Killer Nursery Rhymes

Introduce Your Genre

1. Identify your tentative “underappreciated” genre (or subgenre)

… The double meaning of nursery rhymes.

2. What is interesting to you about this genre? Or, why might it be significant or otherwise worth paying attention to?

… As kid’s we are introduced into literacy through nursery rhymes thinking they are these cute plots/characters/settings/ideas but after researching a bit I find that most of these stories are messed up. Parents prevent their kids from watching and playing violent and sexually active videogames but ironically are okay with children reading, repeating and making games to these these nursery rhymes which hold the same meaning behind them.

3. Tentatively, define/describe your corpus (collection of texts/examples)

… Pop goes the weasel is technically about how the poor have to pawn their clothing in order to buy food or drink

London bridge is an obvious one where the Vikings attacked Norway and destroyed the bridge during the attack

Ring around the rosie was about the plague “ashes” or “a-tishoo” and falling down was supposed to mimic sneezing and eventually dying from the disease

Jack and Jill  Louis XVI of France, who was deposed and beheaded in 1793 (lost his crown), and his Queen Marie Antoinette (who came tumbling after),

4. Provide links (and/or titles) of five samples. (Try to gather samples from more than one “place” [or type] in order to obtain a diverse and accurate representation of the genre. For now, choose samples without significant deviations).

… https://www.sporcle.com/blog/2017/08/real-meaning-behind-ring-around-the-rosie/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JDUtHwqeos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_Goes_the_Weasel

http://mentalfloss.com/article/55035/dark-origins-11-classic-nursery-rhymes

https://www.grunge.com/23605/dark-history-behind-7-classic-nursery-rhymes/

 

Describe the Context

1. Setting: Where (in what context or medium) does the genre appear? How and when is it used? With what other genres does this genre interact? How?

… This genre appears in school classrooms, kids tv shows, at home when the parents try to teach kids, books, daycare, Sunday school ect.. a kids learning environment.  Normally it is used in a sense to entertain the child or to teach the child early literacy skills.

2. Subject: What topics, issues, ideas, etc. are common to this genre? When people use this genre, what are they communicating about?

…Death, disease, historical dark times, sexual activities They report on very dark events that take care of the past but also create this cutesy fantasy world for the kid to start building his/her own imagination. Some nursery rhymes are seen a cute rhyme to teach a kid a chore but have a double meaning of sexual history ect.. Others are just imagination builders but have a double meaning history of death of some messed up king who slaughtered his wives when he was mad. It’s like horror stories/ violent stories for kids.

3. Writers: Who writes the texts in this genre? Are multiple writers possible? What roles do they perform? What characteristics must writers of this genre possess? Under what circumstances do writers write the genre (e.g., in teams, on a computer, in a rush, for their profession? for fun?)?

… The writers themselves are not fully known as these stories developed in the early medieval times when a lot of dark stuff happened mostly to do with dying and perversion. Researchers have narrowed the timelines down to medieval times or early colonial times. Kids may have seen actions and made rhymes during these time periods and these nursery rhymes just traveled throughout the generations. Kids watch and create and it just travels

4. Readers: Who reads the texts in this genre? Is there more than one type of reader for this genre? What roles do they perform? What characteristics must readers of this genre possess? Under what circumstances do readers read the genre (e.g., at their leisure, on the run, in waiting rooms)?

…  Normally the readers read these texts in order to teach or learn. The reading level is an easy entry level to teach children just starting to learn how to read or to start building their imagination. A lot of the time a parent/ teaching being is involved as kids at a young age do not just pick up books and try and read. I mean if I had to define a child who would read nursery rhymes based on characteristics, I suppose he/she would be illiterate, a newcomer to imagination/ short attention span/ just beginning to grasp talking/ a child… Or it could be an adult trying to find the right way to parent not trying to introduce the kids into messed up things like murder and disease and ultimately falling into the irony that these stories are messed up.

5. Exigency/Purpose(s): Why do writers write this genre, and why do readers read it? What purposes does the genre fulfill for the people who use it?

… I suppose the writers wrote the genre as a sense of recording what they saw. Kids don’t fully understand the gravity of a situation and just repeat what the see in clever ways in order to mold a scenario to their situation. It also could be parents who taught the children these rhymes in order to explain to their kids the situation in an innocent way. Regardless this genre is not used in modern times how it was when it originally was created. Now we mold these horrid stories to be cute rhymes to teach kids how to read and understand literature.