966

This article is based on a pilot study investigating the representation of women in a sample of texts for citizenship education in the immediate post-Second World War era in England. The authors argue that existing research into the field of education for citizenship does not engage adequately with how the subject is taught in schools, and how citizenship education constructs the polity in line with normative and traditionalist assumptions about the role of women and men in society. By studying the texts of citizenship for the period 1940-66, the authors argue that researchers can, if they deploy a more critically engaged approach to the way in which notions of 'citizenship' and 'polity' are gendered, generate new questions and new understandings of how education for citizenship functions in schools.     

Exploring urban print environments: a comparative study across San Antonio and Santiago and implications for early childhood literacy practices

In this study, we compared the types of texts found in two metropolitan areas (Santiago, Chile, and San Antonio, TX, USA) as a way of documenting the sponsorship of literacy within these two communities. We found (roughly) equal number of texts across the sites but interesting patterns within each. San Antonio's texts were primarily sponsored by industry and the military and Santiago's texts by political and religious sponsors. Similarly, there were statistically significant differences in the types of texts across neighbourhoods based on how well they were historically resourced. Our findings have implications for teaching early literacy through environmental print.