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From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:27:54 -0500
I'm intrigued by the various comments from writers--especially since I do some writing for children myself. Thanks, Kristen, Sheila, and Valerie, and after reading your messages, I thought I'd say a little more about conscious and unconscious manipulation on the part of writers.
For those who haven't read The Hidden Adult, I talk there about what what writers and editors do, in their involvement with children's books, in terms of the sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu's idea of fields of production. Those who are successful in a specific field of production, such as, say, children's literature, have what Bourdieu calls a habitus, a sort of expertise or feel for the game. The habitus includes an awareness of actual rules or conventions--like knowing not to submit a 5000 word picture book text to an editor, or not having your mistreated orphan hero eventually find happiness as a dedicated opium smuggler. But it also includes a kind of unconscious ability to act in ways that bring success in the field--an awareness, learned more from experience of the field and its previous products than from conscious teaching, of what works and what doesn't and who matters and who doesn't, and so on.
As I'm thinking about it, then, a writer with an appropriate habitus for the field of children's literature production knows all the spoken and unspoken aspects of a manuscript that are or aren't likely to bring it success as a book for children. And my argument in The Hidden Adult is, in part, that the desirable aspects--typical characteristics of writing for young people by adults--can be seen as ways in which the texts actually do their main job, which is both to offer children an image of childhood adults feel comfortable with and want children to share and also, often if not always, to teach child readers various specific ways of becoming more adult; less egocentric and more empathetic, maybe, or more aware of what happened in World War II. So even an author who didn't want to further those goals would nevertheless, if he or she had written a successful book, be replicating these characteristics, and therefore, logically speaking, also replicating the manipulative effects they were originally developed to further.
But a successful writer with a habitus for children's literature who produces texts with these typical characteristics might well not be aware of how the characteristics operate in the service of those main goals of writing for children. So writers might well be unconscious of ways in which their texts might work to manipulate readers. Indeed, I'd be surprised if a successful children's writer nowadays admitted even to him- or herself to having written a novel that was deliberately and consciously didactic. Part of the habitus that makes for success currently in the field of children's literature production is to underplay or deny didactic elements in texts and insist they accurately represent how children think or imagine (as, for instance, A Hole Is to Dig does, in its efforts to promote one particular adult's way of imagining as childlike).
I feel free to say all that because I am also myself unwilling to see ways in which my own novels for children might be manipulative or didactic. They seem to me to be stories meant purely to entertain, as Kristen says hers are. (Well, maybe not my Dear Canada book, Not a Nickel to Spare, but I do think even that book is more significantly entertaining than educational. Or so I hope.)
On the other hand, though,I've been having some interesting discussions lately with Carol Matas, my collaborator in the Ghosthunters trilogy we're currently working on (The Proof that Ghosts Exist and The Curse of the Evening Eye have come out, and we've just finished writing The Hunt for the Haunted Elephant, scheduled for publication next spring--Key Porter in Canada, distributed by PGW in the US.) We've been speculating that the books are less successful than they might have been because they are, in fact, merely entertaining. We made the dumb mistake of not putting a therapeutic element in them, not setting them up so that they conform to, as Sheila says in her message today, "the way books are expected to provide positive role models for kids." We've been thinking we might have had more readers if we'd made our central characters more upset about the death of their grandparent and in need of coming to terms it, or if one of them had anorexia or an experience with as bully or something like that, and learned to cope better. Instead, they're just slightly eccentric but basically happy people totally focussed on dealing with the annoyance of ghosts and trying to solve a mystery. These books are in fact less obviously manipulative than the conventional model of a children's novel would suggest, and so, we're speculating, less successful: adults with a children's lit habitus just don't feel comfortable abut buying them for children when there are so many more obviously helpful books to spend their budgets on. I guess my habitus as a writer of fiction ain't what it should be, eh?
But I bet some perceptive critical reader not as personally involved in these Ghosthunter books as I am or Carol is would have no trouble finding manipulative ideological content in them. My theory suggests it's bound to be there even if i can't see it, just as long as the books do satisfy the conventions enough to allow them to be published by a reputable publisher as children's books--which they have been. The hidden adult, in this case, is hidden from me, but not necessarily from others.
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 19-Jul-09, at 2:08 PM, valhobbs wrote:
> I, too, have been following the discussion with interest. Like
> Butcher, I too am a kit lit reader, author, mother and former
> teacher. I'd like to add that when I write I do my best to become my
> characters--so much so that breaking out of character is sometimes
> difficult. That is not to say that I always do it well, or that I
> completely submerge my adult self, but there is never the intention
> to manipulate in any way or for any reason; in fact, if any
> manipulation is being done it's probably coming from my "inner
> child", trying to have her say (!) And metaphors/themes/symbols, if
> forced, never work. They arise organically in fiction as they do in
> "real" life, only, one hopes, a bit more creatively.
>
> Valerie Hobbs
> www.valeriehobbs.com
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sun 19 Jul 2009 08:27:54 PM CDT
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:27:54 -0500
I'm intrigued by the various comments from writers--especially since I do some writing for children myself. Thanks, Kristen, Sheila, and Valerie, and after reading your messages, I thought I'd say a little more about conscious and unconscious manipulation on the part of writers.
For those who haven't read The Hidden Adult, I talk there about what what writers and editors do, in their involvement with children's books, in terms of the sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu's idea of fields of production. Those who are successful in a specific field of production, such as, say, children's literature, have what Bourdieu calls a habitus, a sort of expertise or feel for the game. The habitus includes an awareness of actual rules or conventions--like knowing not to submit a 5000 word picture book text to an editor, or not having your mistreated orphan hero eventually find happiness as a dedicated opium smuggler. But it also includes a kind of unconscious ability to act in ways that bring success in the field--an awareness, learned more from experience of the field and its previous products than from conscious teaching, of what works and what doesn't and who matters and who doesn't, and so on.
As I'm thinking about it, then, a writer with an appropriate habitus for the field of children's literature production knows all the spoken and unspoken aspects of a manuscript that are or aren't likely to bring it success as a book for children. And my argument in The Hidden Adult is, in part, that the desirable aspects--typical characteristics of writing for young people by adults--can be seen as ways in which the texts actually do their main job, which is both to offer children an image of childhood adults feel comfortable with and want children to share and also, often if not always, to teach child readers various specific ways of becoming more adult; less egocentric and more empathetic, maybe, or more aware of what happened in World War II. So even an author who didn't want to further those goals would nevertheless, if he or she had written a successful book, be replicating these characteristics, and therefore, logically speaking, also replicating the manipulative effects they were originally developed to further.
But a successful writer with a habitus for children's literature who produces texts with these typical characteristics might well not be aware of how the characteristics operate in the service of those main goals of writing for children. So writers might well be unconscious of ways in which their texts might work to manipulate readers. Indeed, I'd be surprised if a successful children's writer nowadays admitted even to him- or herself to having written a novel that was deliberately and consciously didactic. Part of the habitus that makes for success currently in the field of children's literature production is to underplay or deny didactic elements in texts and insist they accurately represent how children think or imagine (as, for instance, A Hole Is to Dig does, in its efforts to promote one particular adult's way of imagining as childlike).
I feel free to say all that because I am also myself unwilling to see ways in which my own novels for children might be manipulative or didactic. They seem to me to be stories meant purely to entertain, as Kristen says hers are. (Well, maybe not my Dear Canada book, Not a Nickel to Spare, but I do think even that book is more significantly entertaining than educational. Or so I hope.)
On the other hand, though,I've been having some interesting discussions lately with Carol Matas, my collaborator in the Ghosthunters trilogy we're currently working on (The Proof that Ghosts Exist and The Curse of the Evening Eye have come out, and we've just finished writing The Hunt for the Haunted Elephant, scheduled for publication next spring--Key Porter in Canada, distributed by PGW in the US.) We've been speculating that the books are less successful than they might have been because they are, in fact, merely entertaining. We made the dumb mistake of not putting a therapeutic element in them, not setting them up so that they conform to, as Sheila says in her message today, "the way books are expected to provide positive role models for kids." We've been thinking we might have had more readers if we'd made our central characters more upset about the death of their grandparent and in need of coming to terms it, or if one of them had anorexia or an experience with as bully or something like that, and learned to cope better. Instead, they're just slightly eccentric but basically happy people totally focussed on dealing with the annoyance of ghosts and trying to solve a mystery. These books are in fact less obviously manipulative than the conventional model of a children's novel would suggest, and so, we're speculating, less successful: adults with a children's lit habitus just don't feel comfortable abut buying them for children when there are so many more obviously helpful books to spend their budgets on. I guess my habitus as a writer of fiction ain't what it should be, eh?
But I bet some perceptive critical reader not as personally involved in these Ghosthunter books as I am or Carol is would have no trouble finding manipulative ideological content in them. My theory suggests it's bound to be there even if i can't see it, just as long as the books do satisfy the conventions enough to allow them to be published by a reputable publisher as children's books--which they have been. The hidden adult, in this case, is hidden from me, but not necessarily from others.
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 19-Jul-09, at 2:08 PM, valhobbs wrote:
> I, too, have been following the discussion with interest. Like
> Butcher, I too am a kit lit reader, author, mother and former
> teacher. I'd like to add that when I write I do my best to become my
> characters--so much so that breaking out of character is sometimes
> difficult. That is not to say that I always do it well, or that I
> completely submerge my adult self, but there is never the intention
> to manipulate in any way or for any reason; in fact, if any
> manipulation is being done it's probably coming from my "inner
> child", trying to have her say (!) And metaphors/themes/symbols, if
> forced, never work. They arise organically in fiction as they do in
> "real" life, only, one hopes, a bit more creatively.
>
> Valerie Hobbs
> www.valeriehobbs.com
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sun 19 Jul 2009 08:27:54 PM CDT
