Overall, I got a ton out of reading Learning from the Left! I was especially inspired by Mickenberg’s methodological approach, particularly in contrast with some of the other scholarship we’ve read. For one thing, I appreciated Mickenberg’s emphasis on the role of the publishing industry in influencing how and what people read. I’m very interested in the history of the book so I was fascinated by Mickenberg’s discussion of how subversive texts were able to be printed because of the lax ways in which the children’s publishing industry was regulated.  I also loved that Mickenberg notes how trends in education and library curation impacted the popularity and accessibility of different books.

In general, I noticed Mickenberg using a different approach and archive than other children’s literature scholars—Gubar, Rose, and even Kidd, for example.  This sentence from the introduction stuck out to me as particularly distinct: “In the course of interviewing people and reading their published work and private correspondence, I encountered very few people conforming to the stereotype of the dogmatic closed-minded Stalinist” (11). First of all, Mickenberg here uses the first person and implicitly acknowledges her own authorial intervention. Secondly, Mickenberg points to using interviews—which she conducts herself—as an important part of her research. I don’t remember any other scholarship we’ve read that used that approach. In a way, because Mickenberg draws our attention to her methodology and subjectivity (however briefly), we remember that she (and the critic more generally) is herself a librarian-like figures who curates our reading experience.

However, because Mickenberg is using a slightly different archive than some of the other criticism we’ve read, she doesn’t really situate herself within childhood studies or children’s literature scholarship. That is to say, although her work is strongly reliant on primary texts and historical information, Mickenberg doesn’t cite contemporary critical conversations happening in childhood studies—some of which seem to complement her readings. As I was reading, I would encounter an opinion that reminded me of someone else we’ve read, but Mickenberg didn’t offer a nod to that scholar. For example, Mickenberg describes Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories as equally “for adults as for children. The stories speak to both an imagined child reader and to an adult fantasy of the child’s liberated imagination” (36). Mickenberg’s framing of imagined childhood and the importance of adult readership reminded me of Rose (even though Rose was of course talking about a historical time and setting). I don’t think Mickenberg’s failure to reference to childhood scholarship is necessarily a bad thing, only something that sets it a part from some of the other works we’ve seen. It may just be because Mickenberg situates herself in a different academic discipline (American studies?) and as such uses the more conventional archive for that field.

Another question I had about Mickenberg’s approach was how she sees the roles of the reader and meaning. For example, I took issue with Mickenberg’s discussion of the moral of Kay’s Battle in the Barnyard: “Perhaps children would interpret the story literally and think of its lessons only in terms of animals, but there is enough anthropomorphism here that Kay’s meaning seems fairly transparent. Moreover, the children who were likely to have read this story had parents who would be sure to make its intended meaning clear” (52). I wonder, though, if the ways in which children could’ve interpreted this text may have been more varied than Mickenberg indicates. It almost seems like Mickenberg thinks there is one “intended” (or even true) “meaning” behind this text—an idea I disagree with. Does Mickenberg believe that the experience of reading a radical text in a particular context (with the intervention of progressive parents, in school, etc.) is what makes the makes a text radical? Or is it what’s in the text in and of itself?  Or both?