J. D. Stahl

Background

I am a Professor in the Department of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). You can contact me at stahl@vt.edu or at 540.231.8447.

My education :


On Research


In my research, I investigate how values and perceptions are expressed in literary form across cultural boundaries. My first book, Mark Twain, Culture, and Gender, studies Twain's representations of gender through his explorations of Europe. In a number of articles, I have pursued the theme of gender representation in Mark Twain's historical sketches, travel writing, and fiction, showing how he adapted European cultural artifacts to American purposes and how he addressed audiences of adults and children, and of women and men. My writing about Mark Twain has also led to my examination of his work as a children's author. Building on my research into the representation of German culture through American children's books and books in translation, I have demonstrated Twain's creative misreading of the German classic children's book Der Struwwelpeter in his loose translation, Slovenly Peter, which both celebrates German freedoms that are unconventional to Americans and reinforces American ideas about race and gender. By editing two special issues of leading children's literature journals, one on cross-cultural themes in children's literature, the other on recent European children's literature theory, I have contributed to the scholarly dialogue across cultural boundaries. My work on the American publication and reception history of the German classic children's book Emil und die Detektive, by Erich K?stner, has further contributed to this dialogue. Through translating a number of articles by leading German scholars for American publication, I have furthered the dialogue between European and American scholars as well, as I have by reviewing significant German scholarship in my field.

Children's literature is at the center of my research program because it is for me an enormously rewarding field of literary study. It not only enlists approaches from history, sociology, psychology, literary studies and educational theory, it represents, at its best, a body of complex and aesthetically and intellectually demanding literary works. Children's literature itself is the complex product of a group of writers-- adults--who write for an audience in some ways fundamentally different from themselves: children. This gap (or contradiction, depending upon one's perspective) is one of the themes I have explored both in articles such as my entries in the Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature about Uri Orlev, the Israeli Holocaust author, and my lengthy biographical/critical examination of award-winning children's author Elizabeth Enright. The paradox of adult author and child audience is also a fundamental theme of my work on Louise Fitzhugh's art influences in the 1964 classic Harriet the Spy.

Children's books are neither as simple as they appear nor as innocent of ideology as we often like to think. Through my work in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature on a pro-fascist propagandist, Schenzinger, I have shown how a boys' adventure story was used, with devastating effectiveness, to support the Nazi cause in the years of Hitler's accession to power. Schenzinger promoted unquestioning submission to authority, glorifying self-sacrifice and even martyrdom in quasi-religious terms. On the other hand, authors who have understood children's needs for secrecy, conspiracy, and self-directed adventure have created enduring classics of Western children's literature, as my work on satire and secrecy in children's books has argued.

This distance between audience and authors and its accompanying paradoxes of style and voice are also major themes of the anthology I have edited and written with my colleagues Tina Hanlon and Elizabeth Keyser, Crosscurrents of Children's Literature: Texts and Criticism. The anthology will be a significant teaching text for professors of children's literature, combining important primary texts with crucial critical selections. Our aim has been to articulate some of the most important critical controversies in children's literature studies in terms that are accessible to undergraduate and graduate students either unfamiliar with the field or seeking to explore it in greater depth. This teaching anthology is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate children's literature courses. My co-editors and I have synthesized the results of our research and teaching in children's literature for a broad, educated, but non-specialist academic audience. By providing both carefully selected primary works (either in full or excerpted) and strategically chosen critical essays, we have made the major issues of children's literature scholarship today available in clear and lively fashion.

Teaching Philosophy

My method of teaching is based on dialogue. My goals are to stimulate students to think for themselves and to engage them in an exploratory process. I believe that students always bring a valuable fund of experience and insight to the learning process, and that my challenge is to excite their interest in the literature we are studying together and to enable them to connect their own knowledge and analytical capacity to the close examination of literary works. Thus, though I strive to convey important background information, my ultimate goal is greater than conveying knowledge. It is to immerse students in a conversation that connects literary studies to humane values.

I see a direct connection between awareness of cultural differences and historical consciousness. The challenge of understanding how different cultures conceive and shape the world is analogous to--and in some cases the same as--the challenge of understanding how human experience and imagination in past eras differed from ours. That is one of the reasons why I emphasize the historical context and development of literature, particularly children's literature. Our conception of childhood is not timeless and universal, but rather always conditioned by the cultural values of the society in which the practice of childhood is imbedded. I frequently begin my course in children's literature by introducing students to the notion that childhood is an invention, one that can be traced in the Western tradition to the emergence in the Renaissance of an awareness of children as qualitatively different from adults, and thus deserving of a different pedagogy, discipline, and ultimately a literature of their own. Thus, I use the Colloquy (ca. 1000) by the English monk and scholar Aelfric (ca. 955-1010) both to demonstrate how divergent from our modern conception of childhood the pupils in his didactic dialogue are (they beg their master to inflict physical punishment on them, because "we are ignorant, and would rather be beaten for the sake of learning than not to know"), as well as how progressive his concept of education was.

Whether in courses about the adaptation of literary works to film, or world literature in English, or children's books in translation, I seek to nurture in students a capacity to perceive and appreciate differences of genre and perspective. My goal is to develop a kind of intellectual depth vision: an ability to perceive, through contrasting perspectives, how works of literary art reflect a multi-dimensionality of values, perceptions, and practices.



— Updated: 6 May 2006