"E - I - E - I - O : The Reproduction and Destruction of the Pastoral Landscape in Children's Literature"
The books we read as kids help us build our world. They help us understand the forms that our communities take -- and they also establish certain norms, tropes, and underlying ideologies that guide us when we, as adults, literally build and transform our communities. I'll look at various attitudes that several American books for children transmit regarding the small town, the countryside, and growth. I'll discuss how even abstract, formal structures imprint themselves on our narrative imaginations and inform our sense of our relationship with our environment. Specific topics include: the wilds of Nantasket, a man from Nantucket, affluence, effluents, dancing cows, and forty-two pounds of edible fungus.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
8:30: a.m. Coffee
9:00 – 9:45 a.m.
David Almond
“The Necessary Wilderness”
The best stories, like the best children, are not tame, trapped things. Like the best parts of the world, there’s a wilderness just beyond their neat and tidy pages. The writer reaches towards perfection, but knows that the perfect story would be very tedious, and could only exist in a very tedious heaven. Here in the world, it’s the sense of wilderness that is the imagination’s most powerful resource.
9:45 – 10:30 a.m.
Prof. Marguerite Holloway
“The Importance of Scale in Children’s Environmental Imagination”
Having a sense of scale is crucial to understanding nature and our place in it. How does children’s literature deal with scale, and what does an appreciation of scale bring about in a child’s environmental imagination? Holloway will engage the work of environmental psychologists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists in her reading of children’s literature.
10:30 – 11:00 a.m. Coffee
11:00 – 11:45 a.m.
Prof. Lawrence Buell
“Children's Literature and/as Environmental Memory”
From a developmental ecopsychological standpoint, how does children’s literature register and further our sense of connectedness and accountability to the natural world, to animals and habitats? Are the didactic and ideological agendas of environment-oriented literature for children pardonable or problematic? Can children’s literature help counteract what has been called “intergenerational environmental amnesia”?
11:45 – 12:30 p.m.
Sarah Ellis
“Into the Thicket: Seeing the Forest for the Trees in Children's Picture Books”
The image of the young child tends to focus our deepest hopes and anxieties. What do picture books, classic and current, reveal about our evolving relationship to the natural world?
12:30 – 1:30 pm. Lunch in The Buttery, TrinityCollege
1:30 – 2:15 p.m.
Susan Cooper
in conversation with Prof. Deirdre Baker
“Fantasy, Naturally”
How and why does an environmental imagination inform all of Susan Cooper’s works? How has her imagining of the natural environment changed and evolved since The Dark is Rising series? Why and how is the British and Celtic folk tradition so central to this aspect of Cooper’s imagination? How does fantasy lend itself particularly to displaying and engaging the natural world?
2:15 - 3:00 p.m.
Tim Wynne-Jones
“Where is Here, Anymore: The Cyber Conquest of Real Space”
Every book is an intermediary between two worlds – the one that we live in and the one the writer takes us to. No matter how exotic the book’s locale may be, it is imbued with the reader’s own locale. This is especially true for young readers. Not having seen much of the world, they cannot help reading into a story what they do know, what they have experienced, what they have seen. The writer creates with lively words only scaffolding upon which the reader hangs the hills and valleys and skies of his or her own place.
The “imaginative” world in which one’s avatar roams, on the other hand, is not imaginative at all in the sense we have come to know the word. While there are options in these virtual kingdoms they are limited not by the viewer but by the game itself.
And the real world? The real world becomes a shifting middle earth, so to speak, between the world of literary fiction, in which the audience is a collaborator, and the world of the video game in which the audience, for all the illusion of control, is never more than a tourist.
3:00 - 3:30 p.m. Coffee
3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Panel Discussion with all speakers
Questions and discussion from audience
4:30 – 6:00
Wine and cheese, The Buttery, TrinityCollege
REGISTRATION
Conference registration: $125 (student rate: $75)
Includes: all of the Friday and Saturday sessions, lunch, coffee break and wine and cheese reception.
Please email Deirdre Baker with any questions regarding registration.
Rooms have been set aside at a preferential nightly rate ($129.00 + taxes) at Holiday Inn Toronto nearest to the George Ignatieff Theatre - Midtown on Bloor St.Rooms must be booked by February 15, 2010.
