A House Divided: The Challenge of Rural Diversity in Children's Literature and Culture
Title and/or Affiliation
Associate Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University
Presenter Bio
Carl F. Miller is Associate Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he also serves as director of the Prestigious National Scholarship Program. Having been raised on a farm in rural Ohio, he now teaches courses on children’s literature, comparative literature, contemporary literature, and critical theory.
Session
Panel: Children Not Seen or Heard
Location
Zoom
Start Date
8-7-2022 4:15 PM
End Date
8-7-2022 5:30 PM
Abstract
While E. B. White’s 1952 classic, Charlotte’s Web, is rightly celebrated as a tale of diversity for its wide-ranging cast of animal characters, it just as crucially draws attention to a lack of human diversity in rural settings that has remained relatively unchanged in the seven decades since the book’s publication. This talk will highlight the lack of representation of diversity in children’s books depicting rural youth culture and consider why such homogeneous characterizations in rural children’s texts have largely avoided scrutiny from diversity studies scholars. It will also propose what effective/realistic contemporary children’s stories of rural and agricultural diversity would entail, moving beyond the traditional anthropomorphism default for diversification (as seen in Charlotte’s Web) and toward direct portrayals of those who have been contemporarily marginalized and othered within rural America. The potential cultural and political stakes of these considerations are immense, as children’s literature holds a crucial power to update the traditional narrative of rural American stasis and uniformity, offering a poignant application (and complication) of diversity studies in the process.
A House Divided: The Challenge of Rural Diversity in Children's Literature and Culture
Zoom
While E. B. White’s 1952 classic, Charlotte’s Web, is rightly celebrated as a tale of diversity for its wide-ranging cast of animal characters, it just as crucially draws attention to a lack of human diversity in rural settings that has remained relatively unchanged in the seven decades since the book’s publication. This talk will highlight the lack of representation of diversity in children’s books depicting rural youth culture and consider why such homogeneous characterizations in rural children’s texts have largely avoided scrutiny from diversity studies scholars. It will also propose what effective/realistic contemporary children’s stories of rural and agricultural diversity would entail, moving beyond the traditional anthropomorphism default for diversification (as seen in Charlotte’s Web) and toward direct portrayals of those who have been contemporarily marginalized and othered within rural America. The potential cultural and political stakes of these considerations are immense, as children’s literature holds a crucial power to update the traditional narrative of rural American stasis and uniformity, offering a poignant application (and complication) of diversity studies in the process.
Comments
Moderated by Diandra Werner