Al ive ne ss

1. Aliveness

2. Talking animals in Children’s Lit. Are often personality types we recognize or will come to recognize. Talking Animals

3. Claude Levi-Strauss: “animals are good to think with” because of their otherness and likeness. Talking Animals

4. Animals allow children to examine the adult human world because of their position outside of it—a position similar to a child in some ways. They also often mock that world through impersonation. Talking Animals

5. “When animals talk in children’s books, the young become accomplices in a remarkable extension of sympathy and compassion” --Griswold Talking Animals

6. (Connection to the “polymorphous worldview”) Boundaries between self and other, human and animal, are still fuzzy. Children are not yet fully socialized to the idea that thinking and feeling are only for humans. Socialization

7. “the wideness of the child’s belief in consciousness in the world” ->egalitarianism ->personification ->animism Socialization

8. “cosmic plasticity” and “ companionable incarnation” see the imaginary friend a child is never alone in the world Socialization

9. Children will sometimes work out their own issues through projection. Socialization

10. Is children’s literature a place where we allow beliefs our culture calls “primitive” to be explored before we squash them? Socialization