CHILDREN’S LITERATURE:

Lecture DEAL and Contract

mohamad Ikhwan rosyidi

General Introduction

 The Children’s Literature lecture in this Even Semester is

conducted in blended platform
 Since this class applies blended and flipped learning
methods, you need to open elena.unnes.ac.id and do
the instructions punctually.
 Students have to validate the course in SIKADU every
week.
 Students have to check whether your RS (Rencana
Study) is validated by your Academic Advisor or not.
 There are some activities in Elena that you have to
follow.
Activities in  Since this class applies blended and
flipped classroom learning methods,
elena.unnes.ac.i beside having offline class, you need
d to open elena.unnes.ac.id and do the
instructions punctually.
 The activities in online class are
attendance, discussion forum, quiz,
assignment, students’ feedback.
 All activities in Elena are compulsory to
follow.
 Not joining one activity in Elena will be
counted as a penalty.
Activities in elena.unnes.ac.id

 Attendance
 Materials (optional)
 Quiz
 Discussion
 Assignment
 Student’s self-evaluation and
feedback
 Students have to present 75% of
maximum lectures.

Students have 25% of absence in

lectures.

Attendan Please click and submit your

attendance to record your presence

ce in the online class every week.

The schedule on clicking the

attendance is based your lecture
schedule.

Please make sure that students are not

late for clicking your attendance.
Quiz

 Quiz is conducted every week.

 Quiz is a comprehensive questions related to the
material given.
 Students are able to join quiz based on schedule
provided.
 Doing the quiz is individually.
Forum: A Discussion Activity

 A Forum of Discussion is conducted every week.

 Discussion is an application of case-method learning
 Discussion is a comprehensive participation related to
the material given.
 Students are able to join the discussion based on
schedule provided.
 Doing the discussion is individually.
Assignment

 An Assignment in elena is conducted every week.

 Assignment is an application of project-based and
team-based project learning methods.
 Assignment is a structured project related to the
material given.
 Students are able to join the exercise based on
schedule provided.
 Students do the assignment either individually or in
group.
Lecture

 The lecture is based on the Children’s Literature

RPS.
 Students must be active, critical, and analytical,
especially in doing presentation and writing(Case-
method and Team-based Project).
 Students must develop their deep comprehension
towards the materials, course competence in
reading children’s literature and writing about it,
and communicative purposes.
 Students must develop their self-thought →
 PLAGIARISM IS PENALIZED.
Lecture

 Students have rights to present or deliver their

ideas and their reason(s).
 Students are not allowed to impolite wearing
when having a class.
 Students must understand (making writing) a lot
about the Children’s Literature and their works
and life by thinking and analyzing them critically.
 Students must submit the assignments punctually
→ Late means penalty and no ‘K’ score.
Course Description

 The Children’s Literature course is elective subject designed

to make students be able to explain their knowledge of
children’s literature, its essence, its genre, to develop
reading skill through appreciating and interpreting
children’s literature and enhance their language literacy in
general so the students are skillful and mastering to write
an essay of a short practical criticism applying semiotic
and/or sociological analytical reading approaches by
prioritizing team-based project and case methods,
demonstrating cultural conservation concerning on
humane, aware, and tolerant values and performing
collaboration, social care, and concern with society and
environment, and applying accuracy on content aspects and
linguistic features in post-intermediate English acquisition.
  After accomplishing the course, students are expected to:

 CLO 1 (related to Attitude GLO)

 demonstrate cultural conservation concerning on humane, aware,

and tolerant attitude based on religion, morality, and ethics (GLO 1.b)

 perform collaboration, social care, and concern with society and

environment (GLO 2.f)

 CLO 2 (related to General Skills GLO)

 apply logical, critical, systematical, and innovative thought to

developing and implementing science and technology contexts

LEARNING 
concerning on and applying to humanity values in accordance with
children’s literature and its language literacy. (GLO 3.a)

CLO 3 (related to Specific skills GLO)

OUTCOME  explain their knowledge of children’s literature, its essence, and its
genre and o develop reading skill through appreciating and
interpreting children’s literature and enhance their language literacy
in general. (GLO 4.j)

 CLO 4 (related to Specific skills GLO)

 write an essay of a short practical criticism applying semiotic and/or

sociological analytical reading approaches (GLO 4.j)

 CLO 5 (related to Knowledge GLO)

 master theoretical concept of literary appreciation and criticism for

children’s literature and its language literacy by applying different
approaches being oriented towards life skills. (GLO 5.e)
Course Program

 Week I : Introduction to Children’s Literature: A Chronological Order

 Week II : Reading on Children’s Literature Elements and Criticism
 Week III : Fables
 Week IV : Fables
 Week V : Poetry and Verse
 Week VI : Poetry and Verse
 Week VII : Picture Books
 Week VIII : Picture Books
 Week IX : Midterm
 Week X : Science Fiction
 Week XI : Science Fiction
 Week XII : Fantasy
 Week XIII : Fantasy
 Week XIV : The Adventure Story
 Week XV : The Adventure Story
 Week XVI : Final Test
 2 CREDITS →

 [1] 2 X 50 MINUTES → A LECTURE

 [2] 2 X 60 MINUTES → DOING ASSIGNMENTS

 [3] 2 X 60 MINUTES → FURTHER INDIVIDUAL READING

  Attendance : 10%
 Discussion Forum : 34% Participator
 Affective Assessment : 2,5% y Scores
 Psychomotor Assessment : 2,5%

Scoring
 Project : 6%
 Quizzes : 7%

System  Assignments : 8%
 NM (Midterm score) : 15%
 NU (final test score) : 15%

 Total Score : 49%Paricpatory scores + 6% Project score + 7%

Quiz score + 8% Assignment score + 15%NUTS + 15%NUAS
 Requirements

Reading then Writing activities

Save your work in your Google drive
Do mini-library research on preparing your
presentation
Find three fables or one English Picture
book → midterm test
Find one English Science
Fiction/Fantasy/The Adventure Story →
final test
 References to Read

 Dickens, Charles. 2006. A Tale of Two Cities. Irvine: Saddleback

Educational Publishing, Inc.
 Lerer, Seth. 2008. Children's Literature: A Reader's History from
Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago and London: The Chicago
University Press.
 Lewis, C. S., 2007. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and
The Wordrobe. New York: Harper Collins e-books.
 Melville, Herman. 2006. Moby Dick. Irvine: Saddleback Educational
Publishing, Inc.
 Pinkey, Jerry. 2000. Aesop's Fables: Chronicles Books. ?
 Ruwe, Donelle. 2014. British Children's Poetry in the Romantic Era:
Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan
 Shelley, Mary. 2006. Frankenstein. Irvine: Saddleback Educational
Publishing, Inc.
Preparing Midterm and Final Test

 Do mini-library research on particular Children’s Literature

 Read a lot of books concerning on your paper/essay topic
 Write three-page essay as report of your research individually
 Topics of research will be around of the analysis of Children’s
Literature concerning on how the work fits within the cultural
context, historical events, and the literary critical analysis.
 The format of your research:
 Introduction (background of the study, review of related
literature, study objective, mini-research methodology) (1page)
 Content (analysis of the topic) (1-2 pages)
 Conclusion (not more than 1 page)
How many literary works do
you have to read?
In Class
•Fables
•Poetry or verses
•1 picture book
•1 science fiction
•1 fantasy
•1 the adventure story

Individual Assignment
•Fables/1 picture book
•1 Novel from science fiction/fantasy/the adventure story
ENJOY THE LECTURE AND
HAVE A GOOD
ACHIEVEMENT
CHILDREN’S
Literature
An introduction
What is it?

 The body of written works and accompanying

illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct
young people.
 The genre encompasses a wide range of works,
including acknowledged classics of world literature,
picture books and easy-to-read stories written
exclusively for children, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables,
folk songs, and other primarily orally transmitted
materials.
 Children’s literature first clearly
emerged as a distinct and
independent form of literature in the
second half of the 18th century,
before which it had been at best only
in an embryonic stage.
 During the 20th century, however, its
growth has been so luxuriant as to
make defensible its claim to be
regarded with the respect—though
perhaps not the solemnity—that is due
any other recognized branch of
literature.
  All potential or actual young literates,
from the instant they can with joy leaf
through a picture book or listen to a story
read aloud, to the age of perhaps 14 or
15, may be called children. Thus
“children” includes “young people.”
 Two considerations blur the definition.
Today’s young teenager is an anomaly:
his environment pushes him toward
Children?? a precocious maturity. Thus, though he
may read children’s books, he also, and
increasingly, reads adult books.
 Second, the child survives in many
adults. As a result, some children’s books
(e.g., Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,
A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, and, at
one time, Munro Leaf’s Story of
Ferdinand) are also read widely by
adults.
  first, “appropriated” adult books satisfying two
conditions—they must generally be read by
children and they must have sharply affected
the course of children’s literature
 second, books the audiences of which seem not
to have been clearly conceived by their creators
(or their creators may have ignored, as irrelevant,
such a consideration) but that are now fixed stars
in the child’s literary firmament.
 third, picture books and easy-to-read stories
literature: five commonly subsumed under the label of literature
but qualifying as such only by relaxed standards.
colonies or
dependencies  fourth, first quality children’s versions of adult
classics
 the domain of once oral “folk” material that
children have kept alive—folktales and fairy
tales; fables, sayings, riddles, charms, tongue
twisters; folksongs, lullabies, hymns, carols, and
other simple poetry; rhymes of the street, the
playground, the nursery; and, supremely, Mother
Goose and nonsense verse.
 Children’s literature embraces the whole content
of the child’s imaginative world and that of his
daily environment, as well as certain ideas
and sentiments characteristic of it.
 Almost to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution,
children’s literature remained recessive. The chief,
though not the only, reason is improbably simple:
the child himself, though there, was not seen—not
seen, that is, as a child.
 Among Old Testament Jews the child’s
place in society replicated his father’s,
molded by his relation to God. So, too,
in ancient Greece and Rome the child,
dressed in the modified adult costume
that with appropriate changes of fashion
remained his fate for centuries to come,
was conceived as a miniature adult.
 It is generally felt that, both as a person
worthy of special regard and as an idea
worthy of serious contemplation, the child
began to come into his own in the second
half of the 18th century. His emergence, as
well as that of a literature suited to his
needs, is linked to many historical forces,
among them the development of
Enlightenment thought: the rise of the
middle class; the beginnings of the
emancipation of women, and
Romanticism, with its minor strands of the
cult of the child, of genres making a
special appeal to the young.
 The Didactic force may take on
many guises. It may stress received
religious or moral doctrine, thus
generating the Catholic children’s
literature of Spain or the moral tale of
Georgian and early Victorian
England. It may bear down less
on morality than on mere good
What is
manners, propriety, or adjustment to
the prevailing social code. children’s
 Children’s literature designed for
entertainment rather than self- literature
improvement, aiming at emotional
expansion rather than acculturation, for?
usually develops late.
 While the didactic and the
imaginative are conveniently thought
of as polar, they need not always
be inimical.
 The Children’s literature analysis is
an understanding that ideological
dogmatism impedes the
exploration of the principles and
mechanisms involved in the
production and reception of
narrative fiction.
 It includes a chronology of the Children’s
writer’s life, an introductory section
on formative contexts and Literature
intertexts, discussion of all the
writer’s major works, a bibliography Analysis
of primary and secondary works
and an index. Issues of racial,
national and cultural identity are
explored, as are gender and
sexuality.
Literary
interpretation
Basic Approaches to
Literary Interpretation
M.H. Abrams “The Mirror and the
Lamp”

1. Mimetic Approach
2. Pragmatic Approach
3. Expressive Approach
4. Objective Approach

33
 1. Literature as Art: The theory of
Imitation, Mimetic
 Literature is a form of imitation
 It defines literature in relation to “life”
 It sees literature as a way of reproducing or
recreating of life in words, just as paintings
reproduces or recreates certain figure or scenes
of life in outline and color.
 2. The theory of effect:
pragmatic
 Literature and public view or its effect readers or
spectators.
 Psychological experience of audience
 Catharsis [“the purging feeling of pity and fear which he
believed the audience undergoes in the course of a
tragedy]
 Horace  “poets either teach or delight”, at their best
“combining the two.”
 Interrelation  to instruct literature must delight; or to
delight, it must also instruct
36
3. The Theory of Expression

o Literature is seen in the view of its creator

o Poets and his work concept:
3.1.The poet is divinely inspired, a prophet,
‘possessed’ by a muse or divinity who
speaks through him:
on the process of the creation, the
poet is almost out of his senses, in the
power of a divine madness (Plato’s
term).
Literature is the profoundest, divinely
inspired wisdom – a testament of
prophecy- created spontaneously in
an ecstatic state.
37 Continued…

3.2. The poet is fundamentally craftsman

(poeta, “maker”)
o He is fully conscious of what he is doing
both at the moment of composition
and afterwards, when he is willing to
polish and re-polish the work. (Horace
term: “the labor of the file.”)
o Literary work is regarded as a piece of
art in the literal sense – as something
man-made which can be labored
over, changed, and refined.
o Historically, this view was dominant in
17th and 18th centuries of
neoclassicism.
 Continued…
38

3.3. The poet is capable of extraordinary

inspiration.
o He is genius who, through his imagination
and emotions, is able to grasp and record
truths about man which ordinary people
may no recognize or feel.
o Literature is a form of expression (in the basic
sense of a process whereby strong and
irrepressible feelings are forced out).
o Poetry : ”spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling.” (Wordsworth’s term).
o Criticism: ….It focuses on the poet’s
psychology… it is for the sake of psychology
than that of literature.
4. Objective approach
39
o It proposes that one must find what happens
within a literary work.
o It is a reflection or recreation of the world and
of life but it is not the world and not real life.
o The best literary work describing the real world
where we find familiar characters is moving in
the fictional world or their own, not in the real
world.
o Poet expresses his idea by presenting himself in
a single mood: as a lover, mourner, etc.
o Thus, he is already fictional character in
incipient form, and he is moving about in a
fictional world, which may resemble ours but is
not world in which we move.
40 Continued…

o To explore the world the following ideas

are proposed:
1. The Idea of Structure
o Literature is regarded as a structure.
Fundamentally, each work is a highly
complex organization and that its many
components or facets are interrelated in
such a way that the whole is greater
than its parts.
o The term does not merely refers only to
the formal aspects but it includes the
whole of a literary work.
o Each work not only has a structure but it
is structure.
41 Continued…

o A structure used is not just as the

mechanical putting together of
assorted ingredients but as a vital
and dynamic interrelationship of
plot, character, tone, style, and all
the other component parts.
o Integrity and unity of a work of
literature can been in this way.
o Form and content: “How can we
know the dancer from the
dance?” (W. B. Yeats)
42 Continued…

o The idea of a virtual world is a useful way

of distinguishing literature from actual
experience
o In literature people are interested not
only in what is being said but also in how
the language is used.
o The plot and the characters owe their
very existence to the words which
recount them – they have no other being
than in these words.
o The style is quite as much as integral part
of the whole as the larger elements of
plot, character, or setting. Paraphrase is
not tolerable.
43 Continued…

o We may less concerned with how

accurately one of these works transcribes
an actual occurrences since the
characters and actions are invented.
o It is a distinctive feature which literature
shares with the other arts but which
differentiates it from other uses of
language that, rather than making us
look from what is being expressed to
what is being referred to, it makes us look
squarely AT ITSELF, at its internal
relationships.
o Like the other arts, literature can be
studied and appreciated for ITS OWN
SAKE, AS A VALUE IN ITSELF.
M.H. Abrams, “Orientation of
critical theories”

mimetic theories

objective theories

expressive theories pragmatic

theories