Writing Maternity

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

That's the title of the book that arrived yesterday, and that I'm now devouring.  It's an anthology edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and it's proving a smart, varied, thoughtful collection.  Here's a great series of questions from Eisner and Vicinus' introduction:

• How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?
• How can students be taught to evaluate sources and then credit the authors appropriately?
• Why have so many experienced researchers been found guilty of stealing from others?
• How can we encourage the free and ethical exchange of ideas?
• How can we encourage students, so accustomed to digital sharing, to understand citation practices, free use, and the legitimate ownership of ideas?

Not a question, but I can't leave you without this, too: "All too often these queries [that writing centers face about plagiarism] are framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for either the teacher or the student to understand the complexities of permission, atttribution, and copyright.  Teachers find themselves placed in an adversarial position in relation to students, as if all writing assignments involved the risk of plagiarism. . . . Across disciplines and fields, we find that plagiarism is not a simple wrong; a full understanding of its role in contemporary intellectual life depends on a broad approach that includes notions of what is original and what role imitation plays in the creation of new texts" (1).

I'd already been pretty sure that this anthology would give me material for the cornerstone of a unit on these issues for my fall course on theories of writing and pedagogy; now I'm certain.

google books, man

I just found editions of two fairly obscure nineteenth-century advice books on Google Books.  Otherwise, I've only had my piecemeal photocopies and notes from the British Library to work with, so this is great, seriously great.

so are they reading or not?

In an article about the series of panels on "The Humanities at Work in the World" at MLA, Richard Byrne mentions that "[i]n November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released yet another doleful report on the decline in American literacy (The Chronicle, November 19, 2007). "Most alarming," wrote Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, in the report's preface, 'both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates.'"

Meanwhile, in The Wired Campus, Hurley Goodall reports that "The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Sunday that says Generation Y—18-to-30-year-olds, in particular—is more likely to turn to libraries to ferret out information than their older counterparts are."

It actually doesn't surprise me that a generation of web-searchers would find the library a natural leap.  I was raised with numerous reference books in the house, but I certainly look more things up on the internets than I ever saw my parents looking up in the encyclopedia.

powers of imagination

I have three intertwining thoughts batting around my head this evening that I’m trying to sort out; we’ll see how it goes.   (long post ahead)

The first comes out of tonight’s bedtime reading of Astrid Lindgren’s Mirabelle.  It’s a somewhat bizarre story – a little girl is given a magic seed, the seed rewards her assiduous over-watering by growing into a doll, the doll comes alive (for her) and becomes her beloved companion and daughter-surrogate – but nothing out of the realm of the norm for twentieth-century picture books vaguely inspired by folk and fairy tales.  The thing that I find the most interesting about it is the narrative voice: it’s narrated by the little girl herself to an audience she addresses very specifically; and she’s quite concrete about timing (she’s 8 now but got the doll seed when she was 6) and a final invitation to come and visit to meet the doll (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s basically, “Follow the narrow lane that leads to our house, and you’ll find me and Mirabelle at the gate, waiting!”).

We got the book about a year ago when a local kids’ library was having a book sale.  It was in heavy rotation for several months, but hasn’t been a favorite recently.  When she pulled it out this evening, Squiss announced, looking vaguely amused at herself: “This is a silly book!”  When we read the final page, she shrugged philosophically and remarked, “But we can’t go visit because [insert shrug here] we’re not in the book!”

She’s figuring something out about fantasy and reality, as well as fantasy and realism as literary genres, and I’m finding it fascinating to watch it all unfold.  I’ve blogged before about how she’s an imaginative kid and also a storyteller.  She’s been narrating her life since she was less than three, and she freely appropriates characters from stories we’ve read to her or that she’s learned about on the playground.  3 and 4 are, for that matter, the ages when kids tend to have imaginary friends – I had one named Betty, and my sister had an entire family (called the “Sillees” [accent on the second syllable]); but what interests me about Squiss’s version of this is that, unlike many kids with such fantasy playmates, she always maintains a clear distinction between the things she’s pretending and the things she isn’t. 

Along these same lines, she’ll often ask whether a particular figure or place in a new book exists “in this world.”  For example, we just got The Seal Mother out of the library, which tells the story of a selkie and her descendents.  So Squiss, understandably, wanted to know whether or not selkies exist, and I’ll admit that I didn’t have a great answer.  I want the realm of faerie to be open to her for as long as possible, but there’s also a worthwhile distinction between things that are simply (simply?!) made up by identifiable individuals and things that are, well, more mythic in stature.  Ultimately she’ll learn the difference, and I haven’t decided yet whether that’s a difference I want to start communicating now. 

This brings me back to the fantasy-reality opposition from another angle.  The one component of Squiss’s active imagination that we note with something less than pleasure (“concern” and “worry” are too strong) is her utter antipathy to anything she determines to be “scary.”  Scary things, interestingly enough, populate the cinematic realm more than the literary realm for her: after a few viewings, Mulan was deemed too scary (it opens with the Huns, and they are pretty scary), and although she’d been quite excited to see it, she insisted that we turn off Ratatouille after only a few scenes (which, again, are probably the most alarming of the film).  “Scary” certainly seems to have something to do with pacing, soundtrack, and general volume for her; it also seems to have something to do with perceived danger and/or emotional trauma – which makes me think that she’s imagining herself into the story in ways that are too powerful for her to make sense of, ways that she’s learned not to do with books.

(Two digressive notes here.  First, one of the first books I can remember her loving was a board book Curious George and the Bunny, in which George lets a baby bunny out of the cage only to have it run away.  There was a particular page where you saw George being sad because he’d lost the bunny, and Squiss didn’t care anything for the before or after at age 18 months: she just wanted that scene, over and over again.  Second, it’s probably obvious from this post as well as other things I’ve written, but I’ll say it directly: Squiss watches very little television.  This came about organically: G and I essentially never have the TV on except in the evenings after the girls are asleep, so it wasn’t as though we had to make a decision about whether or not we were going to “let” her watch.  When she was about two, we introduced her to Blue’s Clues and have since gotten her The Electric Company, both of which are a familiar and beloved treat, at this point.  She asks to watch TV very rarely, and has other ways to veg out when she needs to tune out the world.  But she may be somehow less equipped than some of her agemates to process the medium.)

It’s that sense-making component that brings me to my third thought of the evening, which has to do with Squiss’s relation to the whole princess thing.  (“I love princesses,” she’s taken to announcing periodically.)  A year ago, as we were starting to offer the occasional homeopathic princess, we rented Mulan and watched it with her.  (We also got that and Aladdin out of the library, which was a fiasco.)  She enjoyed it, hiding her face in the neck of the neighboring parent during the Hun episodes, and Mulan has since been a fixture in her fantasy games.  Part of this (no doubt) is the prevalence of princesses on the playground.  (Although I’m pleased to observe that Gemstone has no substantial interest in princesses.)  But Mulan is sometimes an alter-ego for Squiss, and at other times simply a (neutral) name for a character.  She’s just reappeared after a fairly brief absence (replaced by Cinderella).

While I can’t stand the plastic nature of the princess phenomenon in its current incarnation, I can remember being an eight-year-old who loved building and re-building houses for my Barbies, not to mention all the ways in which my friends and I worked out questions about sex by having Barbie and Ken go at it.  I actually bought Squiss a book of princess paper dolls the other day – partly because I’d given her free choice and didn’t want to go back on it, and partly because it seemed like a relatively innocent alternative to the small plastic figurines (etc) that many of her friends have.

And Squiss’s imagination feels to me like her safety net in this.  Her willingness to think about whether or not she can enter into the world of a book may be part of what helps her pull characters out of books and make them do her narrative bidding.  If she’s doing that with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as well as Mulan, we’re in good shape.  I wonder if part of the difficulty of the “scary” parts of movies is that they’re too deeply narrative – if she gets caught up in the story and can’t control it, can’t get herself out, somehow.  Who knows.

Madeleine L'Engle died on Thursday (cross-posted)

She was 88.  Here's the NYT obituary.

There have been many moments in life when I read L'Engle voraciously, when I had various novels nearly memorized.  It was different novels at different moments, which is testimony, perhaps, to her various strengths as a writer.  In recent years, I've lost some of the satisfaction that I had in her books earlier: the Christian message got (or felt) more overt in some; in others, I felt as though there was too much of a pollyannaish outlook for me to hear some of the ideas.

But her death is an event.  And an ending.  And as with any, major, prolific author, it's sad to wrap my mind around the fact that what we have is, well, all we'll have.

P.S. What's your favorite L'Engle novel?  I think that mine has to be A Ring of Endless Light, although that's largely because of the swimming-with-dolphins stuff.  (And the grandparents house -- a converted barn walking distance to the beach that uses the stall as library sections!  What a bookish kid's dream . . .)

mass appeal

G and I have been having an email conversation about fantasy/sci-fi and children's literature this morning that I suddenly realized I wanted to open up to more people.

It started when he forwarded me this article by Jane Espenson about "The Secret to Selling Sci-Fi."  (Espenson has written for Buffy and Firefly and is co-executive producer for Battlestar Galactica.)  G points to these paragraphs as the heart of her argument, and I agree:

I have an intelligent well-read friend, confusingly also named Jane, who says this about why she doesn't like sci-fi and fantasy: "The reason I don't like those books is [that] I don't understand them. I miss the metaphor; I can't remember who's who and what the androids and robots are called and what, for that matter, it even means to be an android versus a robot. And I also kind of don't care to." And yet, she also admits that as a child: "I was a big, big fan of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach and I think the Harry Potter books touch on that sense of longing and sadness and looking to pull yourself out of a bad situation."

Yeah. That's it right there. Charlie and Harry and the emergence from a bad situation. That's what it is. It's something about the actual Harry Potter narrative that makes it cross the boundary. It's a very specific type of Hero's Journey, the most potent sub-case. It's told over and over again, and it works, over and over again. Dorothy Gale, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Charlie Bucket, Luke Skywalker, even Peter Parker, they all fit a very specific pattern. They're living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed. And what's more - and this is the important part - in that new world, they are something special. They are The Chosen One.

I would argue that these stories have a more universal appeal then, say, "Star Trek" in its various incarnations, or "Firefly," or "Battlestar Galactica," as much as those shows all own my heart (and to some degree, pay my bills). And it's no wonder. The Chosen One paradigm is the most positive, most comforting, most affirming metaphorical version of change, of growing up, that I can imagine.

It has obvious inherent appeal to children. They know that they're going to have to move into new worlds as they grow up, and they're scared. A story that tells them that when they arrive they're going to be recognized for the extraordinary person they hope they are, and that they're going to overcome all obstacles even if they're scared? Wow. That's like one of those brain probes they can hook up to lab rats so they can zap their own pleasure centers.

And, of course, the big secret is that grown-ups are every bit as terrified of change as kids, and even more eager to imagine that the ordinary world might be replaced with somewhere in which their specialness is suddenly obvious. In fact, we might even need it more. Kids have potential. Adults have accomplishments. Which of those feels more magical and limitless?

My initial response was to agree, but to want to qualify.  Almost any narrative that's going to take you in to a new world needs to give you a guide, someone who learns about it as you do.  This is partly to give the author an excuse for providing exposition, but it's also a way to get the reader invested in the world.  This isn't about the Chosen One element of things, to be sure.  In the tales Espenson mentions, it seems to me that the protagonists serve that function (we learn about Oz with Dorothy, about intergalactic politics and history with Luke, about the magical world with Harry, and so on).  In fact, Dorothy fits that paradigm better, I'd argue, than the Chosen One paradigm, since her witch-killing world-saving activities are in certain ways incidental: it's more fundamentally a story about getting home.

And Barrie's Peter Pan -- surely an iconic fantasy story -- doesn't quite fit, since there's no Chosen One problem.  The same is true in the Alice books.

G then pointed out various other ways to provide exposition (interestingly, his examples for it being done well were mostly from film -- and it might indeed be easier when you can do some of that stuff visually), but then asked about my Dorothy counter-example in a way that made me try to clarify my point, so here goes.

Ultimately, I'm wondering if the implication of Espenson's point is that bildungsromane sell better than other stories.  If so, well, sure.  That particular structure is rooted in folk and fairy tales all over the world, although it (again) isn't synonymous with the saving-the-world narrative that the Chosen One image invokes. 

I'm teaching a course on fairy tales this fall, and I'll also be advising a senior thesis on nonsense in children's literature that will focus in large part on Alice (which I, ahem, need to re-read).  I'm interested in how Alice is so often a counter-example and yet a source-text for this kind of discussion.

And that, my friends, is as far as we've gotten at this point.

stories

From his post the other day on Crooked Timber, you can download a really lovely essay by Michael Berube on reading the Harry Potter books with his son Jamie.  It's a lovely meditation on the nature of narrative and, perhaps even more, the apprehension of narrative -- which turned it from lunchtime escapist reading into something that at least catalyzes some of the thinking I'm doing about narrative and novels and genre more generally. 

Squiss will turn 4 in August, and we're just on the cusp of chapter books.  We've done a few random chapters from Winnie-the-Pooh, and a few others from The Wind in the Willows.  A few weeks ago, she became obsessed with a stunningly beautiful pop-up version of The Wizard of Oz [1] and since it's a redacted version of Baum's book (rather than a version of the MGM film), I figured that I'd give that a go.

The good thing about coming to the full version from the picture book is that the latter really is a redacted version of the former: the text is drawn from Baum's sentences, it's just a good bit of the descriptions (say, of just how gray and dismal Kansas is) has been taken out.  So Squiss could sit holding the pop-up version on her lap and admiring the pictures and figures while I read from the (pictureless) version we'd gotten from the library.  The down side, of course, is that she already knows what happens -- which means that she's impatient through the (to her mind, extra) descriptions and that she lacks the curiosity that drives much of our narrative desire.  We read two chapters just before bed a few nights ago, and she hasn't asked for it since. 

So we'll see.  I've been puzzling more generally about what chapter book(s) will make the best entry point into that world.  The first major chapter book(s) I can remember being read are the Narnia books: my second grade teacher read the first one to the class and I came home raving about it, which launched that series in my family.  (I don't know if they were read to me first, and my sister later, or not.  I should ask.  I would have been about 6 or 7 when we started, which puts her at Squiss's current age, so I'm betting they were separate readings.)  After that, I know that we went through the Little House books, followed at some point by Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, and we might have read The Hobbit, although my most vivid memories of that are reading it to myself.

So I guess there's a question.  What (and when) chapter books were your first?


[1] Be sure you look at the photos, which give you a sense of just how detailed and gorgeous this book is.  Sabuda has also done Alice and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I haven't looked at those in person.