CCBC-Net Archives
[CCBC-Net] Hide and Seek
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:17:35 -0500
While this conversation has been energetic, stimulating and, i think, very productive, it has tended to focus on just the one aspect of my concerns in The Hidden Adult, and I wouldn't want those who haven't read the book to be unaware of the other ways in which the book explores its topic. I thought,then, that I might encourage discussion of a few other facets of the argument by repeating here the definition of children's literature I emerged with after my consideration of the texts for children and the body of criticism of children's literature i investigate in the book. Here it is:
> Children's literature--the literature published specifically for
> audiences of children and therefore produced in terms of adult ideas
> about children, is a distinct and definable genre of literature,
> with characteristics that emerge from enduring adult ideas about
> childhood and that have consequently remained stable over the
> stretch of time in which thus literature has been produced. Those
> ideas are inherently ambivalent, and therefore the literature is
> ambivalent. It offers children both what adults think children will
> like and what adults want them to need, but does so always in order
> to satisfy adults needs in regard to children. If offers what
> children presumably like by describing characters and telling
> stories that fulfill theoretically childlike wishes for power and
> independence. It fulfills real adult needs and children's presumed
> needs by working to colonize children--imagining a fictional child
> reader as a model for actual child readers to adopt. But its
> imagined child reader is divided, both teachable and incorrigible,
> savage and innocent--eternally ambivalent. It possesses a double
> vision of childhood, simultaneously both celebrating and denigrating
> both childhood desire and adult knowledge, and therefore,
> simultaneously protecting children from adult knowledge and working
> to teach it to them. It is both conservative and subversive, and
> subverts both its conservatism and its own subversiveness. It finds
> its models in literary forms of earlier times, especially the fairy
> tale and the pastoral idyll--sophisticated versions of less
> sophisticated forms. It central characters are children or childlike
> beings, and its main concern is the meaning and value of being
> childlike as understood by adults. It implies (or hides) a
> relationship between an adult narrator and a child narratee. It
> describes events from what purports to be a childlike point of view
> in order to teach children to occupy or enact that childlike point
> of view. It is an apparently simple literature in which adults leave
> things out--tell children less than the adults know themselves,
> especially about sexuality. It is a plot-oriented literature that
> shows rather than tells. But it implies more than it says--
> sublimates deeper and subtler adult knowledge in an unspoken but
> clearly present shadow text necessarily available to all its
> readers, both adults and children. It tends to be utopian in that it
> imagines childhood innocence as utopian, but its plots tend to place
> child characters in unchildlike situations that deprive them of
> their innocence. It is nevertheless hopeful and optimistic in tone,
> and tells stories with what purport to be happy endings, as child or
> childlike characters purportedly achieve maturity by retreating from
> adult experience and accepting adult protection and limiting adult
> ideas about their own childlikeness. It characters achieve innocence
> after having experience. It tends to represent visions of childhood
> pleasing to adults in terms of images and ideas of home, and its
> happy endings often involves returning to or arriving at what is
> presented as home. It is binary oppositional in structure and in
> theme. Its stories tend to have two main settings, each of which
> represents one of a pair of central opposites. Its protagonists tend
> to represent combinations of pairs of characteristics that tend more
> usually in the world of discourse outside these texts to function
> separately and in opposition to each other. It is ambivalently
> unable to dismiss either half of each of its pair of binaries. Its
> texts are internally repetitive and/or variational in form and
> content, and tend to operate as repetitions and/or variations of
> other texts in the genre.
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
Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 12:17:35 PM CDT
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:17:35 -0500
While this conversation has been energetic, stimulating and, i think, very productive, it has tended to focus on just the one aspect of my concerns in The Hidden Adult, and I wouldn't want those who haven't read the book to be unaware of the other ways in which the book explores its topic. I thought,then, that I might encourage discussion of a few other facets of the argument by repeating here the definition of children's literature I emerged with after my consideration of the texts for children and the body of criticism of children's literature i investigate in the book. Here it is:
> Children's literature--the literature published specifically for
> audiences of children and therefore produced in terms of adult ideas
> about children, is a distinct and definable genre of literature,
> with characteristics that emerge from enduring adult ideas about
> childhood and that have consequently remained stable over the
> stretch of time in which thus literature has been produced. Those
> ideas are inherently ambivalent, and therefore the literature is
> ambivalent. It offers children both what adults think children will
> like and what adults want them to need, but does so always in order
> to satisfy adults needs in regard to children. If offers what
> children presumably like by describing characters and telling
> stories that fulfill theoretically childlike wishes for power and
> independence. It fulfills real adult needs and children's presumed
> needs by working to colonize children--imagining a fictional child
> reader as a model for actual child readers to adopt. But its
> imagined child reader is divided, both teachable and incorrigible,
> savage and innocent--eternally ambivalent. It possesses a double
> vision of childhood, simultaneously both celebrating and denigrating
> both childhood desire and adult knowledge, and therefore,
> simultaneously protecting children from adult knowledge and working
> to teach it to them. It is both conservative and subversive, and
> subverts both its conservatism and its own subversiveness. It finds
> its models in literary forms of earlier times, especially the fairy
> tale and the pastoral idyll--sophisticated versions of less
> sophisticated forms. It central characters are children or childlike
> beings, and its main concern is the meaning and value of being
> childlike as understood by adults. It implies (or hides) a
> relationship between an adult narrator and a child narratee. It
> describes events from what purports to be a childlike point of view
> in order to teach children to occupy or enact that childlike point
> of view. It is an apparently simple literature in which adults leave
> things out--tell children less than the adults know themselves,
> especially about sexuality. It is a plot-oriented literature that
> shows rather than tells. But it implies more than it says--
> sublimates deeper and subtler adult knowledge in an unspoken but
> clearly present shadow text necessarily available to all its
> readers, both adults and children. It tends to be utopian in that it
> imagines childhood innocence as utopian, but its plots tend to place
> child characters in unchildlike situations that deprive them of
> their innocence. It is nevertheless hopeful and optimistic in tone,
> and tells stories with what purport to be happy endings, as child or
> childlike characters purportedly achieve maturity by retreating from
> adult experience and accepting adult protection and limiting adult
> ideas about their own childlikeness. It characters achieve innocence
> after having experience. It tends to represent visions of childhood
> pleasing to adults in terms of images and ideas of home, and its
> happy endings often involves returning to or arriving at what is
> presented as home. It is binary oppositional in structure and in
> theme. Its stories tend to have two main settings, each of which
> represents one of a pair of central opposites. Its protagonists tend
> to represent combinations of pairs of characteristics that tend more
> usually in the world of discourse outside these texts to function
> separately and in opposition to each other. It is ambivalently
> unable to dismiss either half of each of its pair of binaries. Its
> texts are internally repetitive and/or variational in form and
> content, and tend to operate as repetitions and/or variations of
> other texts in the genre.
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
Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 12:17:35 PM CDT
