Tuesday 3 December 2013

ABC blog: K

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K is for kenotype. This is another excellent term that never took off. I borrowed it from a Russian scholar and published an article first in Swedish, then in French (one of very few publication I have in French) and finally as a section in my book Children's Literature Comes of Age. A kenotype is the opposite of archetype: keno- (or ceno- or caeno-) means “new”, so a kenotype is a new-image, not connected to archaic thought. My examples of kenotypes in children's books were bicycles (a transformation of mythical horses) and typewriters – today it would be computers. The omnipresent mobile phone in contemporary children's and young adult literature is a kenotype.

This is a very short entry, but there is not much more I can say about it. 

 

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