SOLD Webinar, 19 May 2021
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Gül Bilge Han, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Time: 13:15-14:45 (CET)
Moving between worlds: Pedagogies of spatial and
intercultural mobility in children's literature
Abstract:
In a surprising variety of young adult and children’s fiction,
from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) to recent
works by Neil Gaiman, characters move between worlds with different cultural
and social norms and values. This talk explores the pedagogical and
literary-critical implications of this trope in texts suitable for Anglophone
literature curricula in second-language teacher education programs. It focuses
on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret
Garden (1911), a classic work of children’s literature, and Gaiman’s popular children’s and young adult fiction, Coraline (2002) and American Gods (2001). Narratives of spatial mobility between
worlds, I argue, offer productive ways for instructors and teacher-learners to
underscore the border-traversing potential of the literary imagination, with
the possibility to address questions of intercultural negotiation and
competence.
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Gül
Bilge Han is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of English,
Mälardalen University. Her current research lies at the intersection of
modernist studies, world literature, aesthetic theory, and literary pedagogy.
She is the author of Wallace Stevens and
the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and
several articles and book chapters on twentieth-century poetry and modernist
aesthetics.