I just came across this fascinating article on my Facebook feed and I thought I’d share it here just in case anyone might be interested.

25+ Changes To Your Favorite Childhood Book Show How Much Society Has Changed

Chapter 1’s discussion of the expectations adolescent women face intrigues me, but I question a couple of aspects of it. On page 11, she writes,

this version of adolescent womanhood has cultivated an expectation that young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships without facing the challenges that confront young people whose race, class, and/or sexuality sets them outside of this narrow definition. Largely free from the oppression, rejection, and other trials that mark many young people’s experiences, the adolescent women presented in popular culture generally concern themselves with the friendships and romances that are understood to be the foundations of social acceptance and markers of maturation into adulthood.

This is an important point; race, poverty, and sexualities other than the most heteronormative are minimized in many of the most popular YA novels. Clearly, there are exceptions, but I question Day’s claim that representations of adolescent women in popular culture have cultivated an expectation that “young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.” The fact that TV teenagers never do homework or study for the SATs would seem to contribute to this expectation also. When I was a teenager, the teachers, cultural messages, and social climate I experienced did not encourage adolescent women to cultivate interpersonal relationships—with social consciousness or otherwise. All that mattered was hard work, good grades, and performance, and emotion and intimacy were frowned upon as distractions. Books and TV shows offered refuge largely as a means of vicariously experiencing life as an adolescent girl without such pressures and discouragements.

This wasn’t just an authoritarian message; what I perceived to be mainstream social culture among adolescents also discouraged disclosure of emotions and intimacy. I’m curious if others had the same experience. After all, I came of age in the late 90s when grunge and macho “alternative” rock dominated the airwaves and unisex combat boots were all the rage. Compared to the present glittery era of Katy Perry and Twilight fandom, the 90s didn’t offer the adolescent woman (or anyone) much mainstream cultural material to validate or redeem her emotions or even longings for childish prettiness unless she could cast those emotions in terms of a particular flavor of angst. But has that indeed changed in the present era? My students seem willing to open up and tell me personal details about themselves in their writing; they’ll admit all the sappy romantic books and movies they like. Pop culture seems a thousand times more encouraging of intimate relationships and acceptance of one’s own tender emotions without embarrassment than it did in my day. Yet teenagers still seem to suffer the bad rap of being surly and difficult, and some pieces I’ve read recently about the concept of “underlife” in the classroom have suggested that fear of vulnerability and rejection continues to manifest as a kind of obligatory, cynical culture of coolness and stoicism among adolescents. I’m interested if anyone has any thoughts on this; a certain conception of adolescence seems fundamental to Day’s argument and I wonder how well it holds up otherwise.

I was slightly puzzled by Chapter 5. Day discusses several novels in diary form, observing each fictional diarist’s simultaneous insistence on total privacy and awareness (and construction) of a reader other than herself. While I enjoyed the chapter, I’m not sure I agree with Day’s conclusions (that may be too strong a word). Day contends that the seeming contradiction between a diarist’s longing for privacy and awareness of a reader is resolved by the narrative intimacy made possible by “Lamarque’s ‘logical gap’ between fictional narrator and real reader” (149). The diarist risks too much rejection in disclosing her true thoughts to the people in her life and/or culture discourages her from making such disclosures, but the distance between her and the real reader’s ontological realities insulates her from any rejection or disruption precipitated by the disclosure. As the diarist matures and develops her ability to make honest disclosures to those around her, she no longer needs to write to the reader in the other dimension.*

While I agree with Day’s analysis in general, she seems to deemphasize the fact that diary novels often feature a distinct narrator and implied author. Mia Thermopolis doesn’t describe New York City tourist destinations to convey that she, Mia, understands her diary is really quite public; she describes them because Meg Cabot is the author of Mia’s diary and Cabot can weave text written from Mia’s private perspective together with audience-pleasing detail. To the extent the reader doubts that the real Mia would include such information without expectation of an audience, she can overlook the lapse because the detail is, indeed, pleasing. There are often moments in epistolary and diary novels when the (implied) author winks at the reader through the narrator’s confessions; no young adult reader really believes that the diary novel she picks up is a real person’s diary written in secret. Readers can simultaneously observe certain transparencies and suspend disbelief. In the first chapter, Day presents Seymour Chatman’s 1978 diagram of the intermediary positions between real author and real reader, and I would have liked to see her return to these terms in this discussion, if only to tell us why they don’t apply here.

*Did Day’s book (especially Chapter 6) repeatedly remind anyone else of Bastian and Atreyu communicating and even moving between their respective ontological realities in The Neverending Story? I’m sure plenty has been written on this, but it never occurred to me to interpret The Neverending Story as a metaphor for fan fiction and now it seems clear. Fantasia nearly ceases to be, and Bastian saves it by essentially entering its ontological reality; he continues to write the story, not as the original author, but from the perspective of original narratee, reimagining his engagement with the text.

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.

Trites analysis of Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover (1984), Dangerous Spaces (1991), and Katiangata Twitch (2005) focuses on the way that Mahy depicts the complex understanding of the relationship between thought and body through her characters. Trites uses the analysis to highlight how Mahy changes the interaction between feminist thought and the female body as the larger feminist conversation on embodiment changed over the course of twenty years.

I was really excited to start reading this article because Trites seemed to be doing a feminist historical analysis. I find myself often falling back on that methodology with my own research. It provides an understanding of the text through the feminism in which it was produced as opposed to the feminism of today. The two are rarely similar. Philosophies change, and the way change is approached is usually vastly different as the decades passed. While approaching form a modern feminist analysis is still useful, the value of the text as feminist or not is much easier understood with this feminist historical analysis. And it seems that Trites wants to understand the *feminist value* of these texts, and in order to do that, she is contextualizing Mahy’s characters and ideas within the feminist philosophies during the books’ publications.

Before she begins discussing the novels, she contextualizes the larger feminist ideas on female embodiment. Then, she parallels Mahy’s text with the feminist philosophy during the years surrounding the publication of each text until she begins analyzing Katiangata Twitch. At this point, she switches her methodology to queer theory. This creates a strange imbalance, and it is one of the many things that make her argument feel underdeveloped. Don’t get me wrong, I thought some of her conclusions in this section were the most interesting, but the way she approaches the text is so fundamentally different than the rest of the article that it almost does not seem to fit. The only saving grace is the similar approaches and ideas that the two theories have. If there was more historicizing like in previous sections, I might not have found the section so problematic.

Speaking of problematic, I had a really hard time liking this article. At times, her analysis feels superficial. She does align her work in conversations with other scholars who have researched embodiment in Mahy’s texts, but she relies too heavily on summarizing their arguments and summarizing the text. It feels like the summarization gets far more page space than Trites own ideas and conclusions, which is disappointing. I was interested in what Trites had to say, and I often wanted her to develop her train of thought more. Take her analysis of Sorry touching Laura in The Changeover:

Laura’s laughing response acknowledges sexual desire as a “disease,” with her body still the object of his somewhat ominous sexuality: “Laura felt his left hand, his sinister hand, between her dress and her skin. ‘You probably won’t get a very bad attack,’ she said, nervous but enchanted” (204). She is both “nervous” and “enchanted,” Mahy implies, because sexuality is powerful, dangerous—and fun. (Mahy 142).

After describing how “Sorry preys upon Laura, ogling her breasts, demanding rather than asking for their first kiss, touching her breasts without invitation” and using a quote where Sorry’s hand is referred to as “sinister,” Trites concludes that Mahy is depicting sexuality as “fun.” I understand the powerful and the dangerous, but I feel like Trites is reading something that I am not in these sentences because she reads it as “fun.” This is the last word in a paragraph about “undermining” feminist assertions and repeated depictions of predators, I feel like Trites needs to explain where she is seeing the “fun” part of sexuality. I believe her when she says it is there, I just am not seeing it in the material that she is presenting here.

Ultimately, I think I would have enjoyed this article so much more if it had a narrower focus on one book of Mahy’s OR she developed her points further. I enjoyed what she had to say, to the point that I wanted more of it, but it just wasn’t there.

And I’m going to leave this as a question/idea for the class: I know little to nothing about New Zealand’s feminist movement, but in theory, there is a chance that philosophies trends were different in New Zealand (where the books were published and Mahy was writing). The feminist authors/philosophers Trites references are from a variety of places: Lorde is Caribbean-American; Cixous, French; Susan Bordo, American; Elizabeth Grosz, Australian. However, she does not reference any specific New Zealand feminist philosophies, and it might be that New Zealand followed the “popular” trends in feminism. I was just curious about how that might influence the text, and if anyone actually knew the answer.

In Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young, Sara Day builds her argument around the idea of narrative intimacy, a kind of “narrator-reader relationship that reflects, models, and reimagines intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share.” (3) Accordingly, one of the outcomes of narrative intimacy is the blurring of boundaries between fictional story and real reading experience. Although she limits her analysis to literary texts, Day recognizes that “film and TV Shows, likewise, often allow for the possibility of narrative intimacy by employing voiceovers and other techniques that allow the main character to communicate thoughts and feelings to the viewer without revealing them to other characters within the fictional space of the story.” (24)

A first person voice over narration integrates what, ever since Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto, published in 1919, has been known as the “omniscient nature of the cine-eye.” Voice-overs thus allow the audience to explore the psychological interiority of a character and, by doing so, to strengthen the empathetic relationship it builds with her/him. This technique is often responsible for making us “feel like our friend is telling [us] a story,” (3) similarly to the fan of The Princess Diaries mentioned in the opening of Day’s book.

Voice over narration has been employed in a number of film and television productions aimed at young adults. Day brings up examples such as Felicity (a drama television series that ran from 1998 to 2002 on The WB), and Easy A (a 2010 teen comedy, the plot of which is loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Television shows hold a particularly interesting position in relation to the idea of narrative intimacy proposed by Day, because the very seriality of the format has been linked to the development of parasocial interactions between viewers and characters by scholars in multiple fields. In a nutshell, parasocial relationships can be defined as:

one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars. (Source: “Parasocial Relationships: The Nature of Celebrity Fascinations” – My apologies for employing such an unorthodox source, hopefully this is acceptable on a blog post!)

Cristel Antonia Russell and Barbara Stern have observed that

over the course of watching multiple episodes of a television series […] viewers can become actively vested in the characters whose lives they closely follow and care about, and sometimes begin to interact with them as if they were real, in a parasocial way. Thus, long-term viewing is essential to the attachment process over time, a process in which viewers develop attitudes toward the characters, get to know them, experience feelings of intimacy with them, and engage in vicarious participation in their lives […]. The process resembles the developmental progression of “real” relationships […], during which communication with the other […] and understanding of him or her increases in tandem with familiarity. (Russell and Stern, “Consumers, Characters, and Products.”, 7)

Parasocial relationships, just like narrative intimacy, are put into effect by the audience’s attempt to fill the Lamarquian “logical gap” between characters and viewers (i.e., the impossibility for viewers/readers to communicate with characters) brought into play by Day. (18) It is my understanding that, whereas the creation of a common space between the characters of a story and the audience to vicariously experience emotions is intrinsic to serial television, the employment of first person voice over narration is required for the development of narrative intimacy. I thus locate in parasocial theory the very foundations for the concept of literary intimacy brought forward by Sara Day, and I was surprised to find out that she never refers to it in her study.

While reading Reading like a Girl, several television shows for teenagers that potentially construct narrative intimacy through their protagonists’ voice overs came to mind, and I was debating whether I wanted to focus this post on My So-Called Life (1994-1995), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Suburgatory (2011-2014), or Hart of Dixie (2011-2015). However, once I got through chapter five (“What if Someone Reads it?”) I realized Awkward., a teen-com-drama created by Lauren Iungerich that’s been airing on MTV since 2011, would be the most interesting to bring up for discussion.

The show chronicles the coming of age of Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards), who starts a blog (“Invisible Girl Daily”) as a way to cope with her struggle with identity and her position as an outcast in high school. In Awkward., the audience is allowed to access the main character’s thoughts through both Jenna’s witty voice-overs and her online blogging practices – both places standing as locations of disclosure working towards the development of narrative intimacy with the audience.

The series tackles some of the same themes (all of them quite typical of young adult literature and television, such as irresponsible parenting, teen alienation, high school popularity, first, second, and third loves) as Alyson Noel’s Cruel Summer, one of the texts analyzed by Day. However, what’s more important for my analysis, is that both works examine questions of “private versus public disclosure” (176) and “bring […] private and public genres into conversation with one another in order to investigate [the protagonist’s] complicated experience of disclosure and discretion.” (174)

The audience’s privileged viewpoint on Jenna’s life is built on three levels: first, through the camera-eye we are allowed to witnesses the unfolding of the events as they take place. Second, through her voice overs, she trusts us – sometimes even more than her best friends Tamara (Jillian Rose Reed) and Ming (Jessica Lu) – with her confessions and her innermost thoughts. Third, by giving us access to her blog and her writing process, we witness the shaping of her virtual persona (i.e. an actively constructed presentation of herself).

Furthermore, Day proposes that “the female tradition of personal writing simultaneously invites opportunities for expressive release, guilt, and fictive construction.” (147) Coherently, the show often hints at the therapeutic function of personal writing (Jenna refers to her blog as her “go-to method of problem solving”). As Trevor Kelley beautifully phrased it: “Ideally the blogging experience should feel a little bit like emo yoga. […] Venting about an unrequited crush can—and should—serve as a sort of emo version of Shavasana.” (Trevor Kelley and Leslie Simmon, Everybody Hurts, 86). Thereupon, I am going to speculate that, in Awkward., the depiction of blogging as more than just online-gut-spilling, also serves a didactic function for the audience, which is encouraged to take up writing as a healing and constructive practice, especially during adolescence. Now, on this last remark, the show follows the trajectory of other works analyzed by Day: as the series progresses and Jenna advances through high school and into college, the entries on her journal become less frequent, and blogging give way to other forms of creative writing (one of the subplots in season three revolves around Jenna’s venture into the realms of fiction and poetry).

Finally, I think it’s worth to point out how the series’ producers have cleverly been employing social media to further blur the line between fiction and reality. In addition to recreating Jenna’s blog on Tumblr, the audience has been occasionally invited to reply to the (apparently) rhetorical questions posed by the protagonist through her voice-overs and blog entries. Such seeming possibilities of interaction with Jenna’s fictional world provide the audience with the illusion of bridging the logical gap. For example, when, torn between two lovers, Jenna asks herself whether she should get back with her former lover (Matty McKibben/Beau Mirchoff) or stay with her current boyfriend (Jake Rosati/Brett Davern), the hashtags #teammatty and #teamjake were superimposed on the screen, inviting the audience to voice their opinion – in other words, to give Jenna their advice – via Twitter. In addition to functioning as a form of cross-promotion for the show, these actions also undeniably foster the audience’s sense of involvement and thus develop even further the narrative intimacy between viewer and protagonist.

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?

Let’s start by offering up the interesting back matter found on current copies of The Lorax:

“UNLESS someone like you,

cares a whole awful lot,

nothing is going to get better.

It’s not.—The Lorax

Nearly forty years ago, when Random House first published Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, it sent forth a clarion call—to the industry and consumers alike—to conserve the earth’s precious and finite natural resource. The message of it’s whimsical yet powerful tale resonates today more profoundly than ever. In every corner of the world we are at risk of losing real-life Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, Humming-Fish, Truffula Trees, and the forests they inhabit.

Together, Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House proudly sponsor The Lorax Project, an ongoing multifaceted initiative designed to raise awareness of environmental issues and inpsire earth-friendly action worldwide by passionate individuals of all ages.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House support conservation groups around the world to enhance critical activities needed to protect the real-life Lorax forests, whose preservation is essential to all life on our planet” (Seuss, The Lorax).

The front cover of newer copies of The Lorax also comes stamped with “earth-friendly, printed on recycled paper” (Seuss, The Lorax).

Before even opening the book, readers are given explicit indication of the political implications of the text.

As a researcher of children’s picturebooks, Continue reading →

Abate persuaded me that Raising Your Kids Right is an important book, and for the most part I really enjoyed and learned from Abate’s methodology. This book is a fun read. Knowing nothing about it, I wasn’t sure what Abate’s politics would be, and it’s to her credit that I didn’t figure it out until halfway into the introduction.

That said, I question moments in the book when Abate seems to choose black-and-white characterizations of issues instead of engaging with their nuances in depth—which is exactly her critique of The Book of Virtues and The Truax. I loved her description, for example, of The Book of Virtues as offering “concrete and unquestioned moral certainties, which were arguably never really certain in the past and are surely no longer steadfast amid the complications, complexities, and upheavals of the postmodern world” and her use of Nussbaum’s quote that the book “‘prefers an easy unity of feeling to the hard puzzles of moral reflection’” (42). This is deft phrasing, and pages 35-45 are full of especially juicy nuggets like these. So I was a little disappointed when she occasionally dips into similar modes of thinking with different ideologies; sometimes it feels like she’s just fighting partisan conservative politics with partisan liberal politics. While conversations like that are necessary, I’d like to think there’s a better way (at least from the liberal point of view, since we have truth on our side, just kidding/not kidding/just kidding).

What do we want to teach our children and what don’t we want to teach them? That seems like a fair place to start, right? We want to teach children to stick up for themselves and each other, but not to be bullies; to have high self-esteem, but not be egomaniacs; to be kind, but not be pushovers; to be independent thinkers, but only if they express those independent thoughts in approved ways (e.g., show independence by running for office, not by doing drugs); to be adventurous, but not reckless (Be bold! Try new things! But don’t drink the fabric softener or stick a fork in the electrical outlet); to be creative and artistically free, but not flaky or exploitative or parasitic; to be responsible and take care of business, but not deadened corporate drones with crushed souls. We want children to listen to parents and teachers, and frankly, more or less do what they say (don’t play with doody; don’t bully the shy kid; do your homework), but we also want them to question authority and embrace their own agencies. We want them to be obedient in all the right ways for their own safety and positive development, but we don’t want them to feel helpless or insignificant, and we never want to think of ourselves as teaching them blind obedience.

These are all extremely fine lines, and I think it’s easy to criticize any piece of children’s literature for not getting the balance quite right—especially when children’s lit is also vulnerable to the valid critique of being excessively didactic. Abate calls for children’s lit to incorporate more subtlety, but at what point do extensive pains to tune a book’s message to a precise political key render it even more overtly didactic? We talked a bit about libraries and curation in class last week, and I wonder if the best solution is simply a multiplicity of texts. That’s easier said than done, of course. While I don’t intend to universalize my experience, I grew up in a house with a lot of books, including crusty old traditionalist tomes from the 50s that belonged to my mom and aunts when they were kids (hoarding isn’t all bad). As a kid, I found some of those books exotic and quaint and others stupid and lame, but I didn’t swallow any of their messages whole, and I could sniff them out as dated propaganda. Of course, no one insisted I read them and I was fortunate to have a lot of alternatives. In reading Abate’s discussion of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” I thought of Leo Leoni’s Frederick, a direct counterpoint to “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Frederick the mouse appears to do nothing while the rest of the mice labor all summer, and then in deep winter when the mice are cold and their food stores are empty, Frederick brings them warmth and comfort with the poetry he brooded over all summer, and he saves the day. Would I have understood or appreciated Frederick if I never knew the story of “The Ant and the Grasshopper?” That’s hard to say, but I know I read Frederick thousands of times, and “The Ant and the Grasshopper” only once or twice. If kids can identify and avoid preachy messages in literature, maybe we don’t have to be too scared they’re being brainwashed in any direction.

With respect to the issue of safety, I question Abate’s characterization of Tootle the Train (1945) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) as conservative because they teach the respective lessons of staying on the rails and staying in the bathtub. Are these lessons motivated by politics or the desire to teach the child not to wander off in a crowd, stick her fingers in a light socket, or get into a stranger’s vehicle? As is the case with adults, some children are naturally cautious, but others are not, and parents of an incautious child might want to gently discourage her from exploring that abandoned mine shaft, and maybe to plant seeds of caution hoping that, 15 years later, she’ll make really sure that MDMA pill isn’t rat poison before she swallows it. Now, if Tootle and Scuffy were the only pieces of literature parents offered their children on how to balance boldness with caution, it would be problematic indeed. But consider how even The Polar Express suggests that kids should step beyond their “comfort zones,” take risks, and seize opportunity and adventure in defiance of parental authority. Think about the encouragement of bold adventure in many other pieces of children’s literature (including Harry Potter; recall the article we discussed in class last week about safety hazards at Hogwarts). I’ll plant my flag here and say that Tootle and Scuffy are reasonably gentle counterpoints to grand adventure stories for reminding young children that sometimes caution is a good idea—not to make them neurotic or to cultivate blind obedience, but to survive. Sure, explore the world fearlessly like Dora the Explorer, but…maybe don’t explore climbing that rusty old electrical tower, or explore grand adventures like these.

Abate acknowledges this problem at the end of the chapter on The Book of Virtues; quoting Jean Porter, she recognizes that “One person’s courage is another person’s rashness, and one person’s prudence is another person’s small-minded caution” (51). But Abate puts this statement at the end of the chapter and smooshes it between a reiteration of Bennett’s hypocrisy and a discussion of status politics, both of which make it feel like an afterthought. How would her argument change if she put this issue in the foreground?

It is also worth noting that current parenting practices’ (probably necessary) use of constant surveillance wasn’t the norm in the 1940s. Perhaps there’s less need for Tootle or Scuffy these days because kids don’t have as many opportunities for adventure and don’t make as many risk-benefit choices as kids in the 1940s who played in the street and the woods without adult supervision. But this also raises the question: should we really code safety-motivated messages to stay on the rails as politically conservative? Doesn’t that somehow imply that politically liberal parents are negligent about children’s safety? Is it more liberal or conservative to teach a child to be cautious in an adult world and then give him or her more freedom, versus teaching children to be adventurous but never giving them any opportunity? Trying to code these things politically makes my head spin, and I wonder what purpose such coding really serves.

Shifting gears to The Truax, I would have preferred that Abate discredit The Truax’s environmental claims with sources other than environmental groups. While I think the Wilderness Society is a great organization and I trust them, conservatives would argue that it’s no more neutral than is the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association is. How can we make these arguments without appearing to fight partisan politics with partisan politics? I also would have preferred a lot more detail about why The Truax’s claims are wrong, but I also recognize Abate doesn’t set out to convince us that logging is bad (that would require a much longer book). Even so, the fact that she just tosses off a few quotes as evidence of The Truax’s deception tells me that she intends to preach exclusively to the choir. On one level, that makes practical sense, on another, I’m a little uncomfortable being told to reject propaganda because its information is “not reliable” on the basis of rather superficial evidence, particularly since the crux of The Truax’s argument is that environmentalists are ill-informed and brainwashed by propaganda. Clearly, both sides of the logging debate feel the other side is plainly misinformed. But it seems to me that The Truax sends a useful message about how to advocate for the environment without projecting Guardbark’s presumption, impatience, and disinterest in evidence, and that a fairly superficial treatment of the evidence makes it so easy for conservatives to say, “See, you’re just like Guardbark.” I don’t want to make it easy for them to say that; my affinity for the cause motivates my critique. So the question becomes, am I asking too much of Abate, or might there be a better way?

Allow me to get a little autobiographical here for a moment. I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof experience reading the Abate that provoked some interesting questions for me, and they might be helpful to some of the discussions we’ve been having about childhood and children’s literature this semester.

I was alternately doing my reading and cleaning out an old bookshelf (thanks, Marie Kondo) when I fortuitously came across an old copy of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories I forgot I owned. I’ve had it since I was a kid, in fact, and I remember my mother buying it off the discount book table at Costco, chuckling through it on the way home, and giving it to me. I was about eleven when it came out and I had read “adult books” before, or tried to, struggling mightily with Michael Crichton in the wake of seeing Jurassic Park but plowing through my mother’s Stephen King and scrappy lady investigator mysteries. This book felt *very* adult though, because I knew I was supposed to understand both what it was saying to me and what it wasn’t saying to me, and how adults spoke to each other in order to get that something was going on.

I bring this up because my mother is an avowed Democrat, and yet she purchased Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and gave it to me. And while I haven’t looked at the book since then, what I took from it as a child was not an aversion to “political correctness,” but rather the sexist stupidity of fairy tales. In fact, I remembered this so clearly and was so convinced Abate’s reading of this book was wrong that I went back and flipped through it again, shocked to see it was of course a send-up of “P.C.” liberalism and not the subversive text I’d perceived it to be. What my mother got out of it I’m not sure, but she is a Democrat married to a blue-collar Republican, and they both read only the New York Daily News, never the New York Times. I suspect the thing my parents have in common is the thing she found funny here–a snickering disdain for things they find to be pointlessly pompous. (Dad’s a ball at MOMA.)

Anyway, my experience of Politically-Correct Bedtime Stories lead me down an interesting path–or really, down a series of questions–that ties the Raising Your Kids Right back to some of our other reading. As I was reading about The Book of Virtues and The Truax, I was preoccupied by the fuzzy model of conservative childhood I was getting from Abate’s work–it just wasn’t coming into focus for me. I’m not sure investigating this was the goal of her project because she seems to be working in a bit of a Kidd-like way, in that she uses a historical lens and selects certain works as case-studies to reveal larger themes. Her introduction is heavily historical, tracing the shape of the American conservative movement from the mid-20th century through the present, or the present when the book was written. At least in the chapters chosen for this week, her motive seems to be exploring moments in conservative children’s literature to reveal truths about conservatism, not necessarily what it does for children. I wish she had done more with this, though again I don’t think it was her goal–I wish it because it would be helpful for our class, and for my understanding of childhood studies.

What is the conservative idea (or ideal) of childhood, and what role do books play? I think Bennett’s Book of Virtues points to certain popular conceptions of Victorian childhood that Gubar has so graciously complicated for us, and also to a belief that a child absorbs what they are presented as-is. But if modern conservatism is characterized by traditionalism, an feeling that was “opposed to progressive social changes and promoted the status quo” [12], which the child is, I think, supposed to absorb through the simplified or sanitized moral tales in The Book of Virtues, how and when does that child also learn to question and push back against cultural change? How can political ideology be transmitted through a book to children who may, as I did with Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, take from it a completely different lesson?

Though this is a bit half-baked, I found myself reaching back to Bernstein and wondering whether or not we might be able to look at the children’s book itself as a scriptive thing to get at some of these concepts of childhood. An illustrated picturebook, for example, is meant to be touched and opened, enjoyed visually by the child alone but read in tandem with an adult who can decipher the print. Its script requires contact between adults and children to fully transmit the book’s contents. I’m wondering then about the particular scripts around The Book of Virtues, which at more than 800 pages a child might not even be able to lift for herself and which (from a quick glance inside the book on Amazon) contains almost no illustrations. Or the scripts surrounding the Truax, which, to a child who cannot yet read, might be indistinguishable from The Lorax. These two examples seem to bind together the child receiver to the adult transmitter of the children’s book particularly tightly, and I wonder if that isn’t something important to our understanding of conservative childhood–that one should hew closely to one’s elders.

Due to my fascination with the intersection of literature, history and politics (and with the Age of Containment in particular) I had great expectations for Julia Mickenberg’s text. Although I am mostly satisfied by her findings, and I found her readings of the primary texts particularly insightful, I was frustrated by her occasional one-dimensional treatments of history. I will thus use this post to explain why I believe Learning from the Left can be taken as an example of both good and bad interdisciplinary work.

Mickenberg does a great job in piecing together the information she draws from her massive and multifaceted corpus of sources. The all-embracing analysis of the primary material she selected is particularly impressive. She takes into consideration an extensive repertoire of books for children that differ broadly in terms of genre, settings, stock characters, ideologies, narrative techniques, tropes, origins (national VS transnational), distribution and reception. I also particularly appreciated her close readings, most of which literally prompted me to look up the primary texts online (ever before Prof. Hintz uploaded some of them in the Dropbox).

What’s even more stunning is the way she engages with material as diverse as periodicals, interviews, and archival records. The employment of those sources allows her to enrich her analysis on multiple levels. First, she retraces the personal histories of those who worked in the field in order to persuasively show how different people were moved by different motives in their perpetuation of a leftist ideology through children’s literature. Furthermore, they enable her to connect the dots and successfully delineate the interwovenness and synergies (among authors, publishers, political organizations, educators, and librarians) that made its emergence and diffusion possible, as well as to expose the importance of the gendered nature of the apparatus.

However, much to my displeasure, I found Learning from the Left occasionally subject to oversimplification and historical inaccuracies that illustrate some of the challenges that can emerge from engaging with interdisciplinary work. I will take the first chapter and her treatment of progressivism, which I personally found quite problematic, as an example of my critique.

Let me start by saying that the very way in which she uses the term “progressive” confuses me at times – throughout the book, it is unclear when she employs it as an adjective (as in “using or interested in new or modern ideas especially in politics and education”, vid Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/progressive ) and when she is addressing the actual progressive movement that emerged in the United States early in the 20^th century. When she refers to the latter, she is correct in pointing out that progressives, like Lyrical Leftists, also believed in the idea of “salvation by the child” and largely invested in programs intended to mold (especially urban) children, before they disappeared into “the anonymous mass” (as Jacob Riis put it in How the Other Half Lives). Their efforts ranged from environmental improvement programs (i.e. the construction of parks and playgrounds in heavily populated urban areas) to experimental education.

Mickenberg frames progressivism as a school of thought that

embraced what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the Popular Front “structure of feeling,” which included a commitment to challenging fascism, racism, and imperialism; to promoting democracy; and to forging international, working-class solidarity. As some readers probably already gather, progressive was often a code word for “Communist”. (10)

However, she fails to frame the context in which they operated, and to fully explain the nuances of a movement that was hardly homogeneous in its operations and ideologies. Regardless of their (apparent) antipathy for genteel society and capitalism, progressivism was hardly a leftist initiative. In fact, the term progressive eluded political ideologies, as the movement counted on individuals from across the political spectrum, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. According to New Leftist historians (such as William Williams and Gabriel Kolko), despite the large involvement of the middle-class, progressivism was indeed largely led by part of the new industrial ruling class who identified the corporation as the central institution of the system. From this perspective, public intervention on business regulation promoted by the progressive movement should not be considered a victory of the people against the power of private tycoons, but rather the beginning of the control of business over politics that eventually brought to the establishment of political capitalism. Now, one can clearly see how locating progressives in the same tradition as Lyrical Leftists, without at least mentioning its underlying contradictions, could be somehow misleading.

Moreover, Mickenberg posits that the “[the left] built upon progressive traditions- especially marked in the Settlement House Movement from the turn of the century – of celebrating the distinctive cultural contributions of the national’s immigrant groups.” (46) Such a claim represents yet another historical inaccuracy. The Settlement House Movement was composed of social workers who aimed at educating the poor by establishing settlement houses in poverty-stricken urban areas where they would also live. Settlement workers, predominantly young, white, middle-class, college-educated Protestants, hoped to relieve the poverty of their low-income neighbors by transmitting knowledge and culture, and by providing services such as daycare, education, and healthcare as well as recreational spaces (among which resourceful libraries). The Settlement House Movement emerged from the progressives’ deeply rooted beliefs in immigrant assimilation. In other words, they believed new-comers were to become Americanized by rejecting their native culture for the one of their new country, a process that did not entail only taking up new cultural mores, but also, as Robert Downling has pointed out, “the initiation […] into a democratic society increasingly consumer oriented and actuated by industrial growth.” (114) What is celebrated by Mickenberg as an early attempt to instill in children the importance of ethnic diversity reflects instead the will of progressives to assimilate immigrant children, the great majority of whom belong to the working class, to mainstream society – a goal in clear contrast with the leftist’s aims to foster independent thinking.

I will bring one more example to your attention. The nuances that characterized the progressive movement are once again ignored altogether when she points out that “the emphasis on self-directed activity among the children was characteristic of practices widely promoted by advocates of progressive or “experimental” education.” (31) Although most progressive educators agreed on the necessity of rethinking the role of educators in primary and secondary schools, different fringes of the movement were also in disagreement on the degree to which teachers should function as authoritative figures. This division went beyond the school context. I think for example of the dichotomy between the “park movement” and the “playground movement”, both of which placed a special emphasis on new generations to create for children an alternative environment to the vice-ridden city streets. Whereas the former encouraged unsupervised play, playground enthusiasts believed the presence of a trained supervisor was required on the premises, as in the lack of such control, “the playground community would degenerate into anarchy and chaos.” (Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 249)

Although these are only few among many passages in the text that I found problematic, all in all, I do not think Mickenberg’s general claims are undermined by her occasionally superficial analysis of politics and history. I attribute to the author great merits in illustrating how in the first half of the 20^th century, leftist authors employed children’s literature as a mean to provide lessons to the nation’s youth by instilling their work with social significance. She accurately decodes the (more or less explicit) messages in the primary texts she examines, messages ranging from a critique of the status quo, to the promotion of causes such as the working class struggle and racial equality. However, from Learning from the Left we also learn that stepping in multiple fields can be challenging. I understand that the Progressive Era is not Mickenberg’s main concern, but considering she invested a whole chapter tracing the origins of several elements of leftist children’s literature in the practices of the progressive movement, I believe she should have provided her readers with the proper historical contextualization, rather than granting us only pieces of information that were instrumental to her thesis. I do not mean to bash the text, nor the author, but – as our field is increasingly embracing (and encouraging us to reach out to) other disciplines (vid last week’s class discussion and readings) – I thought I’d mention these dissonances as an example of problems that can possibly be encountered while conducting interdisciplinary research and I am hoping that more potential issues will be brought up during our class discussion.