Inviting the Reader to Play in Selected Stories of Postmodern Children’s Literature | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 6, Volume 80, Issue 1, October 2022, Pages 135-147 PDF (949.55 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2022.282206 | ||
| Author | ||
| Sherine Mostafa El Shoura | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Children’s picture books are generally dismissed when considering great works of literature. That is due to the fact that they are presumably written for a child audience and are, therefore, thought to be of no literary value, except for their recognition as much loved childhood stories. However, as any parent or teacher can notice, many children books give as much to the adult reader as to the child listener with surprising sophistication and layers of meaning. This study will address the positive impact of this aspect of postmodern children’s literature. This will actually create an intelligent reader who must pull from outside knowledge to look past the outward appearance of a text in order to understand a given work. By inviting the reader to play, postmodern children’s literature assumes that the reader will investigate the texts and images to form their own meaning. By the act of the readers “playing”, they engage with the postmodern devices in the stories and become active readers and formers of meaning. Postmodern children’s literature both assumes and then creates a reader through the ongoing process of reading and creating that takes place within the covers of the books. This reader interacts with the text and is able to create diverse meaning, significant to each individual’s own respective experience, counteracting the metanarrative and claiming literature as his or her own. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Children Literature; Picture Books; Postmodernism; Reader and Listener | ||
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