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.

ABC blog: B

See previous entry A

B is for Bakhtin, inescapably. The most important single theorist who has inspired all my research, from the magical chronotopes in my PhD thesis through carnival and polyphony and intertextuality and back to carnival. The trouble with Bakhtin in Western scholarship is that people tend to be familiar with only one of the cornerstones of his all-encompassing theory of the novel. Sadly, Bakhtin died before he could write up his works and fragments into a coherent whole, an ultimate theory of everything. Some people use the chronotope, correctly or incorrectly; some people have no idea that polyphony and heteroglossia are two translations of the same Russian word; some people use carnival in a very narrow sense, while it was for Bakhtin the decisive philosophical approach to all art. Intertextuality is used everywhere, but it is Julia Kristeva's translation of Bakhtin's original concept of text in dialogue. And since Bakhtin's groundbreaking works were published in the West after Booth's and Genette's, he doesn't get credit for the fundamental ideas of narrative theory: the relationships between the author, the narrator and the character. 

 Last year, some of my students asked for a crash course on Bakhtin, and we had some great sessions, but I could easily teach a whole course on Bakhtin and children's literature and never run out of topics. For a full bibliography, see my academia page. Bakhtin is omnipresent, even when he is not specifically tagged. 

You can stop reading here if you wish, but if you want a more detailed and academic mini-introduction to Bakhtin and children's literature, here is a panel proposal I recently sent to an international Bakhtin conference.

The works of Mikhail Bakhtin have been widely employed in international research on children's literature since the late 1980s when they became available outside Russia. The research community not only seized the various parts of Bakhtin's theoretical framework as fruitful tools for examining texts produced and marketed for young audience, but in the first place realised the significance of Bakhtin's theory of the novel for holistic approaches to children's literature as an art form. Firstly, children's literature is inescapably heteroglot, since it is built on the coexistence of and conflict between the adult and the child discourse. This is not merely reflected in the text through the cognitive discrepancy between the adult and child narrative subjectivities, but also in the inevitable asymmetical power positions, reminiscent of other heterological discourses, such as feminist, queer and postcolonial, where Bakhtin's ideas have similarly been creatively utilised. However, secondly, children's literature is also inherently carnivalesque, since it allows temporary empowerment of the disempowered (children), sanctioned by those in power (adults). While the social norms disrupted by carnival in children's literature are typically re-established, the carnivalesque structure has a strong subversive and transformative potential, textual as well as extratextual. Thirdly, children's literature is consciously and consistently dialogical because of its integral eclecticism, drawing on folktales, mainstream literature and popular culture, apart from its own rich intertextuality. Children's literature, more than any other kind of literature, is transnational and transgenerational. Finally, the specific chronotope of childhood, with its restricted spatiality and temporality and its focus on futurity, reflects Bakhtin's concept of incompleteness as the foremost characteristic of the polyphonic novel. 

So. Now you can sit an exam on Bakhtin. But don't forget to refer to me as your source.

ABC blog: A

A is for aetonormativity. As the White Knight says in Through the Looking Glass, “It's my own invention”. Thoroughly my own invention. If you google it, you get 660 hits, which are mostly either by me or references to me. Google will ask whether you meant “heteronormativity”, and it shows you how clever Google is, because the concept of aetonormativity is coined in analogy with heteronormativity in queer theory where it means that heterosexuality is the norm. Aeto- refers to age, so aetonormativity means that adulthood is the norm while childhood is a deviation. If you ask me where I found the aeto-, I have no idea. Possibly on Wikipedia. I needed this term, and I invented it. I first used it in an obscure publication where it wasn't noticed, at least not by children's literature scholars, and then I developed it in my book Power, Voice and Subjectivity. It has now been picked up by some students and colleagues, and one colleague whom I don't know personally even lists it as her specialty on her university profile page. I think I can state with confidence that this has been a successful launch, and I hope that posterity gives me credit.

ABC blog

Once upon a time in the Stone Age I had a webpage. Nobody is impressed now, but in the Stone Age it was rather unusual to have a personal webpage, and I learned how to build one with simple html in a half-day course at Åbo Akademi, Finland, where I was a Visiting Professor. As a small university, Åbo Akademi thought it was worth while to teach their employees to build their own webpages. It was uploaded on the university server, and I was allowed to keep it there for a while after I had left them. Then I moved it to Stockholm University server, because it was still Stone Age and nobody in my department had webpages, but when I left Stockholm I had to find a web hotel, buy a domain and pay for service. It was rather cumbersome. Finally, when academia.edu was launched, there was no point in having a private page. Academia is a great network, and it has many superb features. Except one that I had on my Stone Age webpage. I had a subject index to my work. Of course I have tags on my book and paper publications on academia, but they can never be as detailed as a subject index, and I have so many weird subjects in my work that academia does not acknowledge.

It has been a while since I did a blog marathon. In the coming weeks, I will be running a Subject Index to my work, focused on the various subjects I have written about, particularly terms and concepts I have invented. Some have become established, some haven't. It's a good way to look back on my professional career at this dark and cold time of year.

So watch this space: the ABC of children's literature research.

Unclaimed skills

During my long life I have acquired a number of professional skills that once were useful but have proved to be of no value in the long run.

For instance, I can recite Russian poetry for hours. I once recited Russian poetry for at least an hour while waiting for a delayed flight. My audience didn't understand Russian, but they were fascinated by the sound of it. I frequently recite Russian poetry for myself. Otherwise, it's a useless skill.

I can also sing bawdy Russian songs. I once impressed a younger male colleague who had compiled a collection of dirty Russian verse, but wasn't familiar with some of my repertoire. Another time, at a Slavist conference in Denmark, a friend and I entertained the participants well after midnight, until we got a round of beer on the house because the owner liked his guests to have fun.

Generally, my profound knowledge of Russian literature, bawdy or not, is of no consequence. In Stockholm, I used to teach two optional courses, on nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature. I have stopped using Russian texts in my research because reviewers complain that texts unfamiliar to readers make my research less relevant (!). So much for trying to be international.

My profound knowledge of Swedish literature is rather pointless these days. Although I have managed to smuggle Pippi Longstocking into my syllabus this year, and although I always bring Sven Nordqvist's picturebooks into class, it does not make any difference. My Bahktin-inspired studies of Selma Lagerlöf are of no interest for anyone. Generally, my engagement with literary theory is superfluous. The last course I taught in Sweden before I collapsed and went on sick leave was “Contemporary theories of the novel” where I treated Imre Kertesz' Holocaust novel Fateless as a displacement of myth, examined heteroglossia in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. and combined Alice in Wonderland and The Magic Mountain in the same class from a Jungian perspective.

My Alice studies are, by the way, also irrelevant. Nobody is impressed by Alice studies in the UK. I am donating my whole collection, about two hundred and fifty volumes, in various translations and with various illustrations, to the Homerton library,

Which reminds me of translations. This is what I used to do for a living. Already in Sweden, translations from Swedish into Russian were not in great demand, apart from an occasional short story or a political manifesto. Now Russian and Swedish are two useless languages which at best make me slightly exotic in my colleagues' eyes. Not to mention Norwegian and Danish.

I don't regret all these things in the past, because they have made me what I am now. But it is one of life's paradoxes that the only thing that proved decisive for my present situation is a foreign language I learned in school.

The best ever?

Earlier this week I had a class with my masters students about children's literature classics and canons, and among many other things we talked about the numerous recommendation lists of “The best books ever” or “The best books of the year” or “The best books about this and that”. I was sceptical, yet had to admit that I sometimes provide recommendations, as I have done a coupe of times in this blog. I am revising an academic book with many lists, which has made me think about my selection criteria, and they are of course highly subjective. To see them all, you must wait until the book is published, but here are some of the most stimulating children's and young adult books I have read in the past few years, in no particular order.

Gro Dahle & Svein Nyhus, Sinna man (“Angry man”)

Lane Smith, It's a Book

Lucy Christopher, Stolen

 

Oliver Jeffers, Lost and Found, The Heart and the Bottle

Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go, A Monster Calls 

 

Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

 

Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing, The Red Tree

Jon Klassen, I Want My Hat Back

John Green, The Fault in our Stars

Jacqueline Wilson, Four Children and It

David Shelton, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat

 

Marcus Sedgwick, Midwinterblood, She Is Not Invisible

How a passion is born

People come to children's literature from all kinds of pursuits: some from education, others from librarianship, Medieval or Victorian studies, folklore, history of childhood. I have recently been trying to remember when my interest for children's literature first appeared, and it seems to have always been there. I have a book, or used to have a book, published in Moscow in 1965, titled Anthology of English Children's Literature, with nursery rhymes, folktales, excerpts from novels, and extensive introductions and footnotes. From today's vantage point, I cannot really see who the intended audience was, since children's literature was only taught at schools of librarianship, and the students there probably didn't read English. But the book was compiled by a devoted scholar of English children's literature, and for many years it was the most reliable source I had.

I remember buying this book, which means it wasn't a gift, and it was relatively expensive, while I didn't receive any pocket money (a non-existent concept in my home country). It means that I had to ask my parents for money to buy the book and took the trouble to go to the only bookstore in Moscow that sold books of this kind. It means that, as a thirteen-year-old, I already knew that children's literature was part of my future profession, worth an investment.

About the same time, my grandfather was granted the privilege to travel to England and Ireland, which was very unusual, even for his high academic position. He asked me what I wanted him to buy for me. Most of my classmates would certainly have asked for pretty clothes (there wasn't much choice of these in Russia at the time), pencils, souvernirs. I asked for two books: Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Pan. My grandfather didn't know about paperbacks and was horrified by the prices of hardbacks, but he did buy the books for me (I still have them).

When, age fourteen, I finished middle school, I seriously contemplated going to a vocational library college, because they taught children's literature there. I didn't, but the very idea, as I see now, indicated the depth of my interest. When it was time for university I didn't choose librarianship because it wasn't what I wanted to do, so I studied English as the closest alternative, and since there was practically no research in children's literature I was planning a career as a translator.

So how did it start? When did the love of children's books as reading matter turn into love of children's books as a study object?