Dr. Seuss: American Icon (review)
2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.2005.0004
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoReviewed by: Dr. Seuss: American Icon George Bodmer (bio) Dr. Seuss: American Icon. By Philip Nel. New York: Continuum, 2004. Almost without ads or commercials, I can sense when a new Disney animated offering is on the way, as I begin to feel surrounded at the grocery with figurines and new characters on lunch boxes, signaling the Disney accessory juggernaut is getting ramped up. Likewise, it doesn't take much to convince us that in recent years, with two awful live-action movies and posthumous lithographs for sale, that Dr. Seuss is the subject of a major commercial push. It comes as a relief, therefore, to read Philip Nel's chapter "The Disneyfication of Dr. Seuss: Faithful to Profit, One Hundred Percent?" in Dr. Seuss: American Icon that while copyright law has a fixed time limit, trademark protection extends as long as the products are in manufacture. Therefore, it is in the interests of Dr. Seuss Enterprises to come up with commercial uses of the characters to prevent their falling into public domain. And even though Dr. Seuss himself was interested in turning a buck, since his death in 1991, it's hard to think he would be on board with all that's been done in his name. Nevertheless, the arcane evolution of copyright and trademark law (which Disney has had a profound effect upon), which this chapter explicates, tells us a lot about the state of children's literature today. [End Page 120] There is no doubt that this book is the result of an incredible amount of research, but that raises the question of just whom the book is intended for. There are 198 pages of text, followed by another 103 pages of notes, index, and annotated bibliography, which might indicate scholars, yet the author includes in a discussion of Dr. Seuss' poetics a box which defines feet, iamb ("The adjective is 'iambic'" [17]), and pentameter. There is also much here that is hard-to-read, a result, I guess, of that incredible research, paragraphs and paragraphs of facts, statistics, lists of characters, illustrators, and dates. For example, in describing a posthumous Seuss product, he writes: If it does at least acknowledge its "adapted" status on the cover, Oh Baby, the Places You'll Go! takes a step beyond the aphoristic Seuss, creating a bland pastiche of Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Happy Birthday to You!, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, The Sneetches and Other Stories, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who!, Green Eggs and Ham, Scrambled Eggs Super!, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, McElligot's Pool, Hop on Pop, On Beyond Zebra!, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, and including references to Daisy-Head Mayzie, Hunches in Bunches, and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, thrown in for good measure. (154) This is not an isolated instance, but one of many. It is as if the author became the victim of his research and was unable to use mere examples, to prioritize his information. This is the job of a researcher, to seek out the material, sum it up for us, and draw a conclusion. His thesis in this book is that Dr. Seuss has achieved the status of "American icon" (few would argue), and the book ". . . approaches its subject from six perspectives—poetry, politics, art, biography, marketing, and influences—because I consider these to be the defining features of Dr. Seuss's work" (14). His first chapter, "U.S. Laureate of Nonsense: A Seussian Poetics," gets the ball rolling and shows what will be the strategy for his argument. Not only is Dr. Seuss not fully appreciated for his writing, but the author of this volume is here to set us straight. Rarely have I encountered a book of criticism that is based so much upon the author's sense of himself. He writes, "A particularly striking feature of Seuss criticism is that almost no one writes more than one article on Dr. Seuss" (11). The note to this reads, "The sole exceptions...
Referência(s)