Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man : A Tossed Salad of Parodic Re-versions

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith was awarded a Randolph Caldecott Honor Medal in 1993. Scieszka and Smith subvert textual authority through playing “with literary and cultural codes and conventions” (McCallum 1996, p. 400) in their metafictive text. In this article, I discuss the intertextual and parodic nature of The Stinky Cheese Man and explore Grade 5 students’ responses to this postmodern picturebook. Excerpts from students’ written responses and small group peer-led discussions illustrate some of their responses to and interpretations of the re-versions of the tales, the interactive nature of the characters and the obtrusive narrator, and the design of the book. Sylvia Pantaleo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s literature and all areas of the language arts.