Bedtime Stories Research Articles

The interpretation of beds: More bedtime stories, or maybe they're dreaming?

The interpretation of beds: More bedtime stories, or maybe they're dreaming?

Dichten ums Überleben auf Gratwanderung zwischen Ost und West. Die Rolle der Geschichte(n) in Jan Koneffkes Roman Die sieben Leben des Felix Kannmacher

Abstract Looking back, my memories seem like distant, made­up stories. These words of the main character are to be found all over Jan Koneffkes novel. A foreigner on the run, Felix Kannmacher is forced to tell stories in order to survive. He is at the mercy of a teenager who is avid for constantly new and different bedtime stories. Felix gives in, as he has no other choice but to be a slaveto this child. The following article analyses the fine line between the stories Felix invents for Virginia and two narratological aspects: the actual plot of the novel on the one hand, and the actual course of history, on the other. The entire novel is built on stories-within-stories that twist and turn the course of Story and History alike. Because each one of us writes their own (hi)story.

The bedtime story wars: children’s picturebooks as parodic advocacy

ABSTRACT A growing force in children’s literature, public figures’ crossover picturebooks are designed to appeal to adults and children alike. This study takes a critical look at the crossover picturebooks of John Oliver and Stephen Colbert. As forms of parodic advocacy, their books use the doubled worlds of parody to invite audiences into corrective spaces, highlighting the influence at work in the seemingly persuasion free media of children’s books, while simplifying and expanding the issues at stake through a multimodal form of activism. In particular, we add to the literature on political parody a focus on the potential for such discourses to function metanoically – alternating between original and parodied texts to engage in political revisions while forwarding moral visions on behalf of disadvantaged others. Parody and metanoia jointly invite engagement in the hope of doing something different and restoring political options through re-energized design.

ПОРОДИЧНЕ РУТИНЕ И РИТУАЛИ УСПАВЉИВАЊА ДЕЦЕ – КВАЛИТАТИВНО ИСТРАЖИВАЊЕ

This paper is part of a research conducted with the intention of examining the pattern of family bedtime routines and rituals and determining certain regularities or irregularities in their performance. The aim was to discover family bedtime routines and rituals in a modern family. The research was approached by a qualitative method, by the interview technique, due to the need for a more complete and broader picture of this phenomenon. Mothers have quite successfully identified activities that they regularly engage in in the last hour before turning off the lights, activities that make them happy and satisfied, as well as activities that do not always involve everyone together and those that they could miss because they are not very important to them. The most common pattern of evening activities is: bathing, wearing pajamas, brushing the teeth, and a lullaby in bed,or a conversation, or a bedtime story. The analysis of the interview shows at the same time the uniqueness, but also the diversity in the characteristics and patterns of family bedtime routines and rituals. The paper is important because it is one of the few researches in our area that qualitatively deals with the topic of family routines and rituals that are of great importance for the stability and cohesion of the family, as well as for supporting the family during its expected or unexpected transitions.

Rara and Her Bedtime Story Journey

This study reported four–week English bedtime story of Rara, a young English language learner from Indonesia. A case study approach was employed in this study. Fitri, Rara’s mother, was asked to read five different English stories to her on the basis of the period of four weeks regularly. These stories were given as media for children to have comprehensible input. The data were taken from daily journal written by the mother and a semi-structure interview in which was then analyzed and interpreted. The result showed that the child was able to follow the storylines and was able to comprehend them. The story also helped the child acquiring some English vocabularies and fixed utterances naturally. Hence, English bedtime story program can be considered as an alternative way in introducing English to EFL young learners.

Monsters at bedtime: managing fear in bedtime picture books for children

Monsters make frequent appearances in bedtime stories for children, where they represent a range of common childhood fears, in particular those associated with night-time. In this article, the role and nature of ‘bedtime’ monsters is explored with reference to picture book examples from 20th to 21st century children’s literature. The ways in which they help children to manage fears are shown to be through a combination of both psychological and literary strategies, drawing on examples of English language picture books for children aged 2–5 years, but with a particular focus on three contemporary texts: Molly and the Night Monster; Bedtime for Monsters and The Wardrobe Monster. It is argued that these texts often mirror coping strategies preferred by young children, in particular positive pretence, where threats are minimised or eliminated by mentally changing or altering perception of them. However, in addition to positive pretence, fears are further managed by literary and visual devices employed by the picture book creator/s, in particular in the presentation of images. The article concludes by noting that this is a group of texts which is now sufficiently established to be open to self-reference and parody, and consequently new and playful variations on the bedtime monster story will continue to emerge and evolve.

Confidence Intervals: A Bedtime Story.

Confidence Intervals: A Bedtime Story.

The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares

Reviewed by: The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s ed. by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares Christine Ferguson (bio) The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares; pp. xliv + 246. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2019, $140.00, £115.00. The concept of the fantastic has been crucial to feminist literary criticism since its inception, occupying a leading role in pioneering works such as Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). Yet even the most enduring of critical categories requires constant reinvention, and it is to this task that editors Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares dedicate themselves. Their work, The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, brings together fourteen essays on fantastic fiction produced by women writers from around the world and published in either the 1890s or the 1920s. Narrow in its two-decade historical focus, the book is deliberately capacious in its geographical purview, rejecting any single national focus. The collection’s essays are dedicated to a recovery and reinterpretation of the female literary fantastic. Its contents examine an impressively wide range of authorial subjects, from Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and Edith Nesbit, to Agatha [End Page 133] Christie, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. All of the essays offer finely honed close readings of their focal texts; the best of them extrapolate their conclusions to larger debates and developments within gender and genre studies. Particularly successful are the contributions by Julia Panko, Elizabeth English, Andrew Hock Soon Ng, and Kate Schnur, which convincingly demonstrate how works by Christie, Nesbit, Katherine Burdekin, and Barnes speak to the gendered dynamics of radio broadcasting, science fiction, early-twentieth-century socialism, and the popular gothic. The impact of these often thoughtful contributions is, however, limited by their lack of organization within a coherent conceptualization of what the fantastic might actually be. Gathered within the collection’s titular aegis are texts whose narrative incidents and ontological frames seem to have little in common: the terrifying appearance of a ghost within an otherwise realist story, spontaneous acts of gender or species crossing that evoke no particular surprise within their narrative environment, slips in time, men who tell their children patriarchal bedtime stories, and murderers who escape the law only to face providence. What, if anything, links these occurrences? While procrustean definitions are always best avoided, the category of the fantastic risks losing all meaning if it is not accounted for in some critically consistent way. The editors seem reluctant to take up this task, eschewing—or in fact, barely mentioning—its best known articulation via the structuralist Tzvetan Todorov to offer instead a definition that does not quite fit the contents on offer. The fantastic, they assert, is “a genre of texts and a category of more-or-less supernatural seeming phenomena” (xix). The immediate problem with this definition is that it does not apply to a number of the volume’s own essays. While a woman’s passion for a doll—as depicted in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Doll” (1928) and analyzed by Donna Mitchell in chapter 2—might be unusual, it is hardly supernatural. Similarly, no laws of nature are violated in the telling of patriarchal nonsense stories in Barnes’s experimental novel Ryder (1928). Equally questionable is the designation of the fantastic as a genre: surely if the volume’s contents reveal anything, it is that the fantastic flourishes across a range of genres, from the mystery plot to the fairy tale, the ghost story, the imperial romance, and the erotic thriller. Perhaps the reluctance to define the fantastic lies in the editorial team’s greater interest with what it does than in what it is. And what the fantastic achieves, in their formulation, is a queer blurring of sex and gender binaries. For McCormick, Mitchell, and Soares, fantastic is better understood as a verb than a noun, one which works as an analogue to “queer”: “To...

Translation of Politically Correct Terms and its Reception by Polish Speakers

The article seeks to answer the question of how politically correct terms are perceived by the speakers of Polish. The main focus of analysis is the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner and its Polish translation. The book is a parody of the language of political correctness and, even though it follows the rules of such discourse, its main aim is to mock it. The analysis gives an insight into how meaning is created in both the source and target expressions found in the book. This word-formation and etymological investigation is complemented with the results of an on-line survey submitted by Polish speakers in which they were asked to assess the degree of political correctness of each of the 20 terms. The analysis clearly indicates that, although the meaning of the Polish terms is mostly equivalent to its source expression, which is corroborated by participants’ answers, the terms often explicitly state what the author intended to hide. Hence, participants’ perception of the expressions being politically correct was relatively low and did not correspond the equivalence level.

In the Half Room by Carson Ellis

Reviewed by: In the Half Room by Carson Ellis Deborah Stevenson, Editor Ellis, Carson In the Half Room; written and illus. by Carson Ellis. Candlewick, 2020 [32p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781536214567 $16.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 3-6 yrs The traditional rhyming nighttime benediction takes an enjoyably weird turn in this bedtime story from Ellis (Du Iz Tak?, BCCB 12/16). In the titular half room, everything is cut down to a half: there’s “half table” and “half cat” (just the front half), while half a person (just the right half) reads half a book by the light of the half moon. Then comes “half a knock on half a door” and our reader’s left side arrives, whereupon the two reunite into one and go dance in the moonlight. In true cat fashion, however, the front and back halves of the cat bicker and eventually settle down on the rug together but perversely fail to rejoin. The combination of lulling and disturbing is seductive, and the book’s focus on playful mood makes all the unanswered questions about this strange half world more feature than bug. Compositions shift between focus on individual items and views of the overall scene in yet another echo of Goodnight Moon, and the details are sturdily painted with vigor while the creamy backgrounds enhance the crepuscular flavor. (Adults will also appreciate the joke that the reader is perusing half of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.) The matter-of-fact oddity provides a nursery-rhyme feel and a bit of a twist that will intrigue youngsters more interested in dreaming than sleeping. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“A Turk Named O'Brien”: Bedtime Stories of the Early Turkish Republic from the Memoirs of Sevim Sertel O'Brien

“A Turk Named O'Brien”: Bedtime Stories of the Early Turkish Republic from the Memoirs of Sevim Sertel O'Brien

NARRATIVE TEXTS IN THE TEACHING BULGARIAN TO FOREIGN STUDENTS AS A POSSIBILITY TO DEVELOP THE INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS AND COMPETENCE

The main purpose of foreign university students during studying Bulgarian is reaching a level of communicative abilities, i.e. using the language successfully in different settings and situations. Achieving this purpose requires the use of effective teaching methods and teaching techniques which rely not only on the language skills of the university students, but also on their general knowledge of the world and knowledge in the area of human interactions.This article explores the possibility to include narrative texts from the modern Bulgarian literature in the teaching process as a tool to educate the students during the early stage of studying Bulgarian. Meeting certain narrative texts or abstracts from different genres is what helps the students feel emotionally and socially closer to the Bulgarian language. This creates a specific emotional atmosphere during improving one's skills in a foreign language and helps in the process of “discovering” the Bulgarian culture. This activates the thought pattern of understanding the basic and unavoidable cultural differences but also cultural similarities and also motivates the students from other countries to improve their language skills.The authors of this article share their experience: choosing a narrative text, preparing such texts from their successful use in the classroom, using certain techniques and interactive means for adequate understanding of such texts by foreign students. The results are also described, as far as learning and managing lexical material, syntax structures and intonation details in Bulgarian is concerned.We analyze our work with the short story “From Wednesday to Monday” by Maria Doneva, which aims to “provoke” the active language perception of the students (including both grammar and reading comprehension skills in learning the days of the week and improving the use of past tense).The second narrative included in the article is “A smaller bedtime story” by Ludmil Stanev is presented to the students in the form of role-playing reading. This happens during a national holiday of the Bulgarian alphabet.

Kiviuq and the Bee Woman by N. McDermott

McDermott, Noel. Kiviuq and the Bee Woman. Iqauit, NU, Inhabit Media, 2019.
 When we last heard of Kiviuq, he had just survived a harrowing encounter with scary monster mermaids or tuutalik (Deakin Review by Kirk MacLeod). In Kiviuq and the Bee Woman, the grandfather who narrated Kiviuq and the Mermaid continues the bedtime story to his grandchildren. Kiviuq begins paddling home, but comes upon a tent where an old woman invites him to rest and dry his clothing. She turns out to be a giant Bee Woman who wants to cut up Kiviuq and put him in her cooking pot.
 For a bedtime story, both the text and the illustrations are quite scary. Illustrator Toma Feizo Gas lets us see into the dark, dramatic and frightening world of the Bee Woman, who is a determined killer. “She shouted, ‘I am Iguttarjuaq, the Bee Woman, and I am going to kill you with my ulu’.” The accompanying image shows a woman with pointy teeth and insect mouth pincers, who is shaking a sharp ulu (knife) at Kiviuq.
 As is the case with many of Inhabit Media’s publications, the reading level is higher than one would expect to find in a picture book. For younger children, this book will need some adult intervention. In addition to the scary content, human skulls talk, the woman eats her own eyelids and “Kiviuq, realized the woman was boiling human meat.” Some of the language is difficult. For example, Kiviuq “fainted” of fright, but “feinted” to get away. McDermott also intersperses many Inuktitut words, which will slow down younger readers. These are defined at the end of the book.
 Overall, this excellent product from Inhabit Media should be included in public library collections and school library collections, but should probably be placed in collections designed for older children. 
 Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sandy Campbell
 Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Could Lullabies and Bedtime Stories Help Youth With SCD Have Less Pain?

Could Lullabies and Bedtime Stories Help Youth With SCD Have Less Pain?

Here Comes Rhinoceros / Kommt das Nashorn by H. Janisch

Janisch, Heinz. Here Comes Rhinoceros / Kommt das Nashorn. Illustrated by Helga Bansch. Translated and edited by Evan Jones, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2018. 
 This picture book is a paean to solidity. Its central character, Rhinoceros, is as “beautiful as a mountain.” He “holds his ground,” stands “silent in the storm.” Though he does voice a wish to be as free as the tiny white bird who is his friend (his “chirping snowflake”) he also realizes that many creatures appreciate his stalwart, earthbound presence; they need him “to stand on,” “to rest on.”
 Heinz Janisch, the author of this charming narrative, has won the Austrian State Prize for Poetry, as well as that nation’s Children’s Literature Prize. The poetic quality of his writing style is effectively conveyed in Evan Jones’ translation. Helga Bansch’s illustrations are a perfect match for the text. She draws quite expertly; her rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, and deer are appropriate in detail and in proportion to one another. In an inventive and humorous vein, she lets us see the tiny white bird being blown “right off the page” by the storm. Though all of her work has an endearing quality, the little meerkat with his red umbrella is, in particular, a heart-stealer.
 The story line of this picture book is very suitable for both preschool and primary school aged children. Janisch’s vocabulary, syntax, and use of metaphor, however, suggest the need for adult assistance—at least initially—if children are to fully comprehend and appreciate the beauty of the text. A child enjoying the book as a bedtime story would pore over the illustrations; those illustrations would, as well, be perfectly large and clear enough for small group presentation in a classroom or library. In sum, Here Comes Rhinoceros is an excellent choice for home, school, and public libraries. 
 Reviewer: Leslie Aitken Rating: 4 out of 4 stars
 Leslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship included selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and academic libraries. She is a former Curriculum Librarian of the University of Alberta.

Reading bedtime stories to compatriots: Reconciling global equality of opportunity and self-determination

AbstractIn this article, we propose a reconciliation between global equality of opportunity and self-determination, two central and seemingly conflicting principles in the contemporary theory of global justice. Our conception of reconciliation draws on the family-people analogy, following the account of familial relationship goods, developed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, on permissible parental partiality and domestic equality of opportunity. We argue, first, that a plausible conception of global equality of opportunity must be able to distinguish morally arbitrary aspects of nationality that require mitigation from morally permissible ones. Second, we argue that a plausible criterion for the distinction integrates a person’s normative interests over a lifetime: (i) the interests of a child born into societal circumstances that impact her life prospects; and (ii) the interests of an adult citizen in collective self-determination. Third, we outline an account of ‘people relationship goods’, as a principled way to circumscribe the permissible scope of self-determination. Fair global equality of opportunity requires mitigating nationality-tracking inequalities, except those that fall within the permissible scope of collective self-determination.

Buddhist Viewpoints in Charles Johnson’s Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories

Buddhist Viewpoints in Charles Johnson’s Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories

Reworking the postmodern understanding of reality through fantasy in M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (2006) and Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009).

In the two feature films Lady in the Water (2006) and Ondine (2009), M. Night Shyamalan and Neil Jordan, respectively, present us with two grounded-in-reality fairy tales whose two male protagonists come in close contact with two mythical water creatures – encounters that positively reshape their perspective on reality through the use of fantasy. Shyamalan relates the story of an emotionally wrecked middle-aged man who rescues a ‘narf’ (a water nymph in an unoriginated ancient bedtime story) from the pool of the dreary building he is superintending, while Jordan follows the ordeal of a struggling Irish fisherman who accidentally fishes a ‘selkie’ (a Celtic seal-like water creature that has the power to assume full human form on land by shedding its seal skin). The two films negotiate the problematic connection between the fantastic and the real, and question the postmodern concept of representations masking an absence of solid reality as proposed by Jean Baudrillard. The paper focuses on tracing the ontological and linguistic role of fantasy in relation to reality and delineates how acts of storytelling and representation can refashion the human psyche’s perception of reality in a postmodern world by analysing the narrative and psychological means by which this relation is constructed in Shyamalan’s and Jordan’s films. The main argument of the paper is to explore how employing metafictional narrative techniques and reworking the psyche’s ties to fantasy can offer the postmodern individual a more enabling understanding of themselves and their reality.

Snakes on a Train by Kathryn Dennis

Reviewed by: Snakes on a Train by Kathryn Dennis Elizabeth Bush Dennis, Kathryn Snakes on a Train; written and illus. by Kathryn Dennis. Feiwel, 2019 [32p] ISBN 978-1-250-30440-7 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 1-4 yrs “The conductor takes the tickets/as the snakes all slither on./ The tracks are checked./ The whistle blows. It’s time to move along./ Hissssssssssssssss goes the sound of the train.” So opens this new variant on the perennially popular combination of trains and picture books; in this title, a simple trek on the tracks gains momentum from the giggle-worthy passengers and crew who enjoy the ride in a way only legless, armless, tubular critters can. Candy-bright snakes—reduced here to tapered shapes with googly eyes—hand over (so to speak) tickets with their mouths; a signal snake toots the horn with the tip of his pointed tail, and passengers glimpsed through the train windows read a propped-up book, share a propped-up sno-cone through straws, or simply enjoy the view. Any journey is more exciting when there’s a bit of trouble, and a pink pig has tumbled off the back of the train and lies, startled but stoic, upside down on the tracks. No worries; the brake snake hangs upside down off the emergency pull to pick up the errant rider, and this show is back on the road. A pitch-black tunnel with pairs of googly eyes glowing in the dark, a sleek railroad [End Page 202] bridge with even sleeker water, fish, and scalloped waves below, and a platform with snakes popping out of holes to greet the arrival are rendered in stylish shapes on a plain white backdrop, and final spreads of snakes coiled up to sleep under an “S” constellation of stars provide just the right wind-down for a bedtime story. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Bedtime Books, the Bedtime Story Ritual, and Goodnight Moon

Bedtime Books, the Bedtime Story Ritual, and Goodnight Moon