Reading Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature, I couldn’t help but draw on my own experience as an avid adolescent reader during the time period Day focuses on. I read many of the books Day discusses as a preteen and teen and a lot of what she said about how these books allow for identification and intimacy rings true.

Particularly after reading her chapter on diaries, I was reminded of my own interactive journals that many of my other female friends also had. I wrote in a diary as an early middle schooler that was actually more of a fill-in-the blank book. From what I recall, each section was centered around a different theme: friendships, embarrassing moments, dreams, etc. I remember that there were lists you needed to fill in of your top-ten best friends, or worst enemies, for example. I have been searching for this diary on the internet and I can’t find it! (It had a moon on the cover and a lock.) But it seems similar to these ones:

http://www.amazon.com/Peaceable-Kingdom-Secrets-Dreams-Wishes/dp/B00HOSDC60/ref=pd_sim_21_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=61gce%2BdcIzL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR150%2C160_&refRID=1WVA9D2XC34S771FKHDS

http://www.amazon.com/Do-You-Know-Who-Are/dp/1465416498/ref=sr_1_51?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447097174&sr=1-51

These books share a lot of the aspects of the fictional works Day describes. Like “intimate” YA novels, the notebooks imply a preoccupation with disclosure and secrecy, but they do so through including a physical lock or mirroring the style of an innocent composition book. The journals also imply that the diary is a feminine form, through their stereotypically girly imagery like flowers and butterflies—catering to a particular type of implied adolescent girl audience.

What’s interesting about these types of books is, like the fictional diaries or other “intimate narratives” Day describes, they also create an assumed audience—but in the case, the audience member is both reader and writer. These books are physically interactive—they envision the participation of an implied reader, but also help create an actual writer.

As a teen, I remember being inspired to keep a diary after reading books like The Princess Diaries and would even mimic some of Mia’s language in my own writing. So while writing in these interactive journals, I was also informed by fictional representations of diaries. In a way, then, we can see diary fiction as literacy narratives: works that portray the writing process or the development of a writerly figures. Diaries—both fictional and interactive—can thus serve as writing tools, as well as a form to explore the nature of intimacy and discourse.

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?

I’d never heard of childhood emancipatory studies before reading this article and I’m still not totally sure I understand what it is—I found this to be one of the least accessible pieces we’ve read this semester. But my sense of the field—at least how Mary Galbraith sees it—is that it is an interdisciplinary one (with a strong bent toward psychoanalysis) that roots itself in the subjective experiences of children, who are often marginalized and silenced. Galbraith proposes that we need to emancipate children by “understanding the situation of babies and children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children’s full emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome” (188). But for Galbraith, the way to accomplish this is adult-centered: “through adults transforming themselves and their own practices” and “reevaluat[ing] their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory human project” (188-89).

While I think this is a valid idea, I think that Galbraith fails to emphasize the intersectionality of difference sorts of “emancipatory studies.” There is an enormous discrepancy in how silenced or marginalized a child is depending on his/her socioeconomic status, race, gender, learning or cognitive dis/abilities, family background, etc. For example, studies have shown that students of color are penalized more often and more harshly than their white peers at schools across America. (See below for some articles about these studies.) This type of research comes out of sociology or anthropology, fields I didn’t really see Galbraith giving much of a nod to compared to psychoanalysis and philosophy. In a field like childhood emancipatory studies—or really, any field that’s attempting some sort of understanding of someone’s “subjectivity” who isn’t ourselves—it’s especially important to be mindful of cultural difference. Maybe combining multiple emancipatory models—Galbraith lists liberation theology, feminism, and pedagogy of the oppressed as examples outside childhood emancipatory studies—would allow for more nuanced and comprehensive analyses of emancipation.

Ultimately, what I found most compelling about this article was how Galbraith questions “postmodern skepticism”—which I too have found frustrating. For Galbraith, a key problem of postmodern analysis is “showing theoretical access or even existence” of childhood or other experiences outside ourselves, which can hinder any sort of scholarly conversation about childhood whatsoever (191). But I wonder if a postmodern, skeptical reading is really all that different from the approach that Galbraith encourages and attempts. For example, Galbraith’s analysis of the Polar Express seems based in a certain kind of skepticism of traditional readings of children’s stories. And although, like Kate, I find her analysis of Polar Express with Santa as Hitler-figure questionable at best, I do see how using an approach like Galbraith’s—one that encourages that we question our presumptions and traditional modes of understanding—can be very useful in studying children’s literature and in fact go hand in hand with the type of postmodern criticism that Galbraith seems to oppose.

Articles about race and disciplining in schools:

http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-data-us-department-education-highlights-educational-inequities-around-teacher-experience-discipline-and-high-school-rigor

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/us/higher-expulsion-rates-for-black-students-are-found.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/black-preschoolers-far-more-likely-to-be-suspended

As someone deeply invested in exploring genre and its limits, I was excited to read Westman’s article. From what I could gather, her main argument is that as children’s literature scholars, we need to consider how our field can speak to and illuminate conversations happening about genre and periodization in literary studies more generally. Westman starts by emphasizing is that genre is a performative, not material or static, category that changes depending on audience and context. As such, children’s literary has a unique potential to extend outside of its traditional subfield to inform other areas of literary studies.

In terms of critical approach, I think Westman certainly falls under the broad category of “historicist” because she believes that context is crucial in understanding a text. More specifically, Westman draws on reception theory and book history—she’s interested, for instance, in the publishing and re-publishing of Goodnight Moon and how the work has been read by audiences over time. I also see Westman implicitly relying on poststructuralist thinkers (such as Foucault) in that her piece examines how the seemingly stable structures we use to categorize things like literature—in this case, periodization and genre—are not only arbitrary but historically mediated.

In reading the article, I was initially captivated by Westman’s call to arms of sorts, that as students in this field we have the potential to rethink large-scale structural problems in literary studies more generally. At the same time, I felt that Westman failed to discuss the institutional barriers within academia that might make this type of cross-disciplinary work challenging. If children’s literary studies has been somewhat segregated from English scholarship, how can we collaborate with literature critics to create these sorts of more inclusive, comprehensive analyses? And how can scholars publish non-traditional, genre-bending articles if literary journals tend to be periodized as well? Periodization seems like a deeply entrenched institutional issue, as well as an epistemological one. That’s not to say that moving beyond issues of genre isn’t possible, only that I think it will be more challenging than Westman lets on.

However, Westman’s article was originally read aloud as a “manifesto” at a couple of literary conferences (Notes, pg 468), so I can understand that the context might not have allowed her to delve into specific solutions to the problems she addresses. In any case, this article left me with a lot to think about as I begin writing my paper for this course—especially that I should look into scholarly conversations outside of children’s literary studies even while studying children’s literature.

– Anna Zeemont