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University of Connecticut

Department/Program:
English

Institution address:
Department of English
215 Glenbrook Road, Unit 4025
Storrs, CT 062689-4025

Degree(s) granted:
M.A.
Ph.D.

Faculty involved in the program:
Katharine Capshaw Smith: capshaw@uconn.edu
Margaret R. Higonnet: margaret.higonnet@uconn.edu
Sam Pickering: samuel.pickering@uconn.edu
Jean Marsden: jean.marsden@uconn.edu
Anna Mae Duane: anna.duane@uconn.edu

Courses offered:Children’s Literature:
This course examines the canon of children’s literature, beginning with early didactic literature and fairy tales, moving into the “Golden Age” of Victorian and Edwardian literature, and concluding with contemporary texts in a variety of genres. In addition to employing standard critical approaches, the class will also introduce students to critical theory specific to the field of children’s literature, like picture book and text/image theory.

Ethnic American Children’s Literature:
Many of the major writers we associate with the ethnic experience in America – Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Frank Chin, and Louise Erdrich, among others – have written texts intended for children or appropriated by young readers. Reconsidering our major ethnic writers as children’s authors will change our sense of the scope of their readership and enhance our understanding of
writers’ complicated aesthetic and political purposes. But the course will also attend to ethnic writers who publish mainly for a young audience, like Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and An Na, and reflect on the place of ethnic children’s literature to
American literature and ethnic studies.

African American Literature and Childhood:
This class will explore constructions of black childhood and adolescence in a variety of texts. We will begin by studying the origins of a literature addressed to black children by examining early didactic works, Sunday School publications, and Harlem Renaissance material. Keeping in mind that early works establish a tradition of “cross-writing” for an audience of both children and adults, we will explore intersecting levels of meaning and audience in mid- and late-twentieth century texts. We will then read specific texts as voices in dialogue over central facets of black childhood, such as the role of history and collective memory in shaping expectations for young people, the influence of gender constructions on youth, and the place of fantasy for adolescent readers. Reading “children’s” texts alongside “adult” texts will offer us a sense of their common narratives and goals, as well as of the specific demands that black children’s literature places on its readers.