Emeline Brunet

LB14

Children’s stories : make an intercultural analysis using parameters, comparisons

The study of creative writings of different countries permits to understand the culture of the population concerned. We will compare some American and French children’s stories in order to identify some characteristics of their culture. The analysis will be based on four stories : The little engine that could, The little red hen, La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin and Le chêne et le Roseau. First of all, the most obvious difference between American stories and French ones is the end. Indeed, The little engine that could ends well as she manages to pull her train whereas in La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, the goat dies at the end. This is a good example of the optimism which characterizes Americans, opposed to the French pessimism, which we can find also in Le chêne et le Roseau as the oak is uprooted because of the wind. We can also notice that there is a moral in almost each story. It is very common in children’s stories, it is used in order to teach “the good and the bad” to children. Here it is used in The little red hen as in La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin : the duck and the goose don’t deserve to eat the bread because they didn’t help the hen to make it ; the little goat is punished because she disobeyed her owner. Moreover, we can observe that there are a lot of references and metaphors in French stories : “le cabri d’Esméralda” which refers to the novel “Notre Dame de Paris” by Victor Hugo ; “tu te rappelles, Gringoire ?” refers to the same novel ; “celui de qui la tête au ciel était voisine, et dont les pieds touchaient à l’empire des morts” is a metaphor for the oak. All those references show that French works are generally implicit and that French culture is supposed to be known by everyone. On the contrary, American works are very explicit as we can see in both stories we are analyzing : there are a lot of repetitions when describing the steam engine’s actions ; each answer to the hen’s questions is clearly written even if the goose and the duck say the same thing.

1

Emeline Brunet

LB14

To conclude, we saw some parameters which permit to differentiate and describe the American and French culture. Thanks to the analysis of four children’s stories, we noticed that Americans are optimistic and explicit which is a sign of low context culture whereas French are pessimistic and implicit so France has a high context culture.

422 words

2