Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

Module Identifier
EN27820
Module Title
Forms of Children's Narrative Prose
Academic Year
2020/2021
Co-ordinator
Semester
Semester 2
Other Staff

Course Delivery

 

Assessment

Due to Covid-19 students should refer to the module Blackboard pages for assessment details

Assessment Type Assessment length / details Proportion
Semester Assessment 2 Hours   Essay Assignment  (2,500 words)  60%
Semester Assessment 0.1 Hours   Oral Presentation  (30 minute group oral presentation)  40%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmission of Essay  (2,500 words)  60%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit Oral Presentation  - Submit written script on a new topic, as if for oral delivery, with accompanying visual aids.  40%

Aims

In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson asserts that 'there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom'. By suggesting the formative influence of children's culture on social relations, Woodson highlights an idea that courses through the body of children's literature. Whether writing in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, authors infuse texts with the hope that through childhood, that potent period in the individual's development, sensibilities can be transformed. Telling stories to a young audience can become the conduit for social and political change. A primary factor that distinguishes children's literature from adult literature is its complexly layered audience, for children's literature reaches various adult mediators as well as child readers. Children's literature also becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest. Reversals of power in particular have always had special force in works for children. This module examines the uniqueness of children's literature, from classic realist texts to contemporary fantasy, and explores the thematic crossover between adult and child literature, and the forms of children's literature in which identity-formation takes centre stage, such as fictional and non-fictional autobiography, coming of age stories and the bildungsroman.

Content

The module is structured as 10 x 2 hour seminars, which will address the themes of the course as they arise.

Seminars:

1. Stories, fairy-tale and the tradition of children's literature: selections from Perrault.

2. Classic Fantasy: C.S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

3. Classic Realist Fiction: L. M. Montogomery, Anne of Green Gables

4. Classic Realist Fiction: Frances Hodson Burnett, The Secret Garden.

5. Animal Stories: Richard Adams, Watership Down

6. Animal Stories: selections from Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book.

7, High Fantasy and Domestic Fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

8. High Fantasy and Domestic Fantasy: J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

9. Autobiography for children: Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, and selections from Hi-Li Liang, Red Scarf Girl.

10.ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 5