HonorsCollege

This month, Ellen Handler Spitz’s children’s literature column in The New Republic discusses two books from India as the honors college professor of visual arts examines The Enigma of Karma by Raja Mohanty and Folk Tales of Uttarakhand  by Deepa Agarwal. “As twenty-first century juggernauts of globalization and technology ride roughshod over regional cultures, there is a risk that precious legacies—oral, visual, and dramatic—are being lost. How will we preserve local customs, idiosyncratic habits of speech and dialect, humor, folklore, imagery, symbols, and artistic techniques—all with their concomitant wisdom? Sensitive editors of children’s books are grappling with these questions,” Spitz… Continue Reading Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, in the New Republic

“Art and Psyche,” a book by Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, has been translated into Serbian.Through the book, Spitz explores three principal psychoanalytic approaches to art. The first considers the relations between an artist’s life and work; the second focuses on the work of art itself; and the third encompasses the intricate relations between a work of art and its audience or beholders. To illustrate her discussion, Spitz draws on a variety of art forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, music, and dance.The book was originally published by Yale university Press, and has previously been translated to… Continue Reading Book by Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, Translated to Serbian

“By now, hundreds of children’s books about the Holocaust have been published—fiction and non-fiction, as well as hybrids of varying quality: books about hiding, about substitute parents, about successful and failed escapes, attempted rescues and resistance,” writes Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, in “Pedagogy in Purgatory,” her latest essay for the New Republic. “Two recent non-fiction books… reveal that the choice of any particular book—and, similarly, the decision to visit a memorial or a museum—may be less important than what surrounds the experience whenever it does occur.” Spitz goes on to review Ruth Thomson’s “Terezín: Voices… Continue Reading Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, in the New Republic

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, was mentioned in a September 18 New York Times Sunday Book Review essay entitled “The Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules.” Among the authors mentioned in the essay is Shel Silverstein, who wrote “The Giving Tree.” “[‘The Giving Tree’] was embraced by Christians as a parable of selflessness and has been denounced by feminists as a patriarchal fantasy in morality-tale clothing,” writes essayist Pamela Paul. “Ellen Handler Spitz, the author of the classic study ‘Inside Picture Books,’ wrote that the story ‘perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists… Continue Reading Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College, in the New York Times