Greetings to all our
readers! With this entry we inaugurate the new phase of the blog, with posts
about Masters and Doctoral studies in the field. We begin with an investigation
into children's and young adult literature in Chile. A big thank you to Javiera
and we look forward to your contributions for the following entries. The
indications for being published can be found on the left hand side of the
screen.
Evelyn Arizpe
Javiera Garcia has a
Bachelor’s in Spanish Language and Literature from the Universidad Alberto
Hurtado and a Master’s in Children’s Literature and Literacies from the
University of Glasgow. Her main interests are picturebooks, graphic narrative
and cognitives approaches to children’s literature.
Research question
The aim of my master’s dissertation was to
provide an overview of the changes in and the characteristics of Chilean
children’s literature from 1990 to 2015. In order to establish this, I have
attempted to address the question: What are the characteristics of Chilean children’s
literature from the last 25 years? The answer to this question was provided by
the analysis of award-winning Chilean books from 1990 to 2015.
Context
The number of books for children published
in Chile has dramatically increased in the last 25 years; nevertheless, the
study of this area has been neglected. The main study of children’s literature
– from an historic perspective – was published in 1982 by Manuel Peña[1],
which covers the history of books for young readers from the Colony to the
1980s. From 1990 to this moment, however, no studies exist concerning how
Chilean children’s literature has evolved and what features the books show
nowadays.
|
Year
|
Books
|
Year
|
Books
|
Year
|
Books
|
|
1992
|
23
|
2000
|
63
|
2008
|
215
|
|
1993
|
16
|
2001
|
42
|
2009
|
344
|
|
1994
|
44
|
2002
|
113
|
2010
|
332
|
|
1995
|
32
|
2003
|
93
|
2011
|
542
|
|
1996
|
23
|
2004
|
66
|
2012
|
382
|
|
1997
|
18
|
2005
|
77
|
2013
|
458
|
|
1998
|
12
|
2006
|
194
|
2014
|
504
|
|
1999
|
25
|
2007
|
273
|
2015
|
624
|
Table 1 Number of children's books published by year in Chile. Source: ISBN
Design and methodology
The
selection of books was made taking into consideration all the books awarded by
diverse national and international prizes from 1990 to 2015. This method of corpus
selection is a beneficial way of narrowing down the number of texts that can be
included in the research, and also recognises the quality of the material
selected (Yokota, 2011).
Six awards were taken into consideration
for this investigation: IBBY Chile Honour List, Colibrí Medal, Municipal Prize
of Literature of Santiago, Marta Brunet Award, White Ravens and Barco de Vapor
Chile.
In the last 25
years, there were 58 books awarded, most of them recognised after 2005. Twenty-nine
of them are chapter books, eight are picturebooks, six are poetry, six are
short stories, four are graphic novels or comics, three are nonfiction, one is
drama and one is unknown[2]. However, and because of time and space
limits, in this research I only analysed chapter books.
The chapter books were analysed according
to a guideline from Colomer (1998) that I modified in order to include topics,
characteristics and content elements, and left aside elements from narratology
that I could not tackle due to the parameters of the investigation.
Analysis
This research took into account 17 categories
of analysis applied to the texts; however, I will refer to only a few
categories of analysis that were applied in this research.
Firstly, the representation of boys and
girls as main characters has been far from equal; the depiction has been mostly
in favour of male protagonists. Of the 29 books analysed, 21 of them have male main
characters, while only eight books present female protagonists.
The female main characters were created mostly
by female authors, all except one, and almost the totality of the books were published
after 2005, with the exception of one book awarded in 1992. This confirms that
the appearance of female protagonist is relatively new in the panorama provided
by the prizes.
In addition, this disparity is not only exposed
in the gender of the protagonists of books; it is also present in the gender of
the authors. Books written by men won almost twice as many recognitions than
the ones written by women: while 19 of the
award-winning books were authored by men, women wrote 10 of the award-winning
titles. Therefore, as men tend
to write books with male main characters, and also tend to win more awards, girls
are underrepresented in Chilean children’s literature – particularly in the
period from 1990 to 2005.
The depiction of the family and its conflicts
were also taken into consideration in this research. Following Colomer’s (1998)
guidelines, I selected four possible depictions of the family: traditional,
non-traditional, communal and indeterminate.
The type of family most frequently
represented is the traditional one, appearing in 15 books. After this,
non-traditional families – when only one adult is in charge of the child, being
one of the parents or other relative – are portrayed in nine books. Communal
families are not usually portrayed and appear only in three books, and there
are only two stories with an indeterminate family structure.
These results show the rather conservative vision
of the family portrayed in Chilean children’s literature, as 75% of the books display
a traditional perspective of it, even when this structure is broken later due
to the death of one of the protagonist’s parents. Because of this, readers are
not exposed to different types of families, like single, adopted or same-sex parents.
The concept of family in the award-winning books from the last 25 years is very
traditional and specific.
Regarding new features that the books may
show, I looked for transgressions of literary norms, that is, the appearance of
postmodern features - such as multiple narratives, metafiction, parody, among
others (Thacker and Webb, 2002) – in the stories. From the 58 chapter books
considered in this research, only three included some kind of literary
experiment, all of them published after 2009. This shows that the inclusion of
literary transgressions in books for children is not very common in current
award-winning Chilean literature.
The last topic I wish to approach is the
closure of the narratives; I have divided the endings into four categories:
happy, positive, open or negative ending. Happy endings were the most used by
the authors, 18 books have a resolved ending, without loose ends. Positive
endings, where the protagonist may or may not resolve the conflict but assumes
the problem, were used in seven books. Open endings were used in only two
chapter books, both awarded in 2014, and negative endings are present in also two
of the books.
Contrary to the current international
trends, in which “happy endings are less in vogue than they once were” (Meek,
1996, p. 7), in Chilean children’s literature this type of ending remains
predominant. This points to the fact that the narrative tendencies are more
conservative, since there is not much experimentation with the content nor the
form of the narratives.
Conclusions
The growing number of children’s books published
in Chile has allowed the rise of non-traditional books in the national scene. One
example of this rise is the creation of new awards and the recognition of
narratives in different formats, such as comics, graphic novels, illustrated
poetry and picturebooks since 2005. Chapter books, nonetheless, were the most
awarded books over the last 25 years, and that is the main reason why they were
the selected genre for this study.
Several topics were discussed during the
analysis, which provided information about the characteristics of contemporary
Chilean children's literature. One of the main findings is that the themes
presented in these books are rather conservative in nature; the representation
of the family structure is strongly linked to the traditional vision of a
family. In addition, there is an omission of provocative and transgressive
themes in the majority of the chapter books, as well as a lack of open endings,
which reveals an overprotective stance towards the reader.
Certainly, these findings are about the
award-winning books from the last 25 years and they do not represent the truth
about all the children’s books published in Chile in that period of time. The results,
however, raise several questions regarding the relationship between children and
adults’ choices, and how adults define the contents, experiences and world
visions that are suitable for young readers.
For example, from the information provided
by a survey from Fundación La Fuente (2013) it was established that most of the
genres of the award-winning books do not match the children’s preferences regarding
what they like to read. This gap between what adults and children like casts
doubts on the books selected and their relation to each of the readers.
Finally, this investigation exposes several
areas of Chilean children’s literature that need to be researched thoughtfully.
There is not just a lack of historical studies that can provide us with information
about the image of the child and of childhood presented by Chilean writers at
different points of time, we also need to approach gender issues and
representations, the family genre and its changes according to modern life,
postmodern features and new formats, and many more topics that have yet to be
fully explored.
References
Colomer, T. (1998). La formación del lector literario. Narrativa infantil y juvenil actual.
Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez.
Fundación La Fuente (2013). Esto no es un
cuento. [Online] Available from: http://www.fundacionlafuente.cl/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Estudio-Esto-no-es-un-cuento.pdf
Meek, M. (1996). “Introduction”. In Hunt,
P. (ed.). International Companion
Encyclopaedia of Children's Literature. London: Routledge.
Peña, M. (1982). Historia de la literatura infantil chilena. Santiago de Chile:
Editorial Andrés Bello. Available from: http://www.memoriachilena.cl/archivos2/pdfs/mc0011016.pdf
Thacker, D. & Webb, J. (2002). ‘Playful
subversion’. Introducing Children’s
Literature. From Romanticism to Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
Yokota, J. (2011). ‘Awards in Literature
for Children and Adolescents’. In: Wolf, S. (ed.). Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature. New
York: Routledge.
