Lecture: The Children’s Literature Scholar as a Two-Headed Creature (Lofting and Damrosch)

LECTURE: Prof. Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel "The Children’s Literature Scholar as a Two-Headed Creature (Lofting and Damrosch)"

DATE: Wednesday, October 14, 2020

TIME: 18.00 (CET, Central Eastern Time)

VENUE: MS Teams

Event concluded. Lecture available here

The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to the second of three lectures in the series ”Controversial Dimensions of Children's Literature”: Prof. Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel "The Children’s Literature Scholar as a Two-Headed Creature (Lofting and Damrosch)"

This lecture presents the main contradictions in academic research on children’s literature. These have presently been brought to the fore in the conflict between the local and particular on the one hand, and the general and widespread on the other, as well as the tension between world and global literature accentuated by literary scholars. This translates into an opposition between the standpoint of the researcher as an interpreter of single exceptional works, and her role to isolate tendencies in the world literary market. This lecture’s main thesis was inspired by the definitions developed by David Damrosch in the conclusion of his What is World Literature? (2003), titled “World Enough and Time.” One of Damrosch’s metaphors comes directly from Lofting’s famed series of books about Doctor Dolittle and his animals. The fantastical two-headed creature, a cross between the gazelle and the unicorn, symbolizes a striving in two directions at once, and might serve as a figure for the scholar of children’s literature, faced with contradictions that compel her to achieve the impossible: to reconcile the micro and macro scale in her work, and to classify and evaluate at the same time. The lecture closes by positing a mode of interpretation from a multicultural perspective, and encouraging the development self-critical meta-reflections on how we approach an ever-changing research subject.

Those who have registered for the first lecture, which took place on September 23, can simply join the next lecture at Teams. If you have not, please contact us by email by October 13 at: barbara.kalla@uwr.edu.pl.

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ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel is a researcher of Modernist literature, contemporary poetry and children's literature and titular professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is a founder and head of the Children's and Youth Literature Research Centre at the Faculty of Polish Studies (UJ, since 2014). Editor and co-editor of numerous books, including a series devoted to imagination in children's literature. The last volume of the series: The Elements in Children's Literature: Air was co-edited with Krystayna Zabawa (Kraków, 2020). She is an author of many monographs: Fairytale in Young Poland's Literature (1996), The Child A Symbol and Anthropological Question in the Literature of Young Poland (2003), A Search for Radiance: On the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski (2005), The Goldsmith and the Singer: Poetry of Leopold Staff and Bolesław Leśmian within Modernism (2009), Contradictory Elements: The Young Poland and its Surroundings (2013), The Utopia of Repetition: Repetition, Subjectiveness and Memory in Modernist Literature (2019).