The recurring theme of the misunderstood child

Anastasia De Waal, 5 February 2010

I don’t know whether the decision to subject literary genres routinely dismissed as unsophisticated to a scrutiny of sorts that will combine the sublime with the ridiculous is a) a timely and culturally constructive move or b) just the evolution of a school of thought preoccupied with ‘owning’ the child ostensibly in order to ‘control’ it.

The University of Cambridge/Homerton Research and Training Centre for Children’s Literature is expanding to incorporate the representation of young people in ‘popular’ video games, comics and blogs.  ‘Seriously analysing these “texts” helps teachers understand how children use them to interpret the real world’ said Centre Director, Professor Maria Nikolajeva, justifying the project.

You would be forgiven for thinking the recently opened Centre is addressing an interdisciplinary interstice.  Sensationalist summaries lead you to believe that fictional childhood personalities have never before reclined on the academic’s metaphorical couch; apparently the new Centre will ‘bridge the divide between literary analysis of children’s books and those who treat it as a social science linked to psychology.’

Yet the fact is that the idea of the child in married psychoanalytical and literary discourses has come under a considerable amount of attention, and criticism, in recent years.  This specialty is struggling to emerge as one warranting the recognition and rigour afforded to other literary disciplines. The underlying problem appears to relate to the validity of locating the foundation of analysis of children’s literary criticism in a supposedly sound and unequivocal understanding of the child.  This confidence is uncomfortably juxtaposed with a relatively young psychoanalytical history; the dominant approach being rooted in the concept of a child that is always obscure and interminably ‘there-to-be-found’.

The question is just how child-centered is this children’s literature centre?

It is unrealistic for an adult to engage with a text as a child might.  Bearing in mind the Centre falls under the remit and direction of the University’s Department of Education, what worries me most about this venture is that yet another reductive and standardized vision of the child might form the foundation for (more of the same) dubious and undeveloped initiatives.

By Annaliese Briggs