2022年12月10日 8:00 pm

Children's Literature Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries

凯伦•科茨教授

剑桥大学儿童文学研究中心主任

The study of children's literature has multiple disciplinary 'homes' in universities – Education, Literature, Library and Information Sciences – but it is often not central in any of those disciplines. In this talk, I will consider some of the possibilities and challenges of thinking within a discipline as well as beyond our disciplines in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary ways. I will share stories of such crossings from my own experience and ask us to consider what the literature itself asks us to do in terms of researching its textual affordances and how these are received by readers.

学术背景

Karen’s doctoral work in Human Sciences focused on how people create meaning through text and image. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methodologies and working at the intersections of aesthetics, subjectivity, and ethics, she is primarily interested in the ways children’s literature and culture instantiates and continues to inform a worldview at conscious and unconscious levels. She views children’s texts and critical theories as mutually informative insofar as even the most revered cultural critics and philosophers developed their aesthetic sensibilities and schemas through (often long-forgotten? repressed? integrated?) interaction with children’s poetry, stories, and images in picturebooks. Paying close attention to these texts thus involves an understanding of embodied debt, cognitive and affective change, cultural and material genealogies and transformational interactions, relational ethics, and the sources of creativity.

Research Topics：

Psychoanalysis
Cognitive Poetics
Children’s Poetry
Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Children’s Texts
Literary and Cultural Theory
Intersections of Continental Philosophy and Children’s Literature

Principal and Recent Publications：

Coats, K. (2021) 'Line Breaks, Page Turns, and Gutters: Formal Moments of Silence in Children's Texts.' IRCL, reprinted in Silence and Silencing in Children's Literature, ed. by E. Druker et al., Makadam Publishing, pp. 103-117.

Cadden, M., Coats, K., and Trites, R. S. (2020) Teaching Young Adult Literature, MLA Options for Teaching Series.

Coats, K. (2020) “Diverse Identity in Anxious Times: Young Adult Literature and Contemporary Culture.” Transforming Young Adult Services, 2nd edition. Edited by Anthony Bernier, ALA Neal-Schuman, pp. 17-26.

Coats, K. (2019) "Visual Conceptual Metaphors in Picturebooks: Implications for Social Justice." ChLAQ, vol. 44, no. 4 (Winter 2019), pp. 364-380. (winner of 2021 ChLA Article Award)

Coats, K. (2018) “Lacanian Psychoanalytic Criticism.” A Companion to Literary Theory. Edited by David H. Richter, Wiley Blackwell, pp. 385-95.

Coats, K. (2018) “Gender in Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer, Routledge, pp. 119-27.

Coats, K. (2017) The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Bloomsbury Academic.

Coats, K. (2017) “A Primer of Possibilities: Cognitive Poetics and Children’s Poetry” The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry, Edited by Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy, Routledge, pp. 182-95.

Coats, K. (2017) “The Gothic in American Children’s Literature,” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature, edited by Jeffery A. Weinstock, Cambridge UP, pp. 171-83.

Coats, K. (2017) “Teaching the Conflicts: Diverse Responses to Diverse Children's Books.” The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, edited by Clementine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva, Edinburgh UP, pp.13-28.

Fraustino, L. R. and Coats, K., eds. (2016) Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism. University Press of Mississippi.