Course Description:
Children are never just kids. Cultural studies, literary studies, and critical theory scholars have started to grapple with this fact, investigating cultural constructions of childhood as well as its intersections with gender, race, class, and disability. This course will build—and hopefully expand—this approach by introducing you to the booming field of Critical Childhood Studies (CCS). What is childhood? Under what conditions does someone qualify as “child”? What fantasies and/or phobias animate children’s literature and other popular representations of childhood? Do these representations collapse once we study children as authors—not just characters—of literature? As we tackle these and related questions, our focus will fall mostly on literature and Anglo-American contexts. However, the course welcomes and will be enriched by local, comparatist, and interdisciplinary perspectives.