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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Metafiction and Humour in 'The Great Escape from City Zoo',
single work
criticism
McMillan points out how the use of metafiction in postmodern picture books adds to the 'range of play' already available within picture book compositions and functions to 'generate reader movement between the internal and external positions constructed by the text' (5). She articulates the connection between metafiction and humour, pointing to how play-oriented activities are seen as central to a child's acquisition of language and the development of complex cognitive social skills. Drawing from John Stephens who argues that the use of intertextuality in children's texts is fundamentally problematic, McMillan discusses how metafiction and humour both work to 'foreground the gap between signs and their referents' by relying on 'an audience knowledge of intertexts', and the recognition and implications of specific signifiers (5), with a close reading of Tohby Riddle's The Great Escape from City Zoo. The reading looks at how the text 'uses satire to comment on ways of viewing the world' (7) and how the reader is positioned to question the ways in which language structures reality (10). McMillan concludes that 'while the text encodes the possibility of escaping the net of resonsibility', there is an overriding moral sense that 'victory lies in the fun of the adventure and by extension, in the enjoyment and mastery of the fictional game' (10).
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MIRV, MARV and FOBS: Language and Significances in a Selection of Post-Nuclear Texts for Young Adults,
single work
criticism
Braithwaite is interested in the use of language in texts with a post-nuclear setting and how through a number of techniques, 'language in the nuclear debate frequently encodes power relations whereby those who massage the conventional meanings of language attempt to influence others, often by promoting an ideological position which can be difficult for the reader to oppose' (35). Braithwaite closely analyses five texts, including The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody, which focus on the survival and personal development of the protagonist and/or central characters and in which language is presented as 'a means by which the central characters attempt to excercise power over the world in which they find themselves' (35). For Braithwaite, 'the fascination with language, names and meaning in post-nuclear fiction invites readers to examine how individuals perceive their own realities and how consensus reality can be both questioned and taken for granted' (43). Braithwaite asserts that 'the reader who realises this duality will be in a stronger position both to engage with the text and to examine the ideological positions (both overt and covert) which are being presented'(43).