A is for audience: an examination of audience construction, focalization, and politicization in contemporary children's ABC books

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways contemporary children's ABC books can politically shape or frame the way audiences interpret and conceptualize content within the books. Using the children's ABC books A is for Activist (2013) and America: A Patriotic Primer (2002), I examine how children's texts can construct audiences, create a unique site of focalization--known as a focalized dialogue--for those audiences, and utilize phenomenological metaphors to politically shape the focalized dialogues that occur between readers of the books. In doing so, contemporary children's ABC books can wield social and political power that can function to characterize contemporary understandings of cultural artifacts and even children themselves.