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Enfranchising the Child: Picture Books, Primacy, and Discourse
Marah Gubar
Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving
Maria Nikolajeva
The Changing Aesthetics of Character in Children’s
Fiction
Catherine L. Elick
Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian Reading of C. S. Lewis’s
The
Magician’s Nephew and P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins
Roberta Seelinger Trites
The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent
Literature
Joseph T. Thomas Jr.
Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: The Poetics of Power
in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric
Catherine Addison
“So Stretched Out Huge in Length”: Reading the Extended
Simile
Jure Gantar
From Invention to Convention: A Critical View of
the Evolution of the Aside in French Neoclassical Drama
Günter Leypoldt
Raymond Carver’s “Epiphanic Moments”
The activity of being “read to” not only is an act by which adults generously reach out to children, but it is also an act of colonization. Though this is not to say that adults consciously seek to destroy an indigenous child culture, the method by which adults question a child’s interpretation of a pictorial representation, the modes of interpretation that adults impose, and the style of didactic relationship between adult “reader” and child being “read to” all result in a form of imperialism. Boosted by the eighteenth-century birth of literary consumerism, and by recognition of a part of life that could rightly be called “childhood,” the picture book has been fundamental to our modern understanding of the world. The great paradox in the disenfranchisement of the child picture-book reader lies in how, increasingly, we read the world through visual media images, but those representations, taken as “naturally generative,” are open not to one but to a multiplicity of interpretations.
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Marah Gubar, “Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving”
The popular and influential children’s author E. Nesbit sends up the conventions of children’s literature and invites her young readers to do the same. Keenly aware of the power that adults and their narratives wield over children, Nesbit coaxes young people to recognize the artificiality of the image of childhood presented to them by texts, and to accept, reject, or revise this picture as they see fit. The manufacturing of childhood can be a mutual process, she suggests, if children operate as selective, resistant readers and creative writers in their own right. More specifically, Nesbit repeatedly employs the trope of reciprocal robbery in order to encourage young people to appropriate and adapt texts just as she does.
Maria Nikolajeva, “The Changing Aesthetics
of Character in Children’s Fiction"
Character and characterization are such an obvious part of fiction
that they are very seldom discussed in critical works. Despite the postmodern
and poststructural denigration of characters, however, they are still central
in fiction; basically, we read fiction because we are interested in human
nature and human relationships as revealed through fictive characters.
Such interest is especially true about children’s fiction, even though
it, according to many critics, is usually action-oriented rather than character-oriented.
There are two aspects of the vast field that may be called an aesthetic
of character: the change in characters themselves as they are presented
in children’s literature of the past two centuries; and the change in characterization
devices, that is, the artistic means authors employ to reveal characters
to readers. The main difference lies in the rhetoric of character in children’s
versus that in general fiction.
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Catherine L. Elick, “Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian
Reading of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and P. L. Travers’s Mary
Poppins”
Although not as fully dialogic as the novels of Dostoevsky, The Magician’s
Nephew and Mary Poppins become noticeably polyphonic and carnivalesque
in those episodes in which animal characters are ascribed the capacity
for speech and the power inherent in it. In significant scenes in these
two texts, animals, humans, and other heterogeneous beings mingle in festival-like
gatherings reminiscent of Bakhtin’s conception of medieval carnival, and
out of the dissonant plurality of voices during these interactions result
suspensions of hierarchical barriers in which empowered humans lose authority
and are made to acknowledge the subject status and will of animals whose
rights they have denied. Although the worlds depicted by Lewis and Travers
may be socially stratified and hierarchical, these authors challenge both
classist and anthropocentric assumptions underlying such societies by choosing
representatives from typically oppressed groups—a working-class woman (Mary
Poppins) and a wild animal (Aslan)—as their powerful central figures.
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Roberta Seelinger Trites, “The Harry Potter
Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature”
The Harry Potter novels serve as a test case showing how Foucault’s
theories about power can be used to better understand adolescent literature.
The crux of defining adolescent literature as distinct from children’s
literature revolves around the issue of power. While growth in children’s
literature is depicted as a function of what the character has learned
about self, growth in adolescent literature is depicted as a function of
what the adolescent learns about how society curtails power. The adolescent
cannot grow without experiencing gradations between power and powerlessness.
Consequently, power is even more fundamental to the genre than growth is.
Adolescents must learn to negotiate the many institutions that shape them
and how to balance their power with their parents’ power and with the power
of authority figures in general. Finally, they must learn what portion
of power they wield because of and despite such biological imperatives
as sex and death. Adolescents are empowered by institutions and their parents
and by their knowledge of their bodies, but by offering up rules and holding
repercussions over their heads that limit their newfound freedoms, these
things also restrict them.
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Joseph T. Thomas Jr., “Mel Glenn and Arnold
Adoff: The Poetics of Power in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric”
In style and intention, the immensely popular Mel Glenn represents
the majority of North American poets writing specifically for adolescents.
By formally and thematically treating the traditional subjects in young
adult literature in rather traditional ways, Glenn ultimately disempowers
his young readers. His poems are, to borrow from Lyn Hejinian, “closed
texts” that aim toward a single reading, typically subjugating the prefabricated
representations of adolescents in his verse to adult, institutional power.
In contrast, Arnold Adoff’s Slow Dance Heart Break Blues (1995) is a surprisingly
open document. Adoff’s strikingly visual and empowering poems interrogate
dominant poetic norms, even as they themtically blur the lines between
socially constructed “normalcy” and the abnormal, the marginalized. Exploring
the spaces created when adolescents break out of their prescribed roles,
Adoff, unlike Glenn, manages to craft a place where adolescents may experience
Guy Debord’s “revolutionary moment of language,” a place that serves the
interests of adolescents with great complexity and without condescension.
Catherine Addison, “So Stretched Out Huge in
Length”: Reading the Extended Simile
This essay discusses the extended simile as an embedding device and
catalogues various types of simile in both the classical and the British
traditions. The extended simile represents a kind of embedding not previously
acknowledged by narratologists, since it does not involve a change of narrator
or focalizer. Nevertheless, its “as . . . so” tags construct a frame strong
enough to embed into the world of the main narrative matter belonging to
a totally different ontological universe. In short similes and longer ones
of the conceited and courtly varieties, the vehicle is usually subordinate
to the tenor, which is part of the main discourse. But in Homeric similes,
the vehicle’s sheer length and detail subvert this hierarchy. The reader
of a Homeric simile is lured across a boundary into a world often quite
foreign to that of the main narrative. In Homer’s own case, the foreignness
of the vehicle worlds is usually extreme, but in other epic poets the distance
between these worlds is variable and idiosyncratic.
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Jure Gantar, “From Invention to Convention:
A Critical View of the Evolution of the Aside in French Neoclassical Drama”
The aside as a traditional narrative technique depends so heavily on
the dialogue between the dramatic and the performance text that its relationship
with the audience has radically changed in the course of history. One of
the most significant transformations of the aside—from an essentially genre-less
mechanism of dramatic economy into a predominantly comic device—occurs
in seventeenth-century France. Examples from plays by Corneille, Molière,
and Racine demonstrate how the introduction of the proscenium arch in French
neoclassical theaters results not only in the conventional nature of the
aside but also in the ensuing realization of the limitations of the aside
as a means of theatrical representation.
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Günter Leypoldt, “Raymond Carver’s ‘Epiphanic
Moments’”
Raymond Carver’s use of epiphanic rhetoric is more complex and varied
than has as yet been acknowledged, for critics tend to argue either that
he eschews or subverts epiphany. In Carver’s renegotiation of the tradition,
there are four types of epiphanic moments that predominate. (1) His realist
epiphany corresponds to the use of epiphany by Tolstoy in “The Death of
Ivan Ilyich,” where the non-conceptual sudden illumination coincides with
conceptual recognition or anagnorisis. (2) By contrast, Carver’s “arrested”
epiphany renders the text thoroughly anti-realist: its centers of consciousness
realize that they are on the brink of making a tremendous discovery, but
remain far from grasping exactly what it could be. In such cases, the reader’s
sense-making is arrested along with the character’s helpless groping, so
that the “deep knowledge” below the narrated events fluctuates or is at
best ambiguous. Occasionally, Carver’s arrested epiphanies develop into
another type. (3) Ironized epiphanies are defined by a reader’s ability
to transcend a character’s limited viewpoint. At times, the discrepancy
between the character’s epistemological failure and the reader’s knowledge
is heightened to the point that the ironized epiphany turns into (4) a
comic one, a mere satirical flourish irrelevant to the text’s overall plot
closure. Carver’s variation of these four types corresponds to his oscillation
between realism and anti-realism: types (1) and (4) are marked by coherent
plots and stable meaning, type (2) by the complete breakdown of meaning,
and type (3) by a more subtle tilting towards silence, a tension maintained
by the text’s constant promise and deferral of resolution. What is intriguing
about Carver’s epiphanies, then, is how the capriciousness of the underlying
stylistic shifts renders dubious all categorizations of his work as “pre-”
or “post-” or “post-post-” or “low postmodernism.”
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