Affective Strategies, Emotion Schemas, and Empathic Endings: Selkie Girls and A Critical Odyssey

Authors

  • John Stephens Macquarie University, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2015vol23no1art1122

Keywords:

affective strategies, emotion schemas, empathy, Selkie Girls, A Critical Odyssey

Abstract

We are drawn to the aesthetic again and again because its impact is registered affectively and somatically, as well as via rational cognition.
(Pence 2004, p. 273)

The idea of an ‘odyssey’ derives, of course, from Homer’s famous epic narrative, but separates itself from its eponymous hero to become a script which pervades Western literature. By ‘script’ I refer to a metanarrative structure based on an expectation that in a particular context events will unfold in a coherent and predictable order, within expected parameters, and the observer will be involved either as a participant or an observer (see Stephens 2011, p. 14). Because readers recognise a script from only a few components of its constitutive causal chain, writers have considerable scope for varying the components. Thus an odyssey-script does not require a character named ‘Odysseus’, but will involve, in some form, a long journey with many delays, by-ways and wrong movements, but moves towards a particular goal. Yet, as Tennyson’s well-known poem reminds us, an arrival constitutes a site for another departure:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel ...
Ulysses, 1-6

As our procedures grow old and less productive, and texts seem less responsive to them, we inevitably seek livelier ways of doing things. I have spent the last 30 years or so as a discourse analyst, with a particular focus on how ideology pervades textual representations. During that time, however, I have been somewhat inattentive to the relationship of affect to ideology, perhaps because affect seems to be individually produced, whereas ideology is more a matter of social consensus or even, if we adhere to Althusser’s more extreme view, a social imposition. To put this another way, discourse analysis is less concerned with what readers do with texts than with the role of culture in the production of texts and the potential of texts to position readers. This difference need not result in an either/or choice, needless to say.

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Author Biography

  • John Stephens, Macquarie University, Australia

    John Stephens is an Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University, Australia. He is author of Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction and Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (with Robyn McCallum), and co-authored New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature with Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan and Robyn McCallum. He is editor of Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Fiction and Film, and of Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film. He has authored over a hundred articles. He is a former President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, and currently Editor of International Research in Children’s Literature. In 2007 he received the 11th International Brothers Grimm Award, in recognition of his contribution to research in children’s literature. In 2013 he received the Anne Deveraux Jordan Award from the Children's Literature Association, given to recognize significant contributions to the field of children's literature in scholarship and service.

References

Butler, Charles (2009) ‘Experimental Girls: Feminist and Transgender Discourses in Bill’s New Frock and Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?’ ChLAQ 34 (1): 3-20.

Fisher, Leona W. (2002) ‘“Bridge” Texts: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in American Children's Realist and Historical Fiction’ ChLAQ 27 (3) : 129–135.

Forsyth, Kate (2014) Two Selkie Stories from Scotland. Illustrated by Fiona McDonald. Armidale: Christmas Press.

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Hogan, Patrick Colm (2011) Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

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Pence, Jeffrey (2004) ‘Narrative Emotion: Feeling, Form and Function’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 34 (3): 273-276.

Stephens, John (2011) ‘Schemas and Scripts: Cognitive Instruments and the representation of Cultural Diversity in Children’s Literature.’ In Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford (eds) Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 12–35.

Stephens, John (1995) ‘Writing By Children, Writing For Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 73 (3): 853–863. A revised version of this article appeared in Michèle Anstey and Geoff Bull (eds) (2002) Crossing the Boundaries, Pearson Education, pp. 237–248.

Stephens, John and Taylor, Susan (1992) ‘“No Innocent Texts”: the Representation of Marriage in Two Picture-book Versions of the Seal Wife Legend.’ In Emrys Evans (ed) Young Readers, New Readings. Hull: Hull University Press, pp. 99–123.

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Published

2015-01-01

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Articles

How to Cite

“Affective Strategies, Emotion Schemas, and Empathic Endings: Selkie Girls and A Critical Odyssey” (2015) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 23(1), pp. 17–33. doi:10.21153/pecl2015vol23no1art1122.

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