Anthony Browne and the cultural capital of classic fairy tales

Prolific British author/illustrator Anthony Browne both participates in the classic fairy-tale tradition and appropriates its cultural capital, ultimately undertaking a process of self-canonisation alongside the dissemination of fairy tales. In reading Browne’s Hansel and Gretel (1981), The Tunnel (1989) and Into the Forest (2004), a trajectory emerges that moves from broadly intertextual to more exclusively self-referential modes of representation which reward readers of “Anthony Browne”, rather than readers of “fairy tales���. All three books depict ‘babes in the woods’ stories wherein child characters must negotiate some form of threat outside the home in order to return home safely. Thus, they represent childhood agency. However, these visions of agency are ultimately subordinated to logics of capital, which means that child readers of Browne’s fairy-tale books are overtly invited to identify with children who act, but are interpellated as privileged if they ‘know’. Bourdieu’s model of ‘cultural capital’ offers a lens for considering Browne’s production of ‘value’ for his own works within a broader cultural landscape which privileges literary fairy tales as a register of juvenile cultural competency. If cultural capital can be formulated most simply as the symbolic exchange value of approved modes of knowing and being, it is clearly helpful when trying to unpack logics of meaning within heavily intertextual or citational texts. It is also helpful thinking about what kinds of stories we as a culture choose to disseminate, choose to privilege, or choose to suppress. Zipes notes of fairy tales that, “the genre itself becomes a kind of institute that is involved in the socialization and acculturation of readers” (22). He elaborates that, “We initiate readers and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibility in the civilizing process” (Zipes 29), so it is little wonder that Tatar describes fairy tales as “a vital part of our cultural capital” (xix). Although Browne is clearly interested in literary fairy tales, the most obvious strategies of self-canonisation take place in Browne’s work not in words but in pictures: hidden in plain sight, as illustration becomes self-reflexive citation.

The monster chronicles : the role of children’s stories featuring monsters in managing childhood fears and promoting empowerment

Children’s fascination with monsters is a normal part of childhood development. Children’s literature reflects this with a wealth of stories featuring monsters, ranging from fairy tales to picture books to books for independent readers. These stories can raise concerns from educators, parents and other sections of the community such as political and religious institutions on the basis that they could be disturbing or harmful to children. In contrast, there is evidence to indicate the potential for managing fears and enhancing feelings of empowerment in children through the reading of stories featuring monsters. A reappraisal of these stories from a predominantly therapeutic perspective reveals that they may act as agents of positive change in six ways – catharsis, naming, taming, integration, transformation and moral empowerment. Two of these functions, transformation and moral empowerment, are examined further in three case studies of stories for the older reader that feature monsters, Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, Monster Blood Tattoo, Book One: Foundling by D.M. Cornish and my manuscript, ‘The Monster Chronicles’. The insights from this research have been used to inform the writing and editing of ‘The Monster Chronicles’ and inherent to that, my goal of creating a children’s story featuring monsters that is sensitive to children’s fears and their desire for empowerment.

Once Upon a Misconception : Mark Juddery's Busted [A Review]

Forget Disney's timeless tales of rags-to-riches. Princesses are the most overrated public figures of all time. Apparently. Cinderella, after all, was 'a calculating, sinister go-getter' who murdered her step-mother at the instruction of a jealous governess (88). Sleeping Beauty was raped as she slept, woken not by the wet kiss of a handsome prince, but the kick and punch of twins stirring in her belly. Over the centuries, only the pea-detecting princess has remained herself: hedonistic, melodramatic and 'still perhaps the most pampered, precious wimp in the history of fairy tales' (88). There are, however, shards of truth to be salvaged from the fractured lives of these glassy-eyed women. After all, even Princess Mary worked in real estate.

Sourdough & other stories : a story told in parts (a mosaic novel and exegesis)

The mosaic novel - with its independent 'story-tiles' linking together to form a complete narrative - has the potential to act as a reflection on the periodic resurfacing of unconscious memories in the conscious lives of fictional characters. This project is an exploration of the mosaic text as a fictional analogue of involuntary memory. These concepts are investigated as they appear in traditional fairy tales and engaged with in this thesis's creative component, Sourdough and Other Stories (approximately 80,000 words), a mosaic novel comprising sixteen interconnected 'story-tiles'. Traditional fairy tales are non-reflective and conducive to forgetting (i.e. anti-memory); fairy tale characters are frequently portrayed as psychologically two-dimensional, in that there is no examination of the mental and emotional distress caused when children are stolen/ abandoned/ lost and when adults are exiled. Sourdough and Other Stories is a creative examination of, and attempted to remedy, this lack of psychological depth. This creative work is at once something more than a short story collection, and something that is not a traditional novel, but instead a culmination of two modes of writing. It employs the fairy tale form to explore James' 'thorns in the spirit' (1898, p.199) in fiction; the anxiety caused by separation from familial and community groups. The exegesis, A Story Told in Parts - Sourdough and Other Stories is a critical essay (approximately 20,000 words in length), a companion piece to the mosaic novel, which analyses how my research question proceeded from my creative work, and considers the theoretical underpinnings of the creative work and how it enacts the research question: 'Can a writer use the structural possibilities of the mosaic text to create a fictional work that is an analogue of an involuntary memory?' The cumulative effect of the creative and exegetical works should be that of a dialogue between the two components - each text informing the other and providing alternate but complementary lenses with which to view the research question.

Thinking Critically in the Land of Princesses and Giants : The Affordances and Challenges of Critical Approaches in the Early Years

During the last four decades, educators have created a range of critical literacy approaches for different contexts, including compulsory schooling (Luke & Woods, 2009) and second language education (Luke & Dooley, 2011). Despite inspirational examples of critical work with young students (e.g., O’Brien, 1994; Vasquez, 1994), Comber (2012) laments the persistent myth that critical literacy is not viable in the early years. Assumptions about childhood innocence and the priorities of the back-to-basics movement seem to limit the possibilities for early years literacy teaching and learning. Yet, teachers of young students need not face an either/or choice between the basic and critical dimensions of literacy. Systematic ways of treating literacy in all its complexity exist. We argue that the integrative imperative is especially important in schools that are under pressure to improve technical literacy outcomes. In this chapter, we document how critical literacy was addressed in a fairytales unit taught to 4.5 - 5.5 year olds in a high diversity, high poverty Australian school. We analyze the affordances and challenges of different approaches to critical literacy, concluding they are complementary rather than competing sources of possibility. Furthermore, we make the case for turning familiar classroom activities to critical ends.

Reflections from damaged modernity

The cliché about modern architecture being the fairy-tale fulfillment of every fantasy ceases to be a cliché only when it is accompanied by the fairy tale’s moral: that the fulfillment of the wishes rarely engenders goodness in the one doing the wishing (Adorno). Wishing for the right things in architecture and the city is the most difficult art of all: since the grim childhood-tales of the twentieth century we have been weaned from dreams and utopias, the stuff of modernism’s bad conscience. For Adorno writing in 1953, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition (mimesis) of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics,” like the archaic language of pictures in Ancient Egypt which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. Arguably, today the iconic architecture industry is the executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality. As I will argue in this symposium, such buildings are not a reflection of external ‘reality,’ but regression to an internal architectural polemic that secretly carries out the rituals of modernism’s death and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history.

Traveller’s Tales : The Expatriate English Language Teacher in the New Global Culture

Most of the research into ELT has focused on its linguistic and methodological aspects, which are based on Western scientific traditions. The contributions and experiences of English language teachers themselves, especially their work in overseas contexts, have frequently been overlooked. This volume aims to document the complexity of ELT as ‘work’ in new global economic and cultural conditions, and to explore how this complexity is realised in the everyday experiences of ELT teachers. The development of ELT from the colonial experience to its current status as a global commodity is explored; ELT is then situated in the discourses of globalisation, specifically within Appadurai’s theorisation of global flows of people, images, ideas, technology and money, or scapes. Within this framework, narratives are constructed from the experiences of Native-speaking English teachers. These reveal much about the personal, pedagogical and cultural dimensions of ELT work in non-Centre countries, and will contribute to a greater understanding of the intercultural dimensions of ELT for all those who work in it, and in related educational fields.

Traveller’s Tales : ELT teachers in a globalising world

This chapter summarizes a quasi-ethnographic case study of the lives and work of nine native-speaking English language teachers who have lived and worked outside their countries of origin for extended periods. The study aimed to document the complexity of ELT as ‘work’ in new global economic and cultural conditions, and to explore how this complexity is realised in the everyday experiences of ELT teachers.

Telling tales, shaping stories : the creative practitioner and the artful life story

Norman K. Denzin (1989) claims that the central assumption of the biographical method—that a life can be captured and represented in a text—is open to question. This paper explores Denzin’s statement by documenting the role of creative writers in re-presenting oral histories in two case studies from Queensland, Australia. The first, The Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, was a commercial research project commissioned by the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) in 2009, and involved semi-formal qualitative interviews and digital stories. The second is an on-going practice-led PhD project, The Artful Life: Oral History and Fiction, which investigates the fictionalisation of oral histories. Both projects enter into a dialogue around the re-presentation of oral and life histories, with attention given to the critical scholarship and creative practice in the process. Creative writers represent a life having particular preoccupations with techniques that more closely align with fiction than non-fiction (Hirsch and Dixon 2008). In this context, oral history resources are viewed not so much as repositories of historical facts, but as ambiguous and fluid narrative sources. The comparison of the two case studies also demonstrates that the aims of a particular project dictate the nature of the re-presentation, revealing that writing about another’s life is a complex act of artful ‘shaping’. Alistair Thomson (2007) notes the growing interdisciplinary nature of oral history scholarship since the 1980s; oral histories are used increasingly in art-based contexts to produce diverse cultural artefacts, such as digital stories and works of fiction, which are very different from traditional histories. What are the methodological implications of such projects? This paper will draw on self-reflexive practice to explore this question.

The tales we tell : exploring the legal stories of Queensland women who kill

The bulk of the homicide research to date has focused on male offending, with little consideration given to women's offending and in particular, their constructions within the courtroom following a homicide-related charge. This thesis examines, in detail, nineteen homicide cases finalised in the Queensland Supreme Courts between 01/01/1997 and 31/12/2002, in order to document and discuss the various legal stories available to women who kill. Predominantly, two “stock stories” are available within the court. The first, presented by the defence, offers the accused woman a victimised position to occupy. Evidence of victimisation is made available through previous abuse, expert testimony from psychologists and psychiatrists, challenges to her mental health, or appeals to her emotional nature. The second stock story, presented by the prosecution, positions the accused woman as angry, full of revenge, calculating and self serving. Such a script is usually supported by witnesses, police evidence, and family members. This thesis examines these competing and contradictory scripts using thematic discourse analysis to examine the court transcripts in detail. It argues that the "truth" of the fatal incident is based on one of these two prevailing scripts. This research destabilises the dominant script of violent female offending in the feminist literature. Most research to date has focussed on explaining the circumstances in which women kill, concentrating attention on the victimisation of the violent offending woman and negating or de-prioritising any volition on her part. By analysing all transcripts of women whose trials were held within the specified period, this research is able to demonstrate the stories used to describe their complex offending, and draw attention to the anger and intent that can occur alongside the victimisation.

Pinteresque puppets and masters weave dark tales of a dystopic world

A HARBINGER is a messenger, foreshadowing what is to come. This adult fairytale, told with a cast of human actors and 22 puppets, foretells the story of a little girl found in the shadows of countless books in the library of a character known as the Old Man.