The Language of Julia Donaldson: Rhetoric, Style and Cognition Michael Burke Professor of Rhetoric, University College Roosevelt [Utrecht University] The Burke Kyiv Spring- Summer Lectures 2022 – Lecture 2 19 April, 2022

1

A Question …

2

How does a rhetoric professor and linguist become interested in education and children’s literature?

The discovery of books like this

3

… and these

4

Julia Donaldson

• The Julia Donaldson ‘project’

• A series of articles on language, rhetoric and cogniton in Julia Donaldson’s stories

• Today, (a rationale) … An exposition of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’

5

A broad overview

• Ch. 1 Meter, rhyme and rhythm

• Ch. 2 Lexical repetition

• Ch. 3 Narrative, plots and textual worlds

• Ch. 4 Multimodality – word and image

• Ch. 5 Embodied cognition and emotion

• Ch. 6. Lessons from Donaldson’s works for children’s literacy … “From the reader and the written to the writer and the read”

6

Julia Donaldson

• Successful children’s author over the past twenty-five years

• Published more than 100 books (many translated from English into other languages). Also published children's education book (mostly on phonics)

• 2011 MBE for services to literature

• 2011-2013 UK Children's Laureate

• Honorary degrees from Bristol University (2011) and Glasgow University (2012) – (she studied French & Drama at Bristol)

• Also a playwright and a performer

• Has worked closely with children’s book illustrator Axel Scheffler over the last 20 years

• The number of books (JD/AS) have sold together runs into the millions

7

Scheffler and Donaldson

8

Edinburgh Fringe, Summer 2018 “The Gruffalo, the Witch and the Warthog”

9

Donaldson & Scheffler

10

Donaldson & Monks

11

A working research question

• Given her amazing success …. “What it is that young listeners are drawn to in the stories of Julia Donaldson?”

• A different kind of stylistics …. Listening and seeing … not reading

12

The general benefits of reading aloud

• Reading develops language skills

• Exposure to reading exercises your child’s brain

• Reading enhances a child’s concentration

• Reading together encourages a thirst for knowledge

• A range of books teaches children about different topics

• Reading develops a child’s imagination and creativity

• Reading books with children helps to develop empathy

• Reading together helps to create a bond

13

Reading aloud to children

• “Reading aloud to children builds literacy more than talking to them” (Massaro 2015)

• “Reading aloud ‘rich language’ to children is important” (Massaro, 2015)

• “The earlier children acquire language, the more likely they are to master it” (Massaro, 2015)

• “Reading aloud to children is linked to young children’s emergent literacy ability” (Duursma, Augustyn and Zuckerman, 2006)

14

Margaret Meek (Spenser)

• “How Texts Teach What Readers Learn” (1988)

• Learning is Doing (a core message)

• “Practice, Pleasure, Persistence”

• “How did you learn to read as a child”?

• “The importance of context in reading”

• “Young readers as conspirators”

• “When learning to read, young readers must become both the teller and told”

• “Reading lessons & Writing lessons”

15

What might be ‘standing out’ in the style of Julia Donaldson? … A brief overview

• 1. The protagonist’s character traits

• 2. Dactylic tetrameter

• 3. Rhyming compostition strategy

• 4. Humour

• 5. Lexical repetition

• 6. Long/complicated/unexpected words

• 7. Alliteration & Assonance

• 8. ‘Rhyme-naming’

• 9. Intertextuality

• 10. Plot structure

16

1. A recurring protagonist charater trait

• Many protagonists have the same recurring trait (the ingenious

defensive trickster)

• The Mouse in The Gruffalo • The Mouse in The Gruffalo’s Child • The Princess in The Princess and the Wizard • The Duck in The Highway Rat • Shen in The Magic Paintbrush • The ladybird in almost all the “What the Ladybird Heard” stories • Tiddler in Tiddler the Storytelling Fish • The Mermaid in The Singing Mermaid • Traits -- Ingenious, creative, able to cope under immense pressure,

defensive tricksters (Odysseus-esque, Hermes-esque, Loki-esque) 17

2. A preference for dactylic tetrameter

• Rhyming couplets (often dactylic tetrameters)

• “Where are you going to to little brown mouse?

• Come and have tea in my underground house” (The Gruffalo)

• “The witch had a cat and a very tall hat,

• And long ginger hair which she wore in a plait” (Room on the Broom)

• “Who is this creature so big, bad and strong

• His tail and his whiskers are terribly long” (The Gruffalo’s Child)

18

3. Poetic composition strategy

• She appears to build elements of the story from a single rhyming word – (reverse engineering)

• The Scarecrow’s Wedding

• Confetti → “Betty”

• “Didn’t you know …

• Gruffalo”

19

3. Poetic Composition

• Charlie Cooks’ Favourite Book

• Encyclopedia – “even greedier”

20

3. Poetic Composition

• A day in my life • Tea in bed. Second cup. • Dislodge cats. Get up. • Son to school. Spouse to work. • Sit at desk – mustn’t shirk. • Scratch head. Dream up snail. • Maybe team her up with whale? • Chew pen. What next? • Can’t think. Feel vexed. • Feed cats. Open post. • Read it, over slice of toast. • Little boy wants to know • Date of birth of Gruffalo. • Little girl wonders why • Giant gave away his tie. • Out to shops. Get idea • (Big grin, ear to ear): • Brilliant climax – whale gets beached! • (Rhyme a problem . . . reached? Beseeched? • Leeched? Well never mind, just now.) • Snail then rescues whale – but how??? • Back home, get stuck. • Go off snail. Consider duck. • Phone rings. Who is it? • School, requesting author visit.

• Check diary . . . shocked to see • “Monday, Brookwood Library”. • That’s today! Leap in car. • Thank goodness, not far. • Tell a story, act and sing. • Kids join in with everything. • (Teacher sits there marking books, • Blind to my accusing looks.) • Answer questions. Back to house. • Joined by son, later spouse. • Open bottle. Cook salmon. • Practice piano. Play Backgammon. • Have bath - that’s when • Inspiration strikes again: • Snail could learn to write with slime! • (Quite an easy word to rhyme.) • Crawls on blackboard, leaves a trail . . . • Children run and save the whale. • Story planned! Tomorrow, start • Writing it – the easy part.

21

4. Humour – Many examples in all her books

• The calling of the register school situation, the pantomime-esque shouted repetitions and and the very many creative names for fish sorts (Tiddler)

• “The dragon grew nearer and licking his lips, said, maybe this once I will have witch without chips.” (Room on the Broom)

• “Roasted Fox; Owl Ice-cream; Scrambled snake; Gruffalo Crumble” (The Gruffalo)

22

4. Humour – Many examples in all her books

• “Give me you buns and your biscuits.

• Give me your chocolate eclairs.

• For I am the rat of the highway – the highway – the highway.

• And the rat thief never shares”. (The Highway Rat)

23

5. Lexical Repetition

• Verdonk (1995)

• “There is no doubt that from our earliest childhood onward we find great pleasure with playing with the formal structures of language … the use of lexical repetition seems to be central to this language game (p.7)

• Lexical repetition in embedded schemes lends itself to parody (and humour) (p.17)

• Verdonk, P. “Words, words, words: A pragmatic and socio-cognitive view of lexical repetition”, in Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context (Verdonk & Weber eds. Routledge, 1995

24

5. Lexical Repetition

• He has terrible tusks, • And terrible claws, • And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws.

• (The Gruffalo)

• Superworm is super strong • Superworm is super long • Watch him wiggle – See him squirm • Hip hip hurrah for Superworm

• (Superworm)

• We’re having a wedding; • The best wedding yet; • The wedding that no-one will ever forget

• (The Scarecrow’s Wedding)

25

Julia Donaldson in interviews on sounds and rhyme … (from her website)

• “I write children’s verse for a living”

• “Ever since I taught my sister to read by the phonic method, when I was six and she was four, I have been fascinated by words, sounds and spelling patterns” …

26

6. Long/Unexpected words

• “Three indignant bears” (Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book)

• “My ungainly appearance is second to none” (The Ugly Five)

• “Who can this strange-looking specimen be?” (The Ugly Five)

• “For reining his horse was the highway rat” (The Highway Rat)

• “They’ve gone without me” and he cried “alackaday” (Tyranasaurus Drip)

• Recall Massaro’s 2015 study … “rich language in children’s picture book stories will stimulate an extensive vocabulary”

27

7. Alliteration & Assonance

• The witch had a cat and a very tall hat

• And long ginger hair which she wore in a plait

• How the cat purred and how the witch grinned

• As they sat on the broomstick and flew through the wind

• But how the witch wailed and how the cat spat.

• When the wind blew so wildly, it blew off the hat

28

7. Naming (alliteration, assonance, etc.)

• Betty O’Barley, Harry O’Hay and Reginald Rake (The Scarecrow’s

Wedding)

• “Wobbly Bob” (The Cook and the King)

• Wizard Lizard (Superworm)

• Madam Dragon (Zog)

• Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len (What the Ladybird Heard)

• “Rabbitfish & Redfin – Dragonfish & Dab” • “Spiderfish & Sunfish – Devilfish & Dace” • “Leopardfish & Leapfish- Butterfish & Blue” (Tiddler)

29

8. Plot Structure

• The Gruffalo is a complex plot – More complex that Homer (The Odyssey)

• Mouse – makes up the Gruffalo world

• The animals are in the real story

• Gruffalo cross-over (imagination to real)

• Gruffalo’s child

• Starts with imaginary world that crosses into real world

30

The Esherian Stairwell = The plot structure of “Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book”

31

9. Intertextuality

• In structure & lexis:

• The Highway Rat ….

• The Highway rat was a baddie

• The highway rat was a beast

• Het took what he wanted and he ate what he took

• Life was one long feast.

• His teeth were sharp and yellow.

• His manners were rough and rude.

• And the Highway Rat went riding – riding – riding

• Riding along the highway

• And stealing the travellers’ food 32

Intertextuality

• ‘The Highwayman’ - Poem by Alfred Noyes (1906)

THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— Riding—riding— The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door

33

10. She doesn’t do morality

• The Highway Rat

• The rat in The Highway Rat is a baddie through and through – He steals for the fun of stealing – He is a bully and a tyrant

• Tiddler, the Storytelling Fish

• Tiddler in Tiddler, the Storytelling Fish is a very naughty fish who gets away with systematically lying to his school teacher

• The Gruffalo

• In The Gruffalo, the mouse and the Gruffalo remain enemies at the end

34

Lyric & Patterns

• “Why Lyrics Last” (Brian Boyd, 2012) On Shakespeare’s sonnets …

• What pleasures can verse offer aside from narrative? (p.4)

• “Patterns of sounds and senses of language” (p.10)

• We have a unique human motivation to play with patterns (p.13)

• Playing with patterns begins early and forms an essential part of our rich acquistion of language skills (p.12)

35

What next?

• Is her style unique to children’s literature? If so, what makes it

unique? – (“Children’s Shakespeare” Jeremy Vine, Telegraph, 2009)

• 1. Corpus methods?

• Generate working hypotheses from some of these observations (as above) and test them qualitatively across her ouevre

• Qualitative data from sites like ‘Goodreads’?

• Use of Corpus tools to look in the texts? (quantitative)

36

Possible corpus analysis

Pilot/test case (Sara Bartl) RQ: “Does JD’s language differ when she writes with Axel Scheffler or Lydia Monks?”

• Preliminary results = (only minor differences) • (1) keyness analysis showed more present tense in Scheffler • (2) more references to self in Scheffler

Extra dimensions --- ‘Themes’, not language …. (1) More female protagonists in Monks (2) What drives the plot is different (Scheffler = food related stories)

• (3) In the books illustrated by Monks animals are animals but in the books illustrated by Scheffler animals behave like humans

37

What next?

• 2. Multimodality? & 3. Embodiment?

• Go beyond language to analyse the word image interface and what this also means for embodied cognition

38

Multimodality

• “Visual stimuli in picture books are not only quicker but stronger than verbal stimuli … Therefore picture books can provide us with powerful tools for increasing novice readers’ emotional intelligence” (2014: 95)

• “The body posture and

facial expressions of characters send strong signals to the brain than reading the same statement”(2014: 96)

39

Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (John Benjamins Press, 2014) - Maria Nikolajeva

Picture books – Important questions … (albeit ‘shown’ not ‘read’)

• What is the organsing principle of composition? (place, time, charater,

movement, etc)

• Where are we looking from? (focalisation, alterations in pov, etc.)

• Are the images natrualistic, surrealistic or a mix?

• Where is the center and the margins?

• Where is the light coming from?

• What is the intention of the images with regard to the text? (to support it? challange it? contradict it? etc.)

• What roles do the colours play?

• How are the images coded? (socially, nationally, geographically, etc.)

40

Images and Embodied Cognition

• Image-schema

• Balance

• Affordances

• Mirror-neurons

• etc.

41

Conclusion

42

A working research question - Revisted

• Given her amazing success …. “What it is that young listeners are drawn to in the stories of Julia Donaldson?”

1. The protagonist’s character traits

2. Dactylic tetrameter

3. Rhyming compostition strategy

4. Humour

5. Lexical repetition

6.Long / complicated / unexpected words

7. Alliteration & Assonance

8. ‘Rhyme-naming’

9. Intertextuality

10. Plot structure

43

Wise words ….

“We know surpisingly little about children’s cognitive engagement with fiction or about the impact fiction makes on young readers (….) . We are only beginning to discuss young reader’s cognitive and emotional literacy” (2014: 11).

• Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (John Benjamins Press, 2014) - Maria Nikolajeva

44

Julia Donaldson: Teacher, Troubadour and Teller of Tales

• An apt starting point? … i.e. starting with pre-schoolers (4-5 years old) … the youngest appreciators of literature

45

Goal of the greater project …

• Understanding more about what draws young listeners in their masses to the stories of Julia Donaldson could help us understand better what it is that young children may need in order to help them develop more optimally in today’s world in social, cognitive and emotional terms

46

The End

47

Selected references

• Boyd, B. (2012) Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition and Shakespeare's

Sonnets. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

• Duursma E, Augustyn M, Zuckerman B. Reading aloud to children: the evidence. Arch Dis Child. 2008 Jul;93(7):554-7. doi: 10.1136/adc.2006.106336. Epub 2008 May 13. PMID: 18477693.

• Massaro, D. W. Reading Aloud to Children: Benefits and Implications for Acquiring Literacy Before Schooling Begins. The American Journal of Psychology 1 January 2017; 130 (1): 63–72. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.130.1.0063

• Meek Spencer, M. (1988). How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Stroud, Glos: Thimble Press

• Nikolajeva, M. (2014) Reading for Learning: Cognitve Approaches to Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company

48