Anthony Eaton's Blog: Musings from an Outer-Spiral-Arm - Posts Tagged "nodelman"

I’m in the process at the moment of wrapping up the unit I’ve been teaching this semester – Literature Studies: Reading for 0-18. We’ve covered the construction of ‘the child’ (no, not in biological terms…) fairy tales and the role of the fantastic, ‘classic’ children’s literature, picture books and postmodernism, the problem of ‘fiction’, poetry for children, the construction of ‘Australian Identity’ in young adult literature, issues relating to the portrayal of Indigenous culture in children’s and young adult literature, and numerous other side topics along the way. All in 15 weeks.

In the final lecture, last week, I wrapped up by making ‘the case for children’s literature.’ It’s something that most people who write for children or young adults have to deal with from time to time – the perception that your writing is somehow ‘not real writing’, or the assumption that you’re only writing ‘kids stories’ until you find the time and inspiration to produce an ‘adult novel’. One of the driving outcomes of the course is breaking down this assumption and giving a new perspective on the value and importance of writing in this field. Along the way we do a lot of literary theory, some sociology, a smattering of educational psychology and, of course, a lot of reading and discussion of various books.

Anyway, a few people asked, so here’s a slightly modified version of my final lecture, edited down somewhat for blog purposes…

One of the common problems that students of this and similar courses face is that of definition: what is ‘literature for children’? How might it be defined or categorised. Is it even valid to identify it as a ‘genre’ or ‘field of study’, or do the numerous ‘grey areas’ that we have considered and looked at over the course of our studies mean that the very notion of ‘children’s literature’ as a distinct field of cultural discourse is flawed?

In considering these issues, a good starting point might be to look at the argument posed by Canadian scholar Perry Nodelman in his recent book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature:

“The simplicity of texts of children’s literature is only half the truth about them. They also possess a shadow, an unconscious – a more complex and complete understanding of the world and people that remains unspoken beyond the simple surface but provides that simple surface with comprehensibility…. That something might well be identified as nonchildlike or beyond the ken of childlike consciousness… so children’s literature can be understood as simple literature that communicates by means of reference to a complex repertoire of unspoken but implied adult knowledge.”
(Nodelman, 2009, p.206)

In his book Nodelman argues against the common thesis that children’s literature isn’t a distinct ‘genre’ in and of itself, but rather is a conglomeration of different writing types and styles. He suggests that the defining features of children’s literature need some reconsideration: He argues against the notion that ‘simplicity’ – of form, narrative, function etc… is (or should be) even considered to be a defining feature of ‘children’s and young adult literature’ (indeed, he argues that one of the key defining features of children’s literature is that it is not simple).

This is not, in and of itself, a new idea: back in 1976, in his paper The Case for Children’s Literature, Clifton Fadiman argued against the notion that its apparent ‘simplicity’ was in any way a valid ground for the dismissal of children’s literature as a field of academic study;

“The man in the street puts it in simple terms: children’s literature cannot amount to much because ‘it’s kid stuff.” The assumption here is that by nature the child is ‘inferior’ to or less than the adult. His literature must be correspondingly inferior or less. Give the kid his comic, while I read grown-up books. But does not this amiable condescension shelter a certain insecurity? As racism is the opium of the inferior mind, as sexual chauvinism is the opium of the defective male, so child patronage may be the opium of the immature adult… in certain ways the child is patently inferior but…as an imaginative being – the being who does the reading – he is neither inferior nor superior to the adult. He must be viewed as the structural anthropologist views the ‘primitive’ – with the same unsentimental respect, the same keen desire to penetrate his legitimate, complex symbol-system and idea-world.”
(Fadiman, 1976)

Children’s literature is laden with multiple ideologies, is shaped by a combination of market forces, political and social forces, vested interests. It is practiced by adults for children, moderated by adult requirements for social order, and the foundations of any given narrative for children or young adults often rest as squarely in the world of the adult as that of the child. Many of the canon texts of children’s literature are just as much cultural artefacts as they are narratives of pleasure, and from a scholarly viewpoint they can (or must) be read as much from an anthropological position – to give the scholar some contextual understanding of ‘the child’ over time - as they can (and must) be read in their role as a source of pleasure for children.

As with any other form of literature, children’s literature is as much shaped by the reader as the writer: the final narrative isn’t produced solely from the imagination or agenda of the writer, but is that produced by the meeting of reader and writer.

Making the links between what a children’s writer has experienced, has read, and is reacting to in his or her works (in both a literary and social context) is perhaps one of the key skills required to make some sense of the broad and often confusing ‘problem of definition’ with regard to children’s literature. It is from this sort of comparative analysis that similarities will begin to emerge, which will allow some insight into the extent that children’s literature both shapes social discourse, and responds to it.

And, in definitional terms, once we realises these links, these similarities which connect the various forms and styles of ‘literature for children’ to one another, we can begin to come to terms with the idea argued by Nodelman that children’s literature is not;

…just an indiscriminate body of quite different sorts of text grouped together by adults for convenience merely because of their intended audiences… Fictional texts written by adults for children and young people are enough like each other to be immediately recognisable as having been intended for their specific audiences – as children’s or young adult’s literature.
(Nodelman, 2009, p.81)

Given you accept Nodelman’s argument, that the field of writing for children (in which he includes the idea of writing for young adults) does in fact constitute a ‘genre’ in and of itself, and can therefore take its place in the broader field of writing and literary study, the next crucial question to consider is ‘What’s the point of studying this genre?’ What does it have to offer?

In a broad socio-cultural sense, I would argue that it is possible to suggest that children’s and young adult literature is, in many ways, the foundation upon which all ‘adult’ literature is built. Early understandings of language and culture are conveyed through the reading of books, by adults, to children. This is especially the case in western societies where oral traditions of storytelling as a means of passing on culture are less entrenched. If asked to, most people can easily construct a personal ‘canon’ of books from their childhood, and most can explain without too much analysis, the reasons for their selections.

This long lasting, deep impact is something that is by no means unique to children’s literature, but it is something adult readers and scholars often disregard when considering the role of children’s literature in cultural discourse.

Australian author Sophie Masson made this point in January of this year, in an article published in Quadrant, in which she explored the central question of “Why do you write for children?” She observed that:

…When The Australian magazine published, in late 1999, an issue on ‘The Greatest Writers of the Century / Millennium”, children’s authors were conspicuous by their absence in the lists. And yet the 140 years that had just passed had produced writers of the calibre of Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, Edith Nesbit, Carlo Vollodi, George McDonald, Rudyard Kipling, A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, J.M. Barrie, Tove Jansson, Herge, Jean de Brunhoff, St Exupery, C.S. Lewis, Leon Garfield, Alan Garner, J.K.Rowling, Patricia Wrightson and Ruth Park – to mention only a tiny fraction – writers who by any measure had produced some of the greatest, most timeless and most beloved classics in literature.
(Masson, 2009, p.94)

Masson makes the case, in emphatic terms and from a writer’s perspective, that writing for children fills many of the gaps in literary discourse which might be left by more esoteric and inaccessible ‘adult’ fiction. She continues her argument thus:

"In fact, in my opinion, children’s literature is the greatest and most important literary movement of the last 150 years. It has completely transformed the face of reading, and re-zested twentieth century literary culture, in particular, with its light touch, richness of invention, and haunting, subtle depths. And the crucial importance it attaches to story. Children’s writers, unlike all too many for adults, have never forgotten about story, which from Homer to Shakespeare to Dickens was at the very heart of the writer’s art."(Masson, 2009, p.94)

From my own point of view, suffice to say that the field of children’s literature studies is one which offers a tremendous amount of promise. As a writer it offers the opportunity to both contribute to cultural discourse, and also to be a crucial part of it, both in the present and down the track. As a student of the field, it is an often contentious area of academic debate, but this lends it a high degree of vigour and intellectual freshness which makes study in the field so exciting. Additionally it is a field of narrative so broad and diverse in scope that there are plenty of opportunities here for research into often unconsidered ideas.

From all of this, I hope you come away with, at least, some sense that ‘Literature for 0-18’ years is not nearly so simple, or staid, a field as it might first appear. I hope you come away with an understanding that ‘literature for 0-18’ is in fact literature for all of us, regardless of age.

I hope that those of you studying education find yourselves evaluating the texts and novels that you will study with your classes not merely in terms of characters, themes and symbols, but in terms of their broader context, their contribution to cultural discourse, to the hidden and not-so-hidden ideologies that drive them, their relationship with the canon texts of children’s literature, and the ‘traditional’ genres of fairy tales and morality stories. I hope that you’ll use children’s and young adult literature in your classrooms as a living, vibrant thing, and not as the last remnants of a dying artform.

I hope that those of you engaged in writing degrees will seriously consider the full potential, the implications that come with the responsibility of choosing to ‘write for children’, and will see it as a contribution to a long and rich literary inheritance, rather than as a poor relation of ‘real adult’ literary writing.

Or, failing all that, if nothing else comes of this course I hope you all just continue to read kids books, both for yourselves and your children. Because there is much below the surface of writing for 0-18 years that speaks to the wider world.