Huck Finn

Is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a book for children or a book for adults? It's the story of a child, but it uses questionable language and it exposes children to inappropriate things, and so it gets put in this middle place of questioning.

I find this middle place fascinating-- I applaud Samuel Clemens for not saying, oh, kids might read this book I had better... Although in the mid-nineteenth century few novelists concerned themselves with a child reader.

Susan Honeyman, in her text Elusive Childhood, talks about authors who give children adult characteristics and adults child-like characteristics, and she comments on how adult it is of Huck to sympathize with Jim when he misses his family. Huck thinks "I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks do for their'n." This statement is supposed to be this great commentary on race. Mature Huck, through Jim, learns to see people as equals. I think something is missing here though-- Jim is a good guy. Jim loves his wife and children. This is not something that Huck has seen before. There are no references to him having a mother. His father is MIA most of the time, and when he is around, he's quite abusive. I would think that Huck would see Jim's love for his family as an anomoly instead of as an equalizer.

Books for children are not just this place to say-- this is a story about kids-- or story telling how kids should behave. Books for children provide places for analysis. Why do critics always jump to race issues when discussing Huck? Huck introduces us to a number of character types, and these introductions provide us a different glimpse of culture than we might have caught before.

Technology as Text

We read technology. We might not know how to read HTML code or binary computer languages, but we still read technology. If we know codes, we can read them; they are a text. They are almost an informational how-to manual. When we don't know the codes that make technology behave as it does, we still are reading technology.

What does it mean when someone keeps a blog? What is he/she doing?

A blog is a web-log. This web-log can be analyzed just as easily as letters or a journal, except there are more things to take into consideration.

Reading technology is no longer just about the text. Don't get me wrong, the text matters, but it cannot reign supreme in the message. Technology takes away a private audience. It also reveals things about the users and the creators that add to the message of the text.

We read technology-- we do it every day-- we just sometimes miss a part of the message.

Subjectivity and Semiotic Discourse

James Paul Gee in his book What Video Games can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy spends a lot of time talking about the semiotic discourses of video games-- how gammers have a vocabulary onto themselves and how different games create different discourses, but that video games are extremely collaborative-- more than might initially meet the eye.

Robyn McCullum in her book Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction addresses subjectivity and intersubjectivity while looking at psychological theory. She says, "BakhtinÂ’s ideas about language acquisition are pertinent to the analysis of novels which represent the movement out of solipsism as taking place within a context which is culturally and/or linguistically alien and which depict characters appropriating and assimilating the discourses of others" (104).

McCullum's quote brings me back to Gee and semiotic discourse. Adolescents understand one another--whether in books or in real life-- but they do so by developing their own discourse. They don't need academic discourse or their parent's discourse-- they use the discourse of video games, of instant messenger, of... Being an adolescent has always had an element of adapting to someone else's discourse. Now though, the discourse often results from new media rather than traditional media-- however, we know the language of technology is lasting, while constantly evolving, because it does appear in print.

Hoodwinked

Last night I went to see Hoodwinked, and I thought it was boring. I liked the premise of the movie, and I was looking forward to seeing it, and then it wasn't what I expected. My first thoughts were that it just wasn't that funny, but I don't know that fairy tales are supposed to be funny.

Right now I'm reading Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You and in it he says "Much has been written bout the dexterity with which the creators of these recent films [cartoons for children] build distinct layers of information into their plots, dialogues, and visual effects, creating a kind of hybrid form that dazzles children without boring grownups." And I realized that this was my problem with the movie.

The premise of Hoodwinked is that there is always more than one side to the story, so we get the story of Little Red Riding Hood from 4 perspectives trying to figure out who the real bad guy is. This sounds like it will have some layers of information. It looks like it will require the audience to do a little problem solving. And it does. But the key word is little. It's obvious pretty early on who the real bad guy is-- of course it can't be the wolf--that wouldn't be original. It can't be the little girl-- that would go against the audience. It can't be the Granny because that would upset the political correctness of the film. So, that leaves the woodsman or an outside character.

I know that Hoodwinked is aimed at a child audience vs. an adult audience, but that doesn't mean that the movie needs to be so simple that adults are bored. Toy Story and Finding Nemo remain appropriate for children but still use cultural references that make the story more entertaining for adults. Hoodwinked has some of that-- when the wolf is talking to the evil character, he makes a few references to typical evil characters-- but they are all stereotypical aspects that any child would understand from watching any Saturday morning cartoons.

Children's literature is trying to break stereotypes. Children's film and video games is striving to adhere to the multi-layered narrative that our culture now appreciates. So, I'm disappointed when movies like Hoodwinked come out, because I feel that it falls short of what it could have done.