SCAN 3613: The Scandinavian Child in Literature, Film, and Media
Book publishers, film studios, television channels and streaming platforms have all oriented themselves toward children as a crucial target audience in recent decades. In this way, children are situated as consumers of culture whose tastes and preferences must be met by producers of culture in capitalist media economies. But children are not merely consumers of cultural products - in the form of children's literature, children's television, children's YouTube channels and other media streams; they are also enduring objects of cultural fascination. Even in books, films, and television series that are explicitly oriented to grown-ups, children are enlisted as pivotal (and often metaphorically-charged) fictional characters.
This course examines children's culture (that is, culture produced specifically for children to consume) as well as fictional works from the Nordic region that fixate on child characters in crucial ways. Students will explore the particular ways children figure into the Nordic cultural imagination, with special attention to the autonomy, complexity, morality, and the emerging sexuality of child characters.
The texts we will examine this semester include not only works of Nordic literature, but also numerous films and television series that will be made available for students to screen at home.
The course meets the LE Literature Core requirement by critically analyzing and reflecting on canonical works of Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish) children's literature in English.