Browsing by Subject "Childhood studies"
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Item Bridging the "chasm of doubt" : fictive epistemological strategies in nineteenth-century children's Bibles(2014-05) Plourde, Aubrey Elizabeth; MacDuffie, Allen, 1975-The "conflict thesis" that science and religious are inherently incompatible was by no means taken for granted by nineteenth-century scientists, religious thinkers, or cultural commentators. In fact, scientific exploration and religion happily coexisted for years, partially through the efforts of science writers who framed their potentially incendiary claims with narrative acknowledgements of a Great Creator. This paper examines the late-nineteenth century tension between scientific and religious epistemologies through the lens of children's religious education, claiming that children's Bible adaptations can be read as a lexicon of coping strategies through which religious adults attempted to gain control of the scientific threat to their faith. In short, by employing the techniques of fiction, writers of children's Bibles encouraged their child readers to engage with fiction in an imaginative register, diverting cosmological questions by encouraging children to see themselves and their relationship with God as porous, open, and accessible to a fantastical hyperreality.Item Haunted by you : a study of the real and psycho-literary space of Jack Kerouac’s Lowell(2014-12) Juarez, David Ryan; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-This report argues that through his lived experiences of growing up in his hometown of Lowell, MA, and the joys and traumas he accrued from early childhood and into early adulthood, Jack Kerouac began to rewrite, reimagine, and reconstruction Lowell in several different works and iterations to attempt to address and exorcise the ghosts of his past. For my argument, I study several of Kerouac’s works: Visions of Gerard (1963), Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), Visions of Cody (1972), and Book of Dreams (1960). Pulling from the fields of Beat studies, literary criticism, childhood studies, psychology, geocriticism, and American cultural history, I attempt to highlight the translation and transformation of Lowell in Kerouac’s texts into a psycho-literary space.Item Science and the culture of American childhood, 1900-1980(2012-12) Onion, Rebecca Stiles; Davis, Janet M.; Mickenberg, Julia L.; Meikle, Jeffrey; Hunt, Bruce; Hartigan, JohnIn American culture of the twentieth century, there has evolved a persistent popular association between the personal qualities of children and of scientists. Efforts to encourage children to get “hooked on science” have consistently noted this affinity, as Americans have ascribed curiosity, wonder, and delight in discovery to their children. Responding to debates within cultural history, childhood studies, and the history of science, this dissertation argues that tracking the ways that this cultural commonplace has been created, and showing how it has depended upon inequalities of gender, race, and class, can help us understand intermingled attitudes of awe and distrust toward science in public culture. In five chapters, the dissertation traces efforts to bring science into children’s popular culture across the twentieth century, showing how these efforts constitute a very visible form of public science. In Chapter One, located in the Progressive Era, the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum offer comparative case studies that show how “science” was perceived as a civilizing or empowering force in children’s lives, depending on their social class. In the interwar period, children’s culture taught that posing questions about the natural and technological worlds was a practice that cemented a white male child’s position as the vanguard of evolution. Chapter Two examines the proliferation of children’s non-fiction and encyclopedias, and Chapter Three shows how chemistry sets created images of modern boyhood. In the postwar era, young scientists began to appear as an endangered species, as science promoters saw popular culture as a threat to the kind of individuality and focus necessary for serious inquiry. Chapters Four and Five show how promoters of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and Robert Heinlein, author of a series of young-adult science fiction novels, sought to create alternative youth cultures hospitable to science. By examining the images of young inquirers that result from these popularization efforts, I argue that these images helped adults come to terms with their own relationships to innovation, while naturalizing the perception of science as an intellectual project of privilege.