University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School March 2018 Once Upon a Genre: Distant Reading, the Newbery Medal, and the Affordances of Interdisciplinary Paradigms for Understanding Children’s Literature Melanie Griffin University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Education Commons Scholar Commons Citation Griffin,e M lanie, "Once Upon a Genre: Distant Reading, the Newbery Medal, and the Affordances of Interdisciplinary Paradigms for Understanding Children’s Literature" (2018). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7160 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Once Upon a Genre: Distant Reading, the Newbery Medal, and the Affordances of Interdisciplinary Paradigms for Understanding Children’s Literature by Melanie Griffin A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Teaching and Learning College of Education University of South Florida Major Professor: Jenifer J. Schneider, Ph.D. James King, Ed.D. Cynthia Patterson, Ph.D. Barbara Shircliffe, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 9, 2018 Keywords: macroscopic reading, prizing, canonicity, interdisciplinarity Copyright © 2018, Melanie Griffin Dedication In memory of Robert. Acknowledgments First and foremost: thank you to Dr. Jenifer Schneider, major professor extraordinaire. I would not be here, writing this dissertation, without you. Thank you for recruiting me, for giving me the space to experiment and find my voice in the field of children’s literature, for always pushing me to think harder and write better, for encouragement, and for providing me with this opportunity. Thanks most especially for not letting me quit. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge my committee members and thank them for helping me become the scholar that I am today. Thank you to Dr. James King for introducing me to the study of linguistics and encouraging me to think about why individual words matter. Thanks, too, for your incisive comments on my first full draft. Thank you to Dr. Barbara Shircliffe for the introduction to gender theory as it relates to the history of education in America. Thank you to Dr. Cynthia Patterson for signing me into your class on scholarly research and writing as an overload student and for reading and providing so much guidance on the very first draft of what turned into this dissertation project. I took a lot (a lot) of coursework en route to the dissertation, and I thank each and every professor for their part in the education of Melanie Griffin. In particular, though, I thank Dr. Jennifer Wolgemuth for Qualitative Research Methods I and for offering me the intellectual space to explore, to experiment, to create, to fail, and to explore some more. And last but not least, thank you to the friends and family who supported me and who cheered me on. Thanks to Megan Cross for the many mornings we spent dissertating together. Thanks to Sarah Pennington for rescuing me in Stats II and to Ashley Reese, Jessica Cook, and Tomaro Taylor for assuring me that this, too, would pass and for enduring so many conversations about the Newbery Medal. Thanks, of course, to Mom and Dad, who have always believed I could do anything. And finally, thanks to Dori Griffin for reminding me that if I were to quit before defending, the Drs. Griffin could not go on a celebratory vacation together. i Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................. i List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Once Upon a Dissertation Study ......................................................................................... 1 Statement of the Problem .................................................................................................... 3 Purpose of the Study ........................................................................................................... 5 Scope of the Project ............................................................................................................ 6 A Framework for Distant Reading ...................................................................................... 6 Delimitations ....................................................................................................................... 8 Significance of the Study .................................................................................................... 9 Definitions......................................................................................................................... 10 Children’s literature .............................................................................................. 11 Distant reading ...................................................................................................... 11 Close reading ....................................................................................................... 11 Microscopic reading.............................................................................................. 11 Genre and generic characteristic ........................................................................... 11 Descriptive characteristic ...................................................................................... 12 Structure and structural characteristic ................................................................... 12 Theme and thematic characteristic ........................................................................ 12 Measure of Popularity ........................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2: Review of the Literature .............................................................................................. 13 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 13 The Newbery Medal and the Construction of Canonical American Children’s Literature ...................................................................................................................... 14 The creation of the Newbery Medal ..................................................................... 15 The influence of the Newbery Medal. .................................................................. 18 The Newbery as market force. .................................................................. 19 Librarians as gatekeepers of the Newbery. ............................................... 19 The effect of prizing children’s literature. ................................................ 24 The Newbery’s Definition of Children’s Literature ......................................................... 25 Limitations of the Newbery .............................................................................................. 27 Methodological Approaches to the Newbery ................................................................... 29 The Newbery as sampling strategy. ...................................................................... 30 Single author and single text studies. ........................................................ 30 Small group studies. .................................................................................. 31 Larger scale studies. .................................................................................. 32 ii Analytical lenses. .................................................................................................. 33 Textual analysis and close reading. .......................................................... 33 Cultural studies via content analysis. ........................................................ 34 Critical considerations of race. ................................................................. 36 Readability Measures. ............................................................................... 37 Opinion pieces and reactions to new Medalists. ....................................... 38 Bibliographies ........................................................................................... 39 Critical Understandings of the Newbery and the Need for Distant Reading Methods ..... 39 Disciplinary Siloes and the Affordances of Interdisciplinary Paradigms ......................... 41 Chapter 3: Methods for Reading the Newbery from a Distance ................................................... 48 Research Questions ........................................................................................................... 49 Distant Methods for Analyzing Children’s Literature