PROGRESSIVE TRAITS WE”VE LOOKED AT

· The text does not meet our expectations, it in some way challenges our typical case prototype

· Children are depicted in very atypical ways – not innocent, but knowledgeable (text views that knowledge as positive) – children have rich vivid lives – text is child-centered

· Text is ambiguous (actively encouraging the reader to wrestle with difficult questions) – Text is open (pleasure is to be gained from actively negotiating different interpretations) – Reader intelligence is expected, rewarded

· The style is noticeably different than what we are used to – experimental styles, challenging format, exciting new possibilities

· The content is concerned with new possibilities, not protecting or preserving something about childhood – world is different at the end of the text than at the start – the text sets out to challenge, to change, to expose something, to make the world different

· Text makes fun of adult authority, older texts, the world – book can be self-reflexive (the book is aware of itself as a book, plays with the boundaries between what is real and what is fictional, characters know that they are in a text); can be a parody (takes old stories and explores them in new ways, encouraging the reader to reexamine something, to look at things in new way)

· Part of that fun can involve Carnivalesque tendencies (emphasizing bodily functions, exploring role reversal, making the private public, making the serious something of mockery, degrading something serious)

· Many texts interpellate us – they show us the kinds of representations that we are used to (boys act like boys, girls act like girls, ethnicities act a certain way, ideas about race are never challenged) – Progressive texts therefore either show characters resisting interpellation by examining the world (think Tangerine, Roll of Thunder, Walk Two Moons, Lemony Snicket) exposing the hypocrisy of adults, or having epiphanies where they look at the world in new ways

· Or the reader is led to think about how they themselves have been interpellated – some texts defamiliarize us (take something we are familiar with, play with it until it is new, make it so we can never look at the original the same way again) – once you see interpellation, you can start to resist it