Panel Proposal for ChLA 2005 Conference
Panel Abstract: Reading as Performance: Movable Books, Interactive Software, Video Games, and Wordless Picture Books
Our panel will address reading as performance in various texts associated with childhood and children's culture, including movable books, wordless picture books, interactive software, and video games. Our panel will consist of three presentations building on narrative structure and performance both within the narrative of the text itself and within the space of reading or play. The first presentation will focus on wordless picture books for children and how children must perform the narrative reading of these works in order to traverse the text. Like other texts, wordless picture books rely a great deal on the reader for the meaning-making of the text; however, wordless picture books give agency to the child reader to create their own stories based on the illustrations. Like wordless picture books, movable books, video games, and interactive software also require the child to perform the text. Movable books, video games, and interactive software are performative in the sense that they require physical activity to progress the narrative and in the sense that they require active reading for the meaning-making of the often imagistic stories.
The first presentation, by Trena Houp, will explore the history and uses of Wordless texts including picture books, woodcut novels, and graphic novels. This presentation will also look at how these texts operate in terms of conveying information visually and establishing pace and rhythm as well as how they are performed by their readers. Since these texts contain no words to indicate what the characters are feeling or thinking, the readers must rely on themselves to interpret and recount the narrative. Thus, the readers are made to be active participants in the story. Such interpretations also create a narrative experience unique to each reader as readers bring their own personal responses to the performance of these wordless texts.
The next two presentations, collaboratively presented by Cathlena Martin and Laurie Taylor, will examine the connections between movable books, video games, interactive software, and performance in relation to how these encode gender for childhood. Video games offer the newest form of performative children's texts in both representing characters who perform and in allowing children to both read and perform the texts themselves. While video games are often lauded for their interactive elements, they are far from the only children's texts that allow for an interactive performance of the text. This presentation will trace the evolution of children's interactive texts that require physical performance, including movable books, toy theaters, interactive software, and video games in order to show how these interactive texts encode gender norms for children.
Video games, as presenting active play, are currently configured mainly as toys for boys in much the same way that toy theaters were once designed for the same sort of active play for boys. While video games, toy theaters, and other interactive texts have been designed for boys, girls have been relegated to quieter, more purposeful works. The gendering of interactive works themselves relates to the gendering of children's games and of children. The majority of traditional movable books and new performative texts for girls have encoded gender by making works for girls about domestic spaces and dress-up games. These works include paperdolls that are dressed for weddings, baby paperdolls that are dressed and taken care of, and even new video games where girls design clothing for Barbie dolls. Many performative texts are also house games for girls, such as movable books where girls can play house, as with a doll house, and newer video games where girls also play house as with The SIMS. On the other hand, toys for boys have traditionally been more active like toy theaters on pirate and knight adventures, and video games on the same topics. In creating performative texts that encode gender, toy theaters, video games, and interactive software encode gender norms both within the performance and within the narrative, thus encouraging gender stereotypes even during children's play.
Notes
I am reading a book in the Baldwin, Tilly's Strange Secret 23h28257, and it says, "Lena was a great one for reading what she called 'adventure' which might be anything from wild-westerns to Little Lulu." (79). mentions Little Lulu comic http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/exhibits/popup2/default.htm http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~montanar/mbs.html
presentation from Kidd's class
Kidd's class notesBibliography: (this is in /cathlena - not on the web) Italics are the author's but the bold and brackets additions are mine. Bader, Barbara. American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1976. P221 - "Panoramas -on cardboard or heavy paper, unfolding like screens-were nothing new as such. Originally they were just what the name im-[222 begins]plies, panoramic views of celbrated places or historic scenes, and the Soviets adapted them, cleverly, to public works and the five-year plan" (Bader 221-22). Examples, Animals Everywhere the 1940 edition (not the reprint in 1954 that ruins the front-back scheme) and Town and Country. Compares Town and Country with Oriental screens that tell a continuous story. " 'These ingenious books,' says the flap [I think of Town and Country], can be 'opened out as play backdrops for toys, hung up as murals on the nursery wall, or read,' either as picturebooks or early readers. 'Read,' that is, by following the suggested story on the back page or utilizing the labels on the pictures or, easy enough, keeping your eyes open" (Bader 222). P230 - "Above the cardboard-cloth book level, as well, books should not be a passive experience: ergo 'participation'" (Bader 230). P236 - "Cottontails, on the initial Scott list, was not an improvement, it was something new -'A Tactile Book.' Perhaps the first; certainly the first intended as other than a novelty (Bader 236). p 238 - "Paper dolls become cloth dolls, a costume book become "A Creative Play Book"; either way ingenious and, moreover - as the Japanese say of plain, practical elegance - shibui (Bader 238). Transitions from one media into the next media. Was there a monogenesis effect with the movable books, or polygenesis with multiple forms being developed at once? P 238 - "Meanwhile Pat the Bunny came out, took off and goes on, a novelty that children never tire of (307). With her characteristic delight, May Lanerton Becker tells why: '[?] Paul and Judy can pat the bunny: now 'you' pat the bunny, and here he is, pure cotton wool. 'You' can play peekaboo, look in a mirror, feel Daddy's scratchy face, read Judy's book, and actually put your finger through Mummy's ring. Midway of these thrills, if a tiny finger is poked at a red ball it really squeaks" (Bader 238). Other than paper doll books, Bader seems to be saying that Pat the Bunny is the first American movable-toy book. P238 "Pat the Bunny and its successor The Telephone Book (1942) - 'You can say hello,' 'You can bathe the baby and make him swim,' 'You can find a letter and post it' - give the child a chance to do things he wants to do, real things that are part of his everyday life [?] (Bader 238). Tie in with later texts like The Jolly Postman and then The Griffith and Sabine Trilogy that use envelopes and real letters that can be removed from the page. P 238-239 "But the im-[(239 begins)mediate success of Pat the Bunny gave rise, in the trade field, to the likes of The Fuzzy Kitten and The Wooly Lamb and Pinky and embossed pink elephant - gimmick books, that is to say, with touching added to seeing but nothing intrinsic gained (Bader 238-39). Can we argue with this statement? How can she say that nothing intrinsic is gained from adding a second dimension or layer over a story? P 239 - Novelty books become popular at the beginning of World War II. Because of the shortage of metal and plastic, toys for children were drastically reduced in production numbers. However, there was a substitute - books. "All sorts of books were selling - 'Because toys are scarce and dollars are plentiful,' said Life that December, 'more children are getting books for Christmas than ever before'; but activity books and animated book -the novelty books of various kinds-sold best" (Bader 239). She continues by explaining even a little novelty sold, such as including paper doll cutouts or open-the-flaps. [she gives examples of children's books if we need them] p 240 - punch-out playbooks, Pick the Vegetables, lace-a-shoe books, tell-time books. P240 - Death or decline of movable books for the late 1940s (1947). "And what happened, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, is that Golden Books took over the retail market and libraries took over trade picturebooks, demanding-and getting-library editions that very year. But more of this later; the immediate effect was an end to cloth books on a par with picturebooks, to playbooks as Creative Playthings and, where 'babies' were concerned, to the innovative impulse altogether. P280 - Bader's definition of toy-books does not equate with movable books. Toy-books, particularly Little Golden Books, are "lightly constructed, easily handled playthings, all paper and pictures, as distinct from formal bound volumes" (Bader 280). She includes books by Crane, Caldecott, the McLoughlins, and Little Golden books all as toy-books.