MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Graduate Handbook 1996

Published by Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996


ENM4210/5210

Writing the child

Proposed to be offered next in 1997

Heather Scutter

8 or 12 points + 2 hours per week + Clayton

Synopsis This subject will examine historical and cultural changes in the representation of childhood and the child figure in a range of texts from the Romantic to the modern eras. Prose fictions, some addressed to adult readers, some to child readers, will be explored for the ways in which discourses about the `child' intersect with discourses about notions of origins; gender and sexuality; class, social place, power and subjectivity; race, especially in the relationship between empire and colonised; the family and the home; education of mind and body; and growing up, especially with regard to the liberal humanist preoccupation with individual attainment of maturity/adulthood through suffering. The subject will employ poststructuralist, semiotic and discourse theory, and will have a feminist emphasis.

Assessment (8 points) Assignment/s (2500 words): 40% + Essay (3500 words): 60%

Assessment (12 points) Two seminar papers (2000 words each): 20% each + Short essay (2000 words): 20% + Long essay (3000 words) or a 3-hour examination: 40%

Prescribed texts

A set of readings from Locke, Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Lamb, Mayhew and Hans Christian Andersen will be available from the English department.

Recommended texts


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