Semantics Response Blog

Is Max from Where the Wild Things Are a imperialist who takes over a land of his own creation? This is what Jennifer Shaddock argues in her essay “Where the Wild Things Are: Sendak's Journey into the Heart of Darkness”. In this essay the idea that Max is a representation of imperialistic attitudes within western culture and literature. I think that this is an interesting thing to talk about because we tend to overlook the imperialism that is ingrained in our culture now hundreds of years past when it was acceptable. This can be taken to gender in many ways as Max is rewarded by the things when he was a monster and behaved like a scary thing. He was praised for it to the point that he became king of the Wild Things. When he starts feeling sad and lonely (mainly associated with feminine people) and he wants to leave he’s threatened and told that they’d “eat them up they loved him so”. This takes away his ability to hold on his own decision, something that women have to deal with regularly. But his masculinity is regained when he promptly says “no.” and leaves. Making him a strong male presence and again lacking in emotion and empathy.

Is the Cat  in the Hat black? I think he could be, my true question is what effects did it have on the children of the time? One quote that stood out to me is ““books tells stories that contribute to children’s unconscious sense of the ‘homeland’” (Nel 72). This makes me think that the children of the time were at least subconsciously relating this to the ways that they saw African Americans portrayed and how they were ridiculed through out history. I thought the fact that Suesse was inspired by minstrel shows and black face. It makes an even bigger impact that people today don’t see the same messages and similarity to the Cat. Why is this so? I think it’s because people aren’t exposed to things like black face and minstrel shows. Making the racial connotations of him performing circus acts something that can be tolerated and argued about further. So the effects that I see are how it made children associate black people with things like the cat in the hat who was ridiculous and mostly the antagonist against the children in the book. These negative connotations are something to be considering about our favorite Cat in the Hat.

Childhood can be a lonely experience. There’s people who don’t have time for you and chose to give you to nanny’s and daycare instead. In Good Night Moon by Margret Wise Brown we are observers to the bedtime ritual of a seemingly lonely child. The only other character that is of the same species as our protagonist is an old lady saying “hush” and trying to get them to fall asleep soon. The lack of name given to the old lady is significant to me because most children call their parents “mom” or “dad” and this character not having a name makes it seem like the protagonist is trying to distance themselves from the old woman. Maybe they don’t want to get attached to a nanny, maybe they want their parents to come and get them to sleep. The child’s room looks very extravagant and well taken care of. It seems like they are trying to make up for not being in their child’s life and are trying to placate them with the things like: toy houses, tiger skin rugs, nanny’s, ornate fireplaces, and a bed that is far too big for a small child. Making this seem much sadder and much deeper than a book about sleep.

The need for a sense of superiority over children seems to be laced in a toxic need to feel like we’re better than children. So when w talk about children’s literature, we automatically belittle it and make it seem like it’s less important than that of classical or adult literature. Yet we have the intense need to keep kids as “pure” as we possibly can. There’s a dichotomy of keeping kids safe and cared for and belittling them which I find completely puzzling. I experience it often when I’m talking to professors and to people who I’ve known for most of my life. They still treat me like I’m someone who has no idea what I’m doing and like I need to have my life explained to me. It’s still incredibly frustrating that we see college students as people in some ways (voting, taxes, how expensive school is) but still belittle them and treat them like they don’t have a seat at the “big kids table”. This makes it so interesting to study children’s literature as a part of history. It truly has just as much weight as other literature and has a lot of influence on generations to come.

Where the Wild Things Are has won multiple awards which examine the great characteristics of the book. Something that has stuck out to me about this book is how he mirrors his mom when he gets to the island. He manages to make himself in charge of the Wild Things and commands them around.   Deciding that he was in charge he mirrors the parental figures in his life. It’s even more prevelant that he wants to mirror his mom when he sends the Wild things to bed without dinner and then sits in a lonely silence. In my experience children want to be like their parents when they grow up even when they don’t get what they want. His mom sets a good example of how much she loves him when she still gives him dinner and when he got back from the island. This book is a great example for children who are still learning how to deal with the new emotions that it takes to grow up. The end that no matter what your parents will love you and take care of you. It seems like this is the thing that Max wants to emulate and that’s what the wild things lack.

The Cat in the Hat is a book that most children know well and that they have read at least once. As I read it now I find the lack of consent within the book disturbing. The children have no autonomy and for the most part have no voice. They are torn between one way of thinking and another that is completely polarized. “Then Sally and I did not know what to say. Our mother was out of the house for the day.” There’s no acceptance of the Cat barging into their house, they surely didn’t invite him in and he doesn’t act as though he cares about whether or not they are comfortable during the events. This to me sets a very scary president about consent with children. Fundamentally speaking they are not able to level logic and reason with the cat or even really be able to express their discontent about the problems that the Cat creates. The fact that the only voice of dissent is effectively powerless to do anything besides dissent vocally could be a further illustration to the lack of power that children have to act out their own wills instead of those who have authority and power.

Today we see children as these little beings who don’t know any better and don’t understand how the world works, but this is a privileged view of adolescents and their world. There are many children today and definitely through history that did not get the revered childhood that we are so intent on today. Is this a bad thing or is it completely normal? There are 73.8 million children in the United States (as of 2016) based on a population of 323.95 million, 22% of our population are children, that’s a major amount of the workforce. I think that it’s interesting how we see a trend of making children out to be in need of being taken care of but seen as commendable when they are the bread winners of the family for whatever reason. This dichotomy that we see within our society illustrates a privilege that most of us expect and act on. When this privilege is not seen we are shocked but refuse to help or change it. Literature shapes how we as a society think and act, it sets the norms that we demand from one another. The way that literature shapes childhood is going to be interesting to see as the world grows and changes.

The differences between illustrated books and picturebooks is striking.  We see illustrated books throughout history as bases  for the age of children’s literature. The passage from Reading Children’s Literature “Picturebooks, Visual Media, Digital Texts” emphasizes the freedom that authors have when creating picturebooks. I thought it was interesting that it was specifically talking about the way that the book is designed and how the book is organized. Even the size of the book is  important for children to be able to hold and for children to participate in the reading. So why is it looked down upon so intensely to be a children’s literature author? These people are shaping the lives of children around the world but they are seen as people who are wasting their time. Children are both seen as revered and despised, talked down to as imbeciles but are demanded to be protected.  There is an immense freedom of how we can write books and how they can be influential. I think it’s crazy that people think that children’s literature is not influential to our generation. They have a major impact on childhood and shaped our lives and will shape the next generation of our lives.

I don’t think emoji are a language. I think that they are able to improve a language just like slang and pictures, but they don’t have the capability to create a language in their own. But it’s hard to say one way or another because we are just encountering generations being raised on the emoji culture. I say culture because it does change the way that we see the world and we use emoji’s in place of phrases like “I love you” or “I’m mad” or even “What?!?”. I truly do believe that while it isn’t a language now it has the potential to be a language farther on into the future. I think that assuming that it will never be a language, with some form of emoji, is incredibly ignorant. There’s a lot that we can’t predict and the growth of language is one of those things that we don’t have the ability to predict. The term “literally” was originally used to mean completely and without argument, now it’s used as an exaggeration to add emphasis upon something. Our languages change and morph into different languages that we won’t even be able to recognize within our lifetimes.

The most experience that we have with language (that we’re aware of) is with written and spoken language but it doesn’t mean that we don’t experience other forms of language and communication. In the reading by Mario Pei, he covers the way that we view signs and symbols. We spend a lot of our time talking to each other and participating in discourses that revolve in the way that we convey meaning and I have seen a lot of problems that get caused by discrepancies in communication and language. Look at the middle finger which is a form of auxiliary form of language. In many cultures it can be taken as an offensive symbol but in some it is an inconsequential finger that means nothing.  There are many different examples of this fact. How we translate the signals that we have to mean other things is the most important factor. What can we do to try and improve the communication and reduce the language barriers that stand in the way of our lives? While I do think that it’s important to understand how the languages work and where they fail, I think it’s more important to understand the effect that they have on us and through our history.

 When we talk about signs we can provide many examples that are recognized in our culture and in many cultures across the world. We have come to associate it with peace, hope, and victory but across the world it has been taken to mean hello and as a symbol of feminism and fertility. How can something be taken in so many directions? This is the question that I struggled with while reading The Quest for Meaning by Marcel Danesi. When it comes to the peace sign we see a link to history with the ending of World War Two and Winston Churchill. But that might have been true for the origin but I would argue that it is more commonly associated with the 1960’s and the “hippie” movement. I don’t want to disregard the history  that is found at the tail end of WWII but I would say that since most of the people that were apart of society at that time are relatively inconsequential to the society today. Whereas the people who grew up in the 60’s and past have a much closer tether to the world of hippies. This kind of discourse is exactly what Danesi says Semiotics are about.

As most of Dr. Seuss’s books do, this one encourages imagination and puts children at the center of the book, this is important for the children reading these books to see that crazy stuff happens in the world but it will get better if they find someone who believes them.