From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:26:23 -0500

I just wanted to make it clear that when i wrote this I didn't intend to close down the discussion of manipulation, etc.--I just thought it might be interesting to also include some other aspects of The Hidden Adult in the discussion, if anyone is interested in doing so. I'll happily take a stab at responding to any aspect of these ideas anybody wants me to.

Perry

On 25-Jul-09, at 12:17 PM, Perry Nodelman wrote:

> 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
>
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_____________ 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 03:26:23 PM CDT