labellementeuse | (no subject)

Hi y'all, I have a quick question.

We've been doing "Matilda" in English at the moment, which has been really fun. Some things people have suggested in terms of the kind of film/text it is is as a part of a kind of "children's noir" or "family black comedy", texts that are darker, more sophisticated, and much more intertextual than books or films for children are generally considered to be - children reading/watching these texts have some understanding of stereotype, parody, they understand the conventional storyline and they also understand when the conventional storyline is deliberately being twisted. A really good example of this is A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is another good one. I was wondering if anyone else had any examples? it's a really interesting idea and I'd like to look at it in more detail, maybe for an essay I'm writing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

DLoD is quite a good example, but I think it's also enough of a straight-up fantasy novel/book for older readers that I'm not quite sure about it. But DWJ's work in general definitely has that potential - material that expects more from its readers, more effort, more involvement, more awareness.

A-hah! Okays :) Part of the reason for mentioning DLoD was just that much of the humor, for me at least, would be lost if I hadn't read so much baaaad fantasy over time. Truefax that it's a story with a canon of its own, though.

Hmmm... Maybe some of Vivian Vande Velde's works? She has a couple books set in a universe where kids play immersive virtual reality video games and IMO there's a tongue-in-cheek sort of humor dedicated to poking a bit of fun at the videogame/rpg industry. Cross media, though, don't know if that's suitable.