This talk follows Jack Zipes' recent publication of his new translation of Felix Salten's Bambi (1923). Zipes' research for this book demonstrates that Bambi was essentially a Jew, as were all the animals in the forest, and that he and they had to spend their lives avoiding pogroms in the forest and learning to deal with loneliness. Salten wrote other books, such as Fifteen Rabbits (1928) and Bambi's Children: The Story of a Forest Family ...

Through Young Eyes is an undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Research Focus Group on Global Childhood Ecologies, as well as the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature Program. It features multidisciplinary presentations of thesis research related to childhood by senior majors Victoria Korotchenko in Russian and East European Studies, Nicole Smirnoff in Comparative Literature, and Zoie Orth in English. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion will focus ...

The war in Ukraine raises the issue of a new nuclear threat, as five nuclear power plants are located there. Although the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the north of Ukraine is non-functional, the level of radiation is still very high. Moreover, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the south of Ukraine, is threatened with a new nuclear catastrophe and radiation pollution since the Russian military invasion (Joint Statement ...

A multimodal approach to children’s picturebooks focuses on how images and words (and their interactions) collaboratively make meaning. Narrative theory enriches picturebook studies by demonstrating how paratextual elements (book cover, author’s note, afterword, etc.) complement the body text. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1997) distinction of “peritext” and “epitext” and Nina Nørgaard’s (2018) multimodal stylistics of the novel, this talk treats another multimodal dimension of “quasi-textual” elements or features (such as typography, layout, page-turn, gutter, blank ...

This talk focuses on some semiotic aspects of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its unrivaled reception in China with special reference to the first Chinese translation by Y. R. Chao in 1922. In view of the complex addresser-addressee relationships in “children’s literature,” which denotes literature of, for, and in some cases, by children, this study distinguishes Charles Dodgson the man who wrote as a child for the Liddell Sisters and Charles Dodgson ...

Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states—Arizona and California—Drawing Deportation gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children and their families. Through an analysis of 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews, this book, at once ...

Inside a cardboard box, Mama packed a tin of chicken soup, heavy on cilantro, along with a jar of peppermint tea, peppers from our garden, and a hunk of white goat cheese that smelled like Uncle Jose's feet. That meant one thing. "Roja, your abuelita is not feeling well," Mama told me. "I want you to take this food to her." “But Mama, me and Lupe Maldonado are going to the movies," I replied, but ...

Parents and authors across the world are dealing with the question of how to talk to children about war. Ukrainian writers and illustrators in particular have to find narrative and visual techniques to address children who are growing up under circumstances of war and displacement. In this talk, Svetlana Efimova will analyze Ukrainian picturebooks created during two stages of war: since 2014 and especially since 2022. First, she will focus on the relationship between representation ...