Mavis Reimer, University of Winnipeg
Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures
Department of English
Professor
Winnipeg, Manitoba
m.reimer@uwinnipeg.ca
Office:
(204) 786-7625
Bio/Research
1979, the year I started my M.A. studies, was a time of great excitement and great anxiety in many Canadian departments of English language and literature, with new questions being asked about why and how we might undertake literary studies. My thesis, which focused on the figure of fortune in Re...
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Bio/Research
1979, the year I started my M.A. studies, was a time of great excitement and great anxiety in many Canadian departments of English language and literature, with new questions being asked about why and how we might undertake literary studies. My thesis, which focused on the figure of fortune in Renaissance and Jacobean drama, involved me in traditional research and scholarship. It was in my after-hours reading as a new mother that the new questions about the relations between power and value, aesthetics and ideology, reading practices and making meaning became most interesting and most urgent for me. Only a few texts for young people fell into the category of “good literature,” as I had learned to define it. The failure of my education to that point to help me to account for the texts I was reading and watching prompted me to re-think the ways in which texts might be described, interpreted, and evaluated.When I returned to begin my doctoral work, it was to study children's literature.
Texts for young people reveal and produce the terms of societal consensus, and solicit the agreement of readers with these terms: these seem to me the typical functions of these texts in the cultural system. Studying texts designed for young readers, then, allows me to focus on the dominant modes of seeing and shaping the world in a culture. But these texts also show the pressures on cultural agreements and the shifts in societal consensus, so that changes to the form over time can be read for articulations of residual and emergent structures of feeling. In the face of globalization -- which we are repeatedly told is the inescapable condition under which we now live -- mapping the pressures, the shifts, and the continuities in societal consensus revealed and produced in texts for young people seems to me an important scholarly project.
As this description suggests, my interests in the texts and cultures of young people move between the historical and the contemporary, the international and the local.
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Texts for young people reveal and produce the terms of societal consensus, and solicit the agreement of readers with these terms: these seem to me the typical functions of these texts in the cultural system. Studying texts designed for young readers, then, allows me to focus on the dominant modes of seeing and shaping the world in a culture. But these texts also show the pressures on cultural agreements and the shifts in societal consensus, so that changes to the form over time can be read for articulations of residual and emergent structures of feeling. In the face of globalization -- which we are repeatedly told is the inescapable condition under which we now live -- mapping the pressures, the shifts, and the continuities in societal consensus revealed and produced in texts for young people seems to me an important scholarly project.
As this description suggests, my interests in the texts and cultures of young people move between the historical and the contemporary, the international and the local.
Click to Shrink <<