Popular literature, children's literature, young adult literature towards the challenges of modernity 1500-SDN-SP-LIT-LPDY
The classes will be devoted to the analysis of contemporary directions and methods of research on popular, children's, and young adult literature in Poland and abroad. The first two meetings will focus on popular literature, the third one on children's literature, and the fourth and fifth ones on young adult literature; however, each meeting will also show the interconnections, interferences, and dependencies of the indicated literary areas that create the heterogeneous phenomenon of 21st-century culture.
Concerning popular literature, the following issues will be discussed: contemporary transformations of genres and conventions, multimedia adaptations, the latest theoretical concepts and schools of interpretation (Polish and foreign), sociocultural contexts (reflected, but also modeled by popular literature and culture), and changes in the critical, scholarly, and social evaluation of phenomena related to pop culture.
Issues related to children's and young adult literature will include, among others: research methods and theoretical concepts in the field of modern humanities (feminist criticism, gender studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, postcolonial studies), intertextual and transfictional plays with literary tradition, social, cultural, and market conditions, and current phenomena.
During the classes, the latest scholarly studies (published in Polish and English) devoted to popular, children's, and young adult literature will be discussed, as well as the possibilities for PhD students to conduct their research and disseminate their results (Polish and foreign scholarly conferences, peer-reviewed journals, scholarships addressed to researchers on popular and/or children's and young adult literature).
Type of course
Course coordinators
Bibliography
The list below should be considered a proposal and may be modified according to the interests of PhD students. The discussion will concern the main research problems of the works listed and their selected fragments.
1. 50 twarzy popkultury, ed. K. Olkusz, Ośrodek Badawczy Facta Ficta 2017.
2. D. Brzostek, Wola nie-wiedzy. Horror postmodernistyczny czy groza późnej nowoczesności?, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK 2020.
3. K. M. Maj, Światotwórstwo w fantastyce. Od przedstawienia do zamieszkiwania, Universitas 2019.
4. D. Piechota, Na fali nostalgii. Lata osiemdziesiąte i dziewięćdziesiąte w najnowszej kulturze i literaturze popularnej, Universitas 2022.
5. Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature, eds. M. R. Duckworth, L. Guanio-Uluru, Routledge 2022.
6. Political Changes and Transformations in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Children’s Literature, eds. B. Kümmerling-Meibauer, F. Schulz, Universitatsverlag Winter 2023.
7. Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, eds. A. Tarr, D. R. White, University Press of Mississippi 2018.
8. D. E. Price, Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature, Routledge 2024.
9. R. Seelinger Trites, Twenty-first-century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature, University Press of Mississippi 2018.
10. M. Skowera, Carroll, Baum, Barrie. (Mito)biografie i (mikro)historie, Universitas 2022.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: