ABC blog: G

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G is for gap. I first heard about gaps in a lecture by Aidan Chambers, in the early '80s when he used to come to Sweden regularly. Chambers claims that the scope of gaps in a text is a measure of literary quality, and I am prepared to agree. He distinguishes between didactic texts that have very few or no gaps and creative texts that leave a lot of gaps for readers to fill.

I had never been particularly interested in readers, but this approach offered a way of examining texts from the readers' perspective, without going into empirical research. Nowadays, I am convinced that you cannot study children's literature without considering readers. Implied readers. The reader in the text, which is the title of Chamber's essay.

I then read Wolfgang Iser's (pronounced EE-zer, in case you didn’t know) works where he discusses how (implied) readers interact with texts during the act of reading, through anticipation and retrospection and filling of gaps. He also points out that there are various kinds of gaps in literary text. Information gaps are there for readers to fill with their previous knowledge and experience, both from real life and from previous reading. For instance, few texts involving human beings mention that characters have two arms and two legs. This is a gap we fill automatically, by default, unless we are told something else. Narrative gaps are deliberately left for readers to be alert while reading, filling them as the text progresses, as new facts are added, new inferences made. Some gaps are never filled and leave us curious – or frustrated. The open ending is the ultimate gap. There are cultural gaps that presuppose familiarity with socio-historical and cultural conditions. These can go unnoticed when real readers are displaced, or shifted from implied readers. Or they can be misinterpreted, which may or may not affect the overall interpretation.

Gaps is a also a concept I have used extensively in my work on picturebooks, where, I insist, words and images collaborate, filling each other's gaps – but preferably still leaving enough for readers to fill. In fact, words and images can amplify each other's gaps, creating a BIG gap between the verbal and the visual. These are the books we find most exciting and challenging. 

G is also for genre and gender, two subjects that I have explored extensively. In articles leading to the book From Mythic to Linear, I started looking across genres, finding similarities between folktales and adventure, fantasy and young adult novel. In the book, I suggest three kinds of children's narratives: prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian, depending on how time and space are organised (see chronotope) and where the ending takes the character or at least points at. In Power, Voice and Subjectivity, I added child/adult tensions to these categories. 

ABC blog: C

See previous entries A B

C is for crossvocalisation. Like with aetonormativity, I coined this word because I needed it. It means that a male author uses a female first-person narrator and the other way round. I used crossdressing as analogy. Crossvocalisation is a performance: what interested me was whether a female narrative voice genuinely performs as female, which of course led to a whole bunch of questions about what it means for a voice to be male or female, because narrative voice, as everything else in a narrative text is a construction and has nothing to do with the real author's gender, nor the protagonist's gender. I tested the idea at a major children's literature conference, and the editor of a major journal asked me to develop my paper into an article. The reviewers found lots of petty faults with the article, but failed to notice my revolutionary approach to narrative, and the article was rejected. I published it in Swedish, and then I reworked it into a chapter in Power, Voice and Subjectivity. If you google it, there are 1,500 hits, most of them to my book, and some to course syllabi where the book is used. I haven't seen it employed in further scholarship, so here is your chance.

When I wrote that first article and even in my book I found very few examples of successful male-female crossvocalisation, while there were scores of female writers who used male voices. I also noticed that when male authors did use female voices, gender was often blurred by other, more prominent features, such as ethnicity or genre. I jumped to conclusions, but since then I have read some superb crossvocalised novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and She is Not Invisible, so apparently male YA authors have recently become bolder in their choices of narrative perspective. Which makes me glad, because I didn't like the idea that women should be more imaginative and empathetic than men.

C is of course also for carnival and chronotope, which I have already mentioned; and it is for cats, a subject that I have studied academically as well as empirically.