Original scientific paper
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ASSIGNED READINGS BETWEEN CANONS AND LISTS, INSTITUTIONS AND IDEOLOGY
Marijana Hameršak
orcid.org/0000-0002-8102-6784
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Through an insight into the processes of institutionalisation of elementary school readings lists in Croatia, an examination is made in this article of the rule accepted in literature on the relation between the literary canon and the list of assigned texts that are read as part of elementary education. Since the elementary school reading lists – in force in Croatia on the basis of teaching plans and programmes – also have the characteristics of lists and canons, they are called the assigned reading canon in this paper. The central part of the article deals with the form and formation of that canon, the level of its imaginary, definitive and conclusive nature, its orientation towards children's literature and its debatable canonical effect. The almost century-long (trans)formation of the assigned reading canon is reconstructed and interpreted in the context of economic (in publisher and bookshop terms) and ideological (political, scholarly and age-group) forces. In this, the observed discrepancy between elementary school reading lists and reading lists at other levels of the study and evaluation of literature is interpreted in the concluding part of the article in relation to the marginal position of children's literature in literary scholarship and to the ambivalent meaning and value that contemporary society attaches to the concept of childhood.
Keywords
children's literature; childhood; literary canon; assigned readings; literary scholarship; the history of books
Hrčak ID:
23195
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2006.
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