fantasy and science fiction: a syllabus

[deborah]

I have all of these half written posts I haven't made -- one about the Simmons College Summer Institute, one about Bloomsbury mercifully caving on their dreadful cover decision for Justine Larbalestier's Liar. But summer is coming to a close (already!), And I should just go ahead and post my syllabus for Children's Literature 414, Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Let me see. That's 41 fictional works, or 38 if you lump the Prydain books. As far as I know, and with some of these being judgement calls, 3 authors of color; 7 protagonists of color (8 if you count Laura Chant as multi-racial because of her Maori great-grandmother), 28 white or white-coded, and 2 neither; 20 female and 18 male authors; 16 male protagonists, 18 female, and 3 neither or multi; and 0 canonically queer authors or protagonists. Though there's one canonically-if-subtextually queer secondary couple. Also, three fat (if you count Wilbur) and two disabled (if not-neurotypical counts as disabled).

Obviously I'm better on some aspects of diversity than others. How much of the fail here is mine as opposed to the genre's? Probably a little of both. On the bright side, we spend a lot of the semester talking about these issues, both in ourselves as readers, and in the genre itself.

Comments

[libskrat]

Boy, you make their lazy butts read. I'd be scared to assign that much reading in the graduate LIS course I used to teach!

[deborah]

and yet that is less than half as much reading as they require in the young adult realism class. Seriously, it is a hard-core program. (To be fair, with a few exceptions, such as House of the Scorpion, most of those books are faster reading than equivalent adult novels. Still, it is a lot of reading.)

[libskrat]

Wasn't a criticism! I think it's awesome that you can expect that much of them.

[hhw]

let me know when you're going to teach it out here in the wild west... fyi, the front page still says Fall 2008.

[deborah]

thanks for the catch, fixed!

I'd like to get a chance to teach out in the Wild West at some point. I tried to make it work last year but the logistics of travel were just impossible. Hopefully sometime soon.