Episode 116: The New Kids…and Children’s Lit

The UConn 360 podcast is back…with some new co-hosts. Izzy Harris and Mike Enright of University Communications have taken over the reins of UConn 360 and hope to live up the high standards of information and entertainment provided by colleagues Tom Breen and Julie Bartucca. In this first (or 116^th) episode, Izzy and Mike introduce themselves to the audience and then are joined by Professor Victoria Ford Smith of the Department of English, who is an expert on classic children’s literature, Robert Louis Stevenson and a slew of other topics.

Link to Episode 116 at Podbeam

Transcript

Mike: Well, hello everybody, and welcome to the UConn 360 podcast. If this podcast sounds a little different to you, if you’re a regular listener of the UConn 360 podcast, it is a little different. We have new co-hosts this week, including myself. I’m Mike Enright from University Communications, and I’m joined by Izzy Harris of University Communications, and we really look forward to bringing you news and guests from around the university. So Izzy, it’s great to be with you.

Izzy: Yeah, I’m really excited. It should be a lot of fun.

Mike: Our previous co-hosts have responsibilities in university communications and they decided it was time to pass the baton so Izzy and I took the baton with great happiness.

Izzy: Yep. And here we are today.

Mike: Here we are today. So I will tell you a little bit about myself and then Izzy will tell you a little bit about herself. I am Mike Enright. I am here in university communications as a deputy spokesperson. I do a lot of writing. I’m also the curator of the UConn Husky Heritage Museum over in the Alumni Center. I graduated from UConn in 1988 and grew up in Norwich, Connecticut. Proud graduate of the Norwich Free Academy. And I’ve been at UConn in a second stint. I was here four years after graduation and I came back in 2002 after a few stops along the way and had a long career in athletic Communications and moved over to university communications about five years ago. And like I said, when they were looking for new podcast cohost, I jumped pretty quickly. I think you did too, Izzy, huh?

Izzy: Yeah, I did. Well, my background isn’t quite as interesting as yours, Mike, but I am a multimedia producer over here in University Communications. I make videos ranging from professors to students to Jonathan and everything in between. I had the opportunity to go to Cleveland for the Women’s Final Four this year, which was super fun. When I heard about the podcast opportunity, I was like, why not? Because I’m never the face in front of the camera, but now I can be the voice behind the podcast.

Mike: Well, I’m really looking forward to doing this podcast with you.

Izzy: Me too. I think it’s gonna be great. So let’s bring in our first guest in the reboot of the UConn 360 podcast.

Mike: Today our guest is Victoria Ford Smith, an Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department here at UConn. Professor Smith is very interesting and an expert on children’s literature. Also 19th and 20th century British literature Robert Louis Stevenson and a bunch of other areas that we’ll we’ll talk to her about. Victoria earned her undergraduate degree in literature and print journalism from American University and has a master’s and doctorate from Rice University. So Victoria, thank you for joining us today on the podcast.

Victoria: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. I’m happy to be here.

Mike: So tell us a little bit about your background, we got into it a little bit, and and how children’s literature became an interest of yours over the years.

Victoria: Sure. I became interested in children’s literature a little late I definitely thought I was going to be a journalist, I went to American for that reason, they have a great journalism program. I realize I’m very bad at interviewing people, so I’m glad that I’m not asking the questions today. And I really love books. So I ended up kind of shifting and applying for PhD programs. And when I was studying for my doctorate at Rice I was focused on the 19th century. I was all about Dickens and George Eliot. And I started to realize that there’s all this really weird stuff that happens around childhood in the 19th century. So there’s a huge explosion of children’s literature, but kind of becomes a form in the 19th century. And people attach that to Lewis Carroll and I love Edward Lear and Nonsense. I started to love all these new ways that people were thinking about kids. And so I found all these weird little tidbits, like articles about children’s secret languages or the evolution of children’s drawing. And so I ended up writing a whole dissertation about that. Children’s literature in childhood, which was probably not what my committee was expecting at all. And it’s just kind of gone from there. And UConn is a really special place to study children’s lit. There’s a lot of people working on it. It’s, it’s really respected as a field. And so I’ve just kind of dug myself in deeper and deeper the longer I’ve been here.

Izzy: So what’s it like to teach classic children’s literature to college students who have grown up in such a digitized world? I imagine it’s so different now.

Victoria: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t really know precisely how my students experiences with technology as kids impacts their experiences in my classroom, even though I know it does. I think that in some ways, students memories of Children’s Lit are very tactile in ways that other subjects might not be. So they have memories of particular books or illustrations or like reading with parents or teachers or story time. And so in a way, there’s this like nostalgic pull away from technology in my class at times. It’s actually, it can be an obstacle because people feel very fuzzy about Children’s Lit. Which gets in the way of thinking about it critically. But recently I’ve been trying to think about ways to kind of capitalize on their experiences with technology in my Children’s Lit classes. I mean, for starters, Children’s Lit is also entangled in that world. So something like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has not only become movies and TV shows, but also has become video games and apps and hypertexts so we can think about technology and Children’s Lit as working together. And, and I think some of the more interesting or urgent questions around children’s right now kind of top of my mind are, is like book banning in, in schools and libraries. Those are also entangled with questions of technology. So where are kids getting information if they can’t get it in their schools and libraries and communities? And how does technology kind of enable that? Children to become kind of citizens of the world. So rather than fight it, you know, I’m trying to think of ways to incorporate it into the way we think about kids.

Mike: All of us growing up or a lot of us growing up watched you know, Wonderful World at Disney on Sunday night. I’m probably dating myself a little bit, but we saw the Peter Pan movie and the Alice in Wonderland movie. And that’s, quite frankly, you know, our knowledge of those stories. We perhaps didn’t read the actual original pieces of literature. How are the books different and, dare I say, better than the movies we all grew up with?

Victoria: Yeah. I talk a lot with my students about that. Movies about children’s literature because I think that’s really typical most people have not read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Peter Pan When they come to my class or even some of the classic fairy tales in their original forms The books are I wouldn’t say they’re always better. They’re a lot weirder. They’re very strange. I think people are surprised by them some of that’s because especially Disney, for example, a lot of the stories they adapt are 19th century stories, and so they’re really distant from current readership, like, historically and culturally. Their touchstones are just entirely different. Their ideas of childhood and what’s appropriate for kids are just entirely different. And so Peter Pan is actually a really good example because it’s a story that began as an episode in an adult novel that transformed into a play. That transformed into a novel, and then into a book for younger children. And when it’s adapted into Disney, a lot of the really kind of darker, more violent stuff is taken out of it because we don’t typically show that to kids. So for example, Peter Pan is this really kind of sadistic character in Barry’s play. The Lost Boys never know if he’s pretending or not. Like sometimes they leave the home under the ground and And all the play was just play and sometimes they find a body, right? So it’s very kind of sinister in an interesting way. And then of course, some things that we should take out or don’t get taken out, like Barry was very racist in his depictions of native people. And that has unfortunately stick stuck around. So I think looking at the original text is actually really instructive. To think about, like, why is this uncomfortable for me? Like, why does this feel strange? And that helps us think about, like, well, maybe we just think about kids differently now or stories differently now.

Izzy: Victoria, it sounds like you have a very niche field of interest. What caught your eye about Robert Louis Stevenson and what do you consider his classic work to be?

Victoria: Oh yeah, I love Robert Louis Stevenson. I call him my 19th century boyfriend. So, I came across Stevenson as a grad student because I was writing about adults who collaborated with kids in writing their more well known children’s works. Stevenson had a really long and loving relationship with his stepson, who’s named Lloyd Osborne, and they did toy press productions together, which was like a big hobby in the 19th century. They did these big elaborate toy soldier games where they would account for like weather and rations and things and it’s the story is that, The original map of Treasure Island was actually drawn by Lloyd and that Stevenson stole it, I’m sure, playfully and wrote Treasure Island. He’s just a really thoughtful person when it comes to, I’m talking about him like he’s alive, he’s obviously dead.

But he, he was a very thoughtful person about authorship and about kids. I guess in the context of my current work, his classic work would be Treasure Island. I think that. It’s an interesting novel. People lump it in with other kids adventure stories, but it’s actually, has a really complicated relationship to things like Empire in ways that other books don’t. But I’m also a Victorianist, so I have a very soft spot for the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Not for kids, but really fun.

Mike: Every time I think of Treasure Island, I think of the movie On Golden Pond.

Victoria: Oh, I haven’t seen it.

Mike: Do you remember that scene in On Golden Pond when the old grandfather is kind of being reunited with a grandson and the grandson’s like a teenager and he just wants to go out and mess around and the grandfather says ‘You never read Treasure Island before. What’s wrong with you?’ So anyway, it’s definitely a classic and definitely that, always my treasure Island. The first thing I think of when I think of Treasure Island, it was, it was Fonda and one of Katharine Hepburn’s last movies. So you’re currently working on a book or writing a book called How Children See: Vision and Childhood around 1900. And tell us a little bit about that book, how it’s going, and I suppose how children in that era differed from children of today in terms of how they consume literature.

Victoria: Yeah it’s a good time of year to ask a faculty member about how a book is going, because the summer is just stretching ahead of me with all this time. How Children See is a project about the ways that we imagine children see the world differently than adults and how those assumptions shape how we treat kids and how we listen to kids and what kids do. And so, you know, there, I think it’s a pretty interesting project. familiar assumption that kids see the world differently. Like the example I always give is Haley Joel Osman in The Sixth Sense, these dead people, right? And a lot of the adults around him can’t. But I feel like there is a particularly interesting moment of that idea around 1900. It’s the beginning of child psychology. It’s close to modernism when a lot of like Picasso and Paul Klee would start mimicking children’s art. And so I’m thinking about all the different ways that. adults assume children see things differently and how kids respond to those ideas. So for example, at the end of the 19th century, there’s a big rise in spiritualism and the idea that we can talk to dead people. And there was also a boom in child mediums. So there’d be these big revivals surrounding these little kids who could speak to the dead. Or there would art exhibits where people like Roger Fry in Bloomsbury or Alfred Stieglitz in New York would hang children’s drawings next to each other. Drawings by Matisse and Picasso. So it’s less a book about children’s lit and more a book about childhood and how we assume children see things. I did, but now it’s like shifting and I just got back from the British Library where I could see like catalogs of art exhibits of children’s work from 1890 to 1930 and reproducing all these kids drawings and their connections with World War I and industry and empire.

Izzy: So we know that reading is such an important part of child development and in such a, like we talked about earlier, a technologically based world. Do you have any tips or suggestions to try to get parents to engage their children to reading?

Victoria: I would love to get parents advice to help get kids, get kids to read. I was a big book nerd, which is not surprising as a child. I’m walking around behind my mom at the grocery store with a book. My take on it is to kind of just destroy any kind of assumptions about what’s good reading and what’s bad reading. I teach a lot of comic books and graphic novels. We talk about audio books. We talk about books that are accessible through online platforms or apps. And so trying to find a way into reading that makes sense to your kid about things that they’re excited to read about. It doesn’t have to be. What you consider kind of like good literature all the time. I read a lot of garbage and I don’t even think it’s garbage. I read all kinds of books and I think we should extend the same permission to kids.

Mike: And what, what you mentioned a little bit, what do you like to read in your free time, the free time that you have?

Victoria: Oh, I read all kinds of things. Right now I’m reading, I’ve been, I’m like a nonfiction kick. Recently I’m reading this book called The Unclaimed. Which is about unclaimed human remains, this is dark unclaimed human remains in Los Angeles and what happens to them. But I also like kind of reading what my grad students are reading and, and writing about just so that we can have some interesting conversations. So I have students writing about translation and children’s lit, so I’m re reading some kind of multilingual children’s lit stuff. I just finished Catherine House because I have a student writing about dark academia. So just kind of reading as a way to connect to people, to my students and to. To my family and see what they’re interested in.

Mike: What do you read to keep up with the news of the day? What are your favorite go to places for that?

Victoria: I’m a big podcast lister.

Mike: Well, that’s good. I need podcast listeners.

Izzy: We do.

Victoria: And, and so I listened to the daily and, and some, some other news podcasts. I mostly read my news online, CNN and things like that.

Izzy: All right, last question. And this might be a controversial one. Kindle or print?

Victoria: I read print. I have nothing against the Kindle. I, and, and I’m not even somebody who romanticizes print books. I, like, oh, I don’t have to bury my nose in them or anything. But I try to Kindle and I can’t do it. Although recently I have become reacquainted with my local library in Manchester and I’ve been checking out a lot of books and I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books through the free app, which I also am really enjoying. So all forms, but I, I really can’t, I can’t do the Kindle. I’ve tried.

Izzy: I don’t know what it is either, but there’s nothing just like holding a book in your hand, especially when I’m somewhere on the beach. We talked about technology and like how much we’re already engaged.

Victoria: It’s nice to just, you know, read and, like, think outside of anything with electronics.

Izzy: Absolutely. I completely understand.

Mike: And there’s nothing like going to a good bookstore. You know, you can’t, go to a Kindle store. They don’t sell files anywhere. You know, there’s nothing like going to a good bookstore.

Victoria: Yeah. Yeah, I actually miss, I used to live in Houston and we had so many independents, used bookstores. And I kind of miss that here, although we do have the Book Barn, which I love.

Mike: Well, thank you very, very much for joining us today. And it’s the message is it’s always good to read.

Victoria: Always good to read.

Mike: Our guest today was Victoria Ford Smith from our English department here at UConn. And we thank you for joining us and we look forward to you joining us next time.

Izzy: Thank you so much.