Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought

163 Pages·2020·2.69 MB·English

by  Kenneth B. Kidd

THEORY FOR BEGINNERS
THEORY FOR BEGINNERS
Children’s Literature as Critical Thought
KENNETH B. KIDD
Fordham University Press
NEW YORK 2020
Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press
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First edition
CONTENTS
Introduction: Children’s Literature Otherwise
1. Philosophy for Children
2. Theory for Beginners
3. Literature for Minors
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
THEORY FOR BEGINNERS
Introduction: Children’s Literature Otherwise
In 1963, humorist Louise Armstrong and illustrator Whitney Darrow Jr. published a mock
picturebook entitled A Child’s Guide to Freud. Dedicated to “Sigmund F., A Really Mature
Person,” A Child’s Guide to Freud is a send-up of Freudian ideas at their most reductive,
pitched to adults and, in particular, readers of The New Yorker (Darrow being a New Yorker
cartoonist as well as a children’s book illustrator). “The feelings you have about Mommy and
Daddy closing their door are called OEDIPAL,” the book quickly explains (see Figure 1).
“This means that you want to have a Meaningful Relationship with Mommy. If you think a
lot about this, it is called a WISH. If you think about it in your sleep, it is called a DREAM.
If you suck your thumb instead of thinking about it, it is called COMPENSATION.” And so
on. The joke here is that while Freud certainly had a lot to say about children, he did not
usually talk to them, and we certainly have no business sharing Freud directly with them.
As I emphasize in my previous study Freud in Oz, another American picturebook appeared
in 1963, this one produced sincerely for children and also inspired by Freudian ideas:
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. While Sendak’s book met some resistance at
first, it quickly became popular largely because it gave creative expression to ideas about
child anger, oedipality, and unconscious life—without naming those things explicitly. By the
time the book appeared, Americans had come to expect that fairy tales and works of fantasy
help children navigate psychological challenges. The idea was well-entrenched by the time
Bruno Bettelheim capitalized on it with The Uses of Enchantment. It was perfectly
acceptable, even praiseworthy, to present Freudian or other adult ideas indirectly and in the
form of a (sincere) picturebook. What makes A Child’s Guide to Freud funny is its conceit of
direct address to the child or the idea that Freud might be appropriate for children raw and
unmediated. Never mind that Freud actually did talk to children sometimes, even if he did
not write for them, and that he described children as little researchers and theorists, puzzling
out the sexual and other secrets of adults. A Child’s Guide to Freud is funny in that New
Yorker sort of way because it acknowledges that children are indeed curious and that adults
have the sometimes-uncomfortable task of enlightenment. The book alludes to the scenario
of adults talking to kids about sexuality or evading such talk. (Of course, if we believe Freud,
children do not need to read him or anyone else since they are already doing what Freud does
himself, testing and revising ideas.)
FIGURE 1. Louise Armstrong and Whitney Darrow, Jr., A Child’s Guide to Freud (1963).
Fast-forward to the 2017 publication by MIT Press of an English translation of Bini
Adamczak’s Kommunismus, titled Communism for Kids. Adamczak is a Berlin-based scholar
who has published on communism and its discontents in the former Soviet Union. Published
in Germany over a decade ago to little fanfare, the book tells the story of people suffering
under feudalism, then capitalism, then more promising but finally disappointing models of
communism. Competition between two factories leads to a crisis that workers try to solve six
times, never successfully. Finally, the workers take control of the factories and form a new
collective, and the book ends on an ambiguous note: Will they succeed in establishing a
happier and more just society? And if so, how?
Adamczak’s book met with howls of protest in the United States. The book was denounced
as anti-American, anti-Christian, and antifamily; one reviewer even called it “the most
dangerous book on economics ever written for kids” (Wenzel). One of its translators, Jacob
Blumenfeld, observes in a New York Times piece that while “the narrative is full of suffering,
defeat, and failure, the real scandal of the book lies in its optimism, its hope that another
world is still possible in the womb of the old.” Blumenfeld goes on to clarify that
Communism for Kids “is not a children’s book at all, but a book written for everyone in a
language that, for the most part, children, too, could understand. The title we chose for the
American edition was an elegant way to convey this aspect of the book.”
Likely someone behind the project, whether Blumenfeld and his cotranslator Sophie Lewis
or the powers at MIT Press, expected and even courted the controversy; the book has sold
nicely thanks to such. I doubt many kids are reading this book. Its readers are likely curious
and/or be-mused adults. Regardless, Blumenfeld’s comment underscores just how
provocative is the rhetoric of address to children when it comes to a topic like communism.
Of course, just as there are plenty of children’s books with Freudian tonalities, so too are
there a good many children’s books with Marxist and/or socialist commitments. Scholars
such as Kimberley Reynolds, Jane Rosen, Michael Rosen, Julia L. Mickenberg, and Philip
Nel have written about and even reproduced some of them. These books do not hide their
progressive ideas, but neither do they announce them so nakedly, much less declare the
appropriateness of communism for kids. As with A Child’s Guide to Freud, what makes the
translation and repackaging of Adamczak’s book so scandalous (on top of its perverse
optimism) is the explicit designation of a child audience (sincere or not). The ideas of Freud
or Marx can be acceptable if hidden inside a children’s book, but to speak openly to children
about Freud or Marx is apparently beyond the pale.
The idea that philosophy might be “for” children, however, has met with considerable
public as well as academic success. That is especially true when philosophy is built into the
narrative structure of children’s books rather than spotlighted as a topic or concern, but even
books for children about philosophy do not carry the same potential for scandal as do books
about Freud or Marx. One of my topics in Theory for Beginners is the philosophy for
children movement (acronym P4C), which got its start in the early 1970s in the United States
and has since expanded globally. P4C developed its own materials for children and makes
use of existing children’s literature. Indeed, P4C has become increasingly reliant on
children’s literature over the decades. But P4C does not need to work under cover in a
children’s book; it can also announce itself openly. It may be that to the broader public,
philosophy is not as threatening as the names Freud or Marx. Philosophy remains associated
with Western culture and the search for wisdom rather than with sexuality or economics.
Philosophy does not seem political or even cultural, although of course it is both. For
whatever reasons, the prospect of philosophy for children has been quite palatable, even
compelling. That does not mean that all philosophers deem P4C appropriate or even possible.
Its early advocates were outliers, in a sense. But as time went on, P4C took root. Theory,
meanwhile, probably does not ring a bell outside the academy, except in its general meaning
of hypothesis or speculation. Theory is more narrowly academic as a discourse or genre and,
when mentioned at all beyond academia, does not enjoy the approval rating of philosophy.
But like philosophy, theory thinks about the child and even invests in children’s literature.
Theory has an even stronger interest in that cousin to the child—the beginner. Theory loves a
beginner.
Theory for Beginners examines the relationship of children’s and young adult (YA)
literature to P4C and what I am calling theory for beginners.1 Whatever else it may be—a
mode of address, a literary heritage, a multigenre body of work, a publishing category, a field
of professionalization—children’s literature is a set of experiments in thinking and feeling.
Children’s literature can be narrowly prescriptive, of course, but much of the time it is
imaginative, expansive, and surprising in its strategies of engagement and cultivation. It
invites us all to dream, wonder, and explore. In helping children to read, it also helps them to
“read”—to interpret, contextualize, understand.2 It often does so self-reflexively, inviting
would-be readers to engage materially as much as psychologically and emotionally.
Literature for young children often takes picturebook form, and recent years have seen an
upsurge in YA graphic novels. These materials are not simply “illustrated”; rather, they invite
and even demand different sorts of interaction and manipulation. Aaron Kashtan makes the
case that comics help us grasp the materiality of texts, and the same can be said for children’s
books, with their varying styles, sizes, shapes, and textures. Given all of this, it is no surprise
that psychological discourse looks to children’s literature for inspiration or that children’s
literature correspondingly has a psychological texture. I told that story of reciprocity in Freud
in Oz. Theory for Beginners shifts focus to how philosophy and theory draw motivation and
power from children’s literature, conventionally understood, while also encouraging and even
developing materials for beginners—what I am referring to as children’s literature
“otherwise,” meaning in an alternative form or register. Like psychoanalysis, philosophy and
theory are ostensibly adult projects that nonetheless concern themselves with childhood and
make use of—and sometimes produce—texts for children and/or beginners. While Freud in
Oz focuses on the psychological uses of enchantment, or the association of children’s
literature with psychological work, Theory for Beginners considers the intellectual uses of
enchantment (alternatively, the uses of intellectual enchantment), or the association of
children’s literature with thought and thinking.
Children’s literature scholars such as Deborah Thacker and Katharine Jones have rightly
underscored theory’s neglect of children’s literature despite the opportunities the latter offers
for thinking about language and culture.3 But if we think expansively about what counts as
children’s literature, there is a record of engagement by theory, one that should excite
theorists and philosophers as much as children’s literature scholars. Children’s literature
broadly construed is a philosophical and theoretical as well as aesthetic and educational
affair, one providing inspiration to philosophy and theory, as well as the reverse. While the
term children’s literature has descriptive value and convenience, I do not treat it as clearer or
more stable than the terms philosophy or theory. All three terms enjoy a certain
amorphousness that is generally helpful, if also sometimes frustrating. Writing on modernist
studies and “weak theory,” Paul Saint-Amour proposes that an academic field’s strength
increases as consensus about its central term weakens (451).4 This has been true of children’s
literature studies. The more we question and expand the conceit of children’s literature, the
more productive have been our analyses. It is not that there is no such thing as children’s
literature but that there are many such things.5 We can affirm the legitimacy and legibility of