From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:51:57 -0500

Looking it over again, I see that last post of mine was pretty depressing--too depressing, maybe? Let me try to think of some ways in which all of children's literature always might not be dangerously counter-productive from beginning to end.

So: it's characteristically and inherently manipulative. Well, yes, I think it is. But:

First, in good texts for young people it's fun as a reader to be manipulated. The rich experience they offer of a childhood utopia where childhood innocence is always better than adult cynicism and pessimism and things always work out very well for the children we care about can be very, very satisfying to read about, for both children and adults. It's like chocolate, maybe--a delight to taste, but too much eaten too inattentively can make you sick (and tired of chocolate). And if you're controlling how much chocolate you eat, then why waste your chocolate ration on bad chocolate? Concentrate on the really tasty quality stuff--let yourself be manipulated ingeniously

Second, the chocolate can still taste good even to those who know how sick it can make you, and who eat it carefully and warily. So, too, manipulative books; you can enjoy their attempts to manipulate just as much if you know how manipulative they are and actively work against letting them manipulate you too much. It can be a game with two equal players, not just one manipulater and one completely gullible manipulee. The more critical thinking the better, for human beings of all ages and stages. Down with thoughtless and unquestioning responses. Down, I say! Let children be wise enough to be able enjoy the same kind of nostalgia for what we identify as childlike innocence as adults do when they read children's books.

Third, some of what we've been calling "manipulation" is really just plain old teaching, and some of what adults try to teach children is things they should legitimately be taught. Sometimes we let our faith in the wonderful individual freedom of each and all to get in the way if our sense of responsibility to help children find ways to cope with being alive, as children and in their future life as adults. It's an adult duty to manipulate children--i.e., to socialize them, to help them become capable of living in the culture they inhabit and understanding the world.

And fourth, the really great children's books, i think, tend to undermine their own apparent manipulations, to say both what they seem to teach and its opposite. Like the books I admire that I named yesterday: Peter Rabbit is both about the bad things that happen when you disobey your mother and the satisfyingly heroic adventures you can have when you do. Charlotte's Web is about both enduring friendship and the ways affections come to an end (Fern's transfer of her attention away from Charlotte), about both triumphing over impending death and having to give in to it. And so on. Really good writers for children can always find a way of both seeming to meet the conventions and typical characteristics of children's books and at the same time defying them, or being ambivalent about them. I suspect that's why so many adults write essays about books like Peter Rabbit or Charlotte's Web or Where the Wild Things Are; they mean much more and are much less definite about it than they at first appear to, so that different readers can interpret them not only differently but often, oppositely. (I say more about this in the last section of The Hidden Adult.)

So manipulation, yes. Bad for children and other human beings? Not necessarily.

Stepping gingerly away from the brink of doom, Perry

_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/

Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k

On 17-Jul-09, at 4:13 PM, Perry Nodelman wrote:

> On 17-Jul-09, at 12:31 PM, Megan Schliesman wrote:
>>
>>
>> Perry Nodelman wrote:
>>
>> "I find myself having to admit that some of the things i like about
>> those likeable texts are exactly the ways in which they work to
>> manipulate their readers, including me."
>>
>> Perry, I'm curious about whether you see this manipulation as being
>> conscious, or whether it has become subconsciously imbedded in our
>> understanding of the genre, so that authors and artists may in fact
>> be--at least at times--unwitting participants. Of course, we can all
>> think of books where the manipulation is obvious rather than artful,
>> but
>> it is those artful books--the ones that manage to be well written,
>> sometimes beautifully written, and child-centered--that I find
>> myself thinking in terms of this idea of the manipulation of the
>> child reader.
>
> Hmm. I'm wondering if it's a combination of both conscious
> manipulation and unconscious embedding.
>
> A lot of it is, of course, conscious. We do tend almost always to
> talk about children's books almost exclusively in terms of their
> pedagogical effects on children--and not always just in relation to
> their obvious didactic contents. For instance, we say things like,
> "It's a funny book, so it'll help children to develop a sense of
> humour," or, "it's a fun read, which will encourage children to think
> positively abut literacy" (University students I taught in children's
> lit courses were always saying things like that, and I hard to read
> then that a good enough reason for children to read a fun book would
> be simply that it was fun.).
>
> Also, most of our endless worrying about which books to keep out of
> children's hands is a concern with what the books might teach or how
> they might manipulate pliable young minds. Our current North American
> discourse about children and books is almost a hundred percent about
> how the books can or should or shouldn't or will or won't manipulate
> young readers. And when I say "our" here, i don't mean just adults--
> how often have you heard a child say something like, "It's a good
> book, but not for little kids younger than me because they might get
> nightmares from it." These children have already learned the
> acceptable way to talk about children's books--in terms of going
> through all the reasons for keeping them out of vulnerable younger
> hands before actually recommending them as safely okay.
>
> And in that context, then, it'd be almost impossible for anyone with
> much knowledge of children's books not to be engaged in unconscious
> thinking about how the books might effect or manipulate young readers,
> without any even awareness of doing so. From its beginning,
> children's literature has been defined as a literature which both
> educates young readers and, just as significantly, leaves things out--
> things children ought not to know about in order to preserve their
> childlikeness. If you know your business as a writer or editor or
> publisher or library purchaser, then, and you know what makes a
> children's book a children's book and what makes a saleable children's
> book, then you're probably unconsciously operating with ideas about
> children's literature based on your previous experience of it that
> emerge from those primal concerns. (Your own description, Megan, of
> books that "well written, sometimes beautifully written, and child-
> centered," for instance--how much are our idea of good writing in
> texts for young people tied up with ideas of suitable simplicity, and
> how much is "child-centered" understood in terms of how well the book
> evokes the right kind of utopian childhood?)
>
> As far as I can see, all the qualities characteristic or even just
> typical of texts for young people that I describe in The Hidden Adult
> emerge from and relate to efforts to manipulate of child readers, to
> create a safe version of childhood for children to imagine as being
> where they are and who they are. As I say in The Hidden Adult,
> children's literature is like the home that so many of its
> conventional texts insist is the best place for children to be--a
> haven protected against the dangers of the bigger world out there.
> And in our time, especially, childhood is increasingly understood by
> far too many parents, teachers, librarians, and others as a state of
> constantly being under siege by the dark forces of out there--and
> therefore, for many children nowadays, a prison of constant adult
> surveillance and never being very far away from the world-views of the
> Disney folk and their cronies in the kid's entertainment biz and never
> going outside to play unsupervised with your friends and without an
> appropriately age-rated video game in your hand. Childhood IS, more
> and more constantly, a state of being under authority and
> manipulation? And so children's literature is that, too?
>
> Cheerily on the edge of doom,
> Perry
> _____________
> Perry Nodelman
> http://pernodel.wordpress.com/
>
> Book Trailers:
> The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA
> The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis
> The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
>
>
>
>> Perry Nodelman wrote:
>>
>> "I find myself having to admit that some of the things i like about
>> those likeable texts are exactly the ways in which they work to
>> manipulate their readers, including me."
>>
>> Perry, I'm curious about whether you see this manipulation as being
>> conscious, or whether it has become subconsciously imbedded in our
>> understanding of the genre, so that authors and artists may in fact
>> be--at least at times--unwitting participants. Of course, we can all
>> think of books where the manipulation is obvious rather than artful,
>> but
>> it is those artful books--the ones that manage to be well written,
>> sometimes beautifully written, and child-centered--that I find myself
>> thinking in terms of this idea of the manipulation of the child
>> reader.
>>
>> Your discussion of A Very Special House by Maurice Sendak suggests a
>> concsiousness to this. Would you say that is typically true?
>>
>> And what do others of you-- readers, and writers or illustrators--
>> think
>> about this?
>>
>> Megan
>>
>>
>> --
>> Megan Schliesman, Librarian
>> Cooperative Children's Book Center
>> School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
>> 600 N. Park Street, Room 4290
>> Madison, WI 53706
>>
>> 608/262-9503
>> schliesman at education.wisc.edu
>>
>> www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> CCBC-Net mailing list
>> CCBC-Net at lists.education.wisc.edu
>> Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe...
>> http://lists.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
>
> _______________________________________________
> CCBC-Net mailing list
> CCBC-Net at lists.education.wisc.edu
> Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe...
> http://lists.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
Received on Fri 17 Jul 2009 08:51:57 PM CDT