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Stop All the Clocks: Time in Postmodern Picture Books
Get PDFTime, according to Ursula Heise (Heise 1997, p.48), is one of the most fundamental parameters through which narrative is organised and understood and the mode by which we mediate and negotiate human temporality. This human experience of time depends on cultural contexts that themselves are subject to change (p.48). The novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (Robbe-Grillet 1962, p.133), claims that time no longer passes and that the question of chronology, of 'clocks and calendars', has become irrelevant. Time, as an aspect of the referential illusion created by conventional narratives, is being undermined, not only in postmodern novels, but also in postmodern picture books. In an effort, then, to understand these new temporal realities of the contemporary world and the ways in which they are represented in postmodern narrative, principally the postmodern picture book, I turned to Heise's text Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997). It is Heise's contention that a fundamental change has taken place in the Western culture of time and it is my intention in this paper to examine these changes to our conceptualisation of time and briefly look at the causes of such changes. Following this I examine the ways in which these changes are reflected in narrative, with particular emphasis on the post-modern picture book
An Awfully Big Adventure: Killing Death in War Stories for Children
Get PDFThe increase of discourses dealing with death, violence or brutality in times of war, may be due to two factors. First there is a perception of a global increase of fields of war. This, in turn, may be dependent upon the second factor: the ready availability of images and information about war, from newspapers, histories of war events, and cinematic documentaries, to video games and, as I explore in this paper, fictional texts for children. In war stories for children death is usually at one remove because children do not normally fight as soldiers. For the child in war time, their position is usually that of the equivocal observer. This then reveals a basic problem of how to tell of the brutality of war, how to underline an apparent fundamental ideology of war stories for children; that is, to create a sense of anti-war ethos, when the child narrator and focaliser is not a combatant. Nevertheless it seems that war stories should, and do, attempt to show that war is about 'killing soldiers' and often others as well. But in so doing it is rarely this simple. There may be many reasons why this blunt and necessary aspect of war is re-shaped for the child reader; but in this paper I want to concentrate on the ways and means of this re-shaping
Narrative in Robyn Kahukiwa’s 'Matatuhi': Culture and Narrative
Get PDFThe question of a dominating Western metanarrative in postcolonial societies has particular significance when people write for children in a bi-cultural situation. In a recent study the Maori scholar Jon Battista shows that fictional texts written in English by Maori in a Maori context are structured to project Maori cultural understandings and argues that these cultural beliefs shape the narrative of individual texts (Battista, 2004). I apply her thesis to 'Matatuhi', a picture book by Robyn Kahukiwa, in order to discuss the narrative operation and significance of Maori cultural beliefs and practices identified by Battista
“My battery is low and it's getting dark”: The Opportunity rover's collective persona
Get PDFThe Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity operated on Mars from 2004 until it was disabled by a dust storm in 2018. Its demise was declared in February 2019 after months of unsuccessful recontact attempts by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This announcement sparked a global outpouring of grief that demonstrated people understood and related to the robot in a notably human-like manner. In short, it had been given a collectively understood persona. This paper presents a study of 100 digital postcards created by users on a NASA website that demonstrate the ways in which people expressed love, grief, hope, and thanks for Opportunity’s fourteen years of operation on another planet. In presenting this case study, the paper argues that certain personas are collective achievements. This is especially likely to occur for robots and other inanimate objects which have no centrally controlled or developed persona. The paper is situated within existing persona studies literature to extend and stretch the definition of persona studies and therefore expand the field in productive ways to incorporate the study of non-human personas
2021 Online Conference: Diversifying Persona Studies Online International Conference and Special Issue
Get PDFThe online conference does not and cannot replicate the flow and feel of a face-to-face experience; instead, it offers something new.We saw the timing and the mode of the conference as a chance to ask hard questions about the ground that persona studies has carved as an emerging field of study. We wanted to ensure that persona studies is a space for new voices and new directions of inquiry, and to provide a conference space that is entirely built around inclusive scholarship.The purpose of framing the conference as diversifying persona studies was to expand the scope and reach of our ambition, invite new possibilities, to challenge the conceptualisations of the field, and to challenge ourselves to release a sense of ownership and control over what persona studies could be. We have always strived to make persona studies as a welcoming and inclusive scholarly exercise, but the risk of groupthink and boundary policing is ever-present, and the conference theme was intended to challenge this
Under the Wire: Detainee Activism in Australian Children’s Literature
Get PDFIn this paper, I shall analyse this figure of the activist protesting on behalf of detainees via the notion of cultural citizenship, looking specifically at Gleitzman's 'Girl Underground'. I argue that an ethics of compassion must give way to an ethics of responsibility in representations of this relationship between activist and detainee in order for texts to challenge current detention centre policy and to posit a new version of multiculturalism, which relies on an ethical cultural citizenship
Moonlit Revelations: The Discourse of the End in Gina B. Nahai’s Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
Get PDFYoung adult fiction often engages with what Derrida terms a discourse of the end, a paradoxical notion that is evident - yet hidden - in such fictions. For Derrida, a discourse of the end is the haunted existence that surrounds extreme events, where the presence of the end is the 'staging for the end of history' that we simultaneously comprehend, yet it is incomprehensible (1974, p.10). One aspect of the discourse of the end is the post-apocalyptic, which Berger describes as: 'Everything that follows the revelation is postapocalyptic' (Berger 1999, p.138). The post-apocalyptic is evident in the novel 'Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith' (Nahai 1999) where the women have sensed the 'doom' that surrounds a daughter in each generation for the last 1000 years. Moonlight is written by an Iranian 'exile' (as Nahai puts it) living in America, and set in a Jewish Iranian culture in the midst of political upheaval and religious persecution. The narrative focuses on the matrilineal heritage of Lili, a teenage girl, and the role that prophecy has played in her family's lives. Particularly, the novel focuses on her mother (Roxanna) and the events leading to, and following, her disappearance when Lili was still a girl. In this paper, I first delve into the discourse of the end, and then comment on how this concept can bring the importance of the interwoven narration, the events of the story, and character constructions together into a post-apocalyptic understanding of the text. Although Moonlight has many potential avenues for exploration, I will be focusing on the role of the revelation by using concepts of hiddenness (Bull 1999), protention/portention (Derrida 1974), and the post-apocalyptic (Berger 1999). This combination of theoretical perspectives offers a new scholarly direction in the analysis of young adult fiction
Anime Haibane Renmei (Charcoal Feather Federation): An Enclave for the Hurt, Alienated Souls
Get PDFAnime is an audiovisual, symphonic narrative form characterised by diversity, fluidity, hybridity and intertexuality. The abundant borrowing of images is a common practice in both manga and anime, and is considered as homage to the pretext and/or the establishing of a provocative dialogue between texts. This paper will discuss some of its distinctive characteristics, mainly intertexuality, using Yoshitoshi ABe's enigmatic 'Haibane Renmei' series (2002) and Haruki Murakami's novel, 'Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World' (hereafter HBW/EOW) (1985)
A Chosen Sacrifice: The Doomed Destiny of the Child Messiah in Late Twentieth-Century Children’s Fantasy
Get PDFThe story is familiar. A child is born. It is identified by a mark, prophecy, auspicious birth, or wise soothsayer. A lightning bolt on a forehead. The world rejoices at the birth of the Child Messiah, and hope for the future is restored. Though it may be a happy event for the world, what does it signify for the Child Messiahs? We assume that the heroic destiny is the stuff of dreams for children, and that they are, or at least should be, honoured by destiny's choice. But perhaps being chosen as the Child Messiah in today's world is not as rewarding as it once was. In this paper, I propose that the Child Messiah of late-twentieth-century children's fantasy is not the luckily chosen one, but a doomed sacrifice to Fate in exchange for the future survival of the human race
‘Advocating and Celebrating the Abomination of Sodomy’: The Cultural Reception of Lesbian and Gay Picturebooks
Get PDFReactions to lesbian and gay picture books range from fatuous public statements made by Australian politicians about school readers featuring a girl with two mums, through to current court cases over the use of the picture book 'King and King' (de Haan & Nijland 2000) in Boston classrooms (Barrett 2006). In the case of Susanne Bosche's 'Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin' (1983), the book was used in government debate in London to justify the introduction of Section 28, a controversial piece of legislation which forbade the promotion of 'homosexuality as a pretended family relationship' (Local Government Act 1988). On the whole, these reactions have little to do with picture books. Controversies about these texts are really about much bigger social questions, such as childhood 'innocence', constructions of sexuality, paedophilia, conversion and the dissolution of the family. These simmering anxieties erupt into moral panics when the culturally sacred and/or unspeakable categories of childhood and non-normative sexualities come into contact. In this paper I will examine reactions to a range of texts, and track the similarities between the media reaction and the contents of the picture books themselves, and the ways that these react to and feed off each other. I will discuss some of the recurring topics of this circular relationship and consider some of the problems caused by circling these topics. For this paper I will define lesbian and gay picture books as fiction for children which addresses sexualities other than heterosexuality, primarily picture books about children with same sex parents, such as 'Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin' (Bosche 1983). Although 'cultural reception' can be expanded to include a wide range of phenomena, for the purposes of this paper I will be relying mainly on newspaper articles addressing panics over these texts, with some forays into cyberspace and archives of parliamentary debate