John Cech is an award-winning teacher and public lecturer.   He has presented a wide range of graduate and undergraduate university courses, as well as invited seminars and public workshops on the creative process and writing for children.  John’s goal is to try to  look at subjects in fresh, innovative, interdisciplinary ways.

The following is a sampling of his courses.

The Course of Love

What is this thing called love?

      -- Cole Porter

I swept the marble chambers,

But you sent me down below.

You kept me from believing

Until you let me know:

That I am not the one who loves –

It’s love that chooses me.

                                                         -- Leonard Cohen

One of the most permanent, seemingly omnipresent and, arguably most important themes of world literature (and films and music and art) is love, in one of its many incarnations.  For most of us, love is a mystery, a miracle, a passion, a sudden and remarkable transformation in our otherwise ordinary lives.  How does it happen?  Why does it happen?  When or where or to whom does it happen?  “Who wrote the book of love?” the Monotones asked in their hit from 1957.  And we still wonder about that today.  This fall, we will look at some possible answers to these and many other enigmas as we follow the course of love from its ancient origins to the present, and through the myriad forms that expressions of love take.  This course will put you in touch with works that are familiar and unexpected, with stories as old as our most ancient civilizations and with those that were written and performed yesterday. 

Fairy Tales, Psyche,  Culture

The Cultures of Childhood

We usually don't link the words "children" and "culture" together. The latter is thought of as somethings serious, lofty, essential; while the former is generally regarded as disposable, insignificant, and dispensable. And when these two terms are combined, "culture" is usually singular. The purpose of this course is to explore not only the connections between culture and childhood and their eternal ties, but also to consider the plurality of these cultures and childhoods. For though there are fundamental similarities that nearly all children share, the social circumstances and the developmental experiences are very different for a child who grows up to be veiled in one part of the world, and a child in another who is allowed to hold wild rumpusses in the family room, like Max in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Childhoods, as we shall see, are dependent upon historical and material facts, social customs, and mythic configurations. But children and childhoods may also be a source of dramatic change and paradigmatic shifts, for cultures, and for the individuals who people and create them.

Sendak:  Angels and Wild Things

    This seminar focuses on the work of the renowned author/illustrator Maurice Sendak who is generally regarded as the central figure in what has sometimes been called the second Golden Age of children's literature that began in the United States in the 1950s. This exploration of Sendak's many works -- from picture books to his productions for stage and screen -- will examine the evolution of his distinctive, individual styles and vision as well as the place of his work in the larger contexts of American cultural history and the history of children's books. Special attention will be paid to the works that Sendak both wrote and illustrated, especially to his picture book trilogy of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There.

Other Recent  Courses

Childhood, Culture, Creativity

  A graduate seminar that probes the connections between how we construct our cultural ideas of childhood (in and through film, literature, toys, games, music, and other “texts”) and the kinds of works of the imagination that we create for and about the children who inhabit this world.  The seminar fuses the historical and the experimental, the received and the innovative, and it relies on the creative openness and initiatives of the participants.  One of the concerns we will have in the course is to look at those boundaries that have been drawn, arbitrarily or consciously, to define children's books, and thus what creative works we believe are important to bring into the lives of young people. We will look at "classics" as well as unusual works that are testing accepted assumptions. Throughout the term, along with examining these texts from various critical perspectives,  we will also be responding to them in creative ways, producing works that build imaginatively on these possibilities.

Literature for Adolescents

This course is designed to provide you with a survey of some major figures, historical trends, and critical approaches to that relatively new field of literature that occupies the shifting, transitional ground between works for children and adults.  We will look at a broad range of genres and styles intended for or chosen by the adolescent reader, beginning with some canonical “classics” from the mid-twentieth century, and ending with some innovative novels from our own literary present.  Taken together, these works will raise many of the questions (psychological, social, philosophical) in our discussions that are asked by adolescents themselves about their own challenging, demanding, and often defining experiences.  A principle interest of the course will be to examine the ways in which successive generations have “constructed their ideas of the adolescent through a variety of cultural forms, among them:  literature, film, television, music, and, most recently, the internet.

Spring 2009

Children’s Literature

"To understand our attachment to the world, it is necessary to add a childhood, our childhood to each archetype. We cannot love water, fire, the tree without putting a love into them, a friendship which goes back to our childhood. We love them with childhood.. . . we love them in a new found childhood, in a childhood reanimated with that childhood which is latent in each of us."

                                                                      GASTON BACHELARD, THE POETICS OF REVERIE

   Children’s literature has become, in recent years, one of the most dynamic areas of publishing and media production.  Currently, one of the wealthiest people in the world is a writer of children’s books, and each year films drawn from stories for children or adolescents are among the biggest box office hits.  There is even a television channel devoted to the entertainment of babies.  Children’s literature has, of course, been with us from the beginning and is the oldest and first form of literature that we experience.  This course is meant to take you on a journey through this essential part of our literature -- its history, genres, major figures,  and some of its more familiar and celebrated works.

From Hermes to Harry Potter:  Myths, Archetypes, and Childhood

                           The child is all that is abandoned and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning and the triumphal end.  The “eternal child” in man is an  indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap,  and a divine prerogative.

            CARL JUNG

This course explores the range of the mythic paradigms that have  been with us, often for millennia, in our various representations of  the child. It examines such fundamental archetypes of the child as  those expressions of him/her as a redemptive source and a creative genius,  as a wiley trickster and an innocent observer, as a “bad seed” and  a symbol of futurity, as a heroic magician and as a rebel, with and without  causes. This constellation of meanings attached to the child will be  approached through readings in mythology and depth psychology, through  films and other media, and through a number of famous “touchstone” works  of children’s literature.

Fall 2008

Children, Culture and Violence

    Large and small acts of violence have touched children 's lives since the beginnings of civilization. At times this violence is careless and accidental, at times it is maliciously intentional, and at many times it has been regarded as an accepted part of growing up. Representations of the violence to which children are exposed is a current that runs through nursery rhymes and lullabies; fairy tales and fantasies; games, toys, and any number of other genres of popular culture. Inescapably, violence is also found in the facts of young peoples' lives: in our families and schools, our neighborhoods and larger communities, including the global village. This course will examine the "origins" of violence vis-a-vis children in myth, psychology, and history. It will explore many of the more familiar forms in which this violence occurs and in which it is represented culturally - from picture books, comics, realistic and fantasy fiction, and traditional games to movies, rap, sports, and the digital world. Throughout, we will be interested in engaging a number of important questions (psychological, philosophical, historical, creative) about the shifting cultural dynamics that affect our attitudes toward violence and the ways that it touches the youngest among us as well as it has our own younger selves.

Fall 2009

Sir Eward Burne-Jones, Cupid Delivering Psyche (ca. 1871)

Literature for Young Children

This course is meant to be an introduction to and an exploration of the child's earliest experiences with literature, from birth until his or her first years in school. We will be interested in the relationships between children's books and oral literature and the imaginative, aesthetic, moral, and psychological growth of their young audiences. The course is designed to involve you actively, analytically, and creatively in the study of this subject. You will be encouraged to develop a first hand sense of how some forms of children's literature are created; you will be asked to look at works for children with a critical eye; and you will be urged to do your own field work, testing assertions, questions, and ideas that are raised in the course. Literature for Young Children is intended for the children in your classrooms, the children in your home, and the child who still lives somewhere within you.