The Latest Theory is that Theory Doesn’t Matter
(Eakin, 2002)
In a report in the New York Times about a public symposium on the future of theory held at University of Chicago in 2002, staff writer Emily Eakin suggests that theory appears to have taken a back seat to more pressing current affairs – the Bush Administration, Al Qaeda, Iraq. Further, she reports that the symposium’s panel of high-profile theorists and scholars, including Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, seemed reticent to offer their views on what is often touted as the demise or irrelevance of theory. The symposium and other commentaries on the topic of theory have prompted the view that the ‘Golden Age of Theory’ has passed and we are now in a ‘Post-Theory Age’. Given these pronouncements, we need to ask – Does theory matter any longer? Is it time for its obituary? Or are reports of the death of theory greatly exaggerated? The question remains whether to mourn or celebrate the demise of theory, and whether the body has in fact breathed its last. The title of this Introduction – ‘Bringing back theory’ – suggests a resurrection, or perhaps a haunting, as if the funeral has passed and, like Banquo’s ghost, theory returns to unsettle or disturb the celebration. It also suggests an entreaty, or perhaps a return performance. Rather than settle on one meaning, one interpretation, we are happy for all possibilities to coexist. The coexistence of different theories, different approaches, different interpretations also reflects the state of literary and cultural studies generally and children’s literature criticism in particular. No single theory or viewpoint predominates or vies for hegemony. Yet, one further question lingers – what is theory?
‘Theory’ written with a capital ‘T’ is an encompassing term which gathers a number of theories under its umbrella. Perhaps we might define ‘Theory’ as so-called ‘High Theory’ – structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and so on, and lower case ‘theory’ as a minor player. But this kind of hierarchical division serves little purpose, especially when theory in one form or another influences our daily lives. Theory is not solely the domain of adults; children too are quite capable of coming up with a theoretical proposition about everyday phenomena and surprises – rainbows, thunder, why bubbles burst. As Jonathan Culler observes, ‘we are ineluctably in theory’ (2007: p. 3). Theory, regardless of its status as high or low, sophisticated or simple, offers a supposition or a system of ideas explaining something. However, our interest here is not with everyday theory, but with critical theory and what it can offer the study of children’s literature and film.
Since the time of Aristotle’s Poetics, theory has informed readers about the nature of literature, its affects, genres, and functions. However, the birth of critical theory is relatively recent. Critical theory arose from its early proponents’ dissatisfaction with the ‘practical criticism’ that characterized approaches to literature study from the 1920s. Pioneers of practical criticism, such as I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Cleanth Brooks, advocated a close reading of literature without regard to history or context. Undoubtedly, ‘close reading’ of texts remains an important aspect of criticism today, but simply analysing the ‘words on the page’ in isolation fails to take account of the theoretical or ideological assumptions on which such analysis is based. This kind of reading in a theoretical void pertains to liberal humanist practice, which operates from a set of uncritical assumptions about the value of literature, the constancy of human nature, the transcendence of an essential individuality over cultural and other influences, and so on. However, approaches to criticism have always been characterized by peaks and troughs, with each decade of the twentieth century riding on a new wave of critical theory ready to wipe out the liberal humanist consensus (Barry, 2002: p. 32). Peter Barry, like others who provide a chronology of the development of critical theory, maps these new waves, noting both the turn away from and the return towards a particular theory. For example, Marxist literary criticism, first introduced in the early twentieth century, returned with renewed vigour and political agency in the 1960s. From the 1970s, other theories which railed against liberal humanist orthodoxies began to make their presence felt, namely, feminist criticism and linguistic criticism. In the 1970s and 1980s, both structuralism and post-structuralism foregrounded language and philosophy, rather than history or context. This prompted a ‘turn to history’ which was ushered in by New Historicism (USA) and Cultural Materialism (UK). Finally, in the 1990s, the move from grand universalizing theories to more specific forms of criticism and theory emerged from postcolonialism, post-modernism, and postfeminism (Barry, 2002: p. 33). The twentieth century was undoubtedly an important period in the history of critical theory. Now in the twenty-first century we may well ask – ‘Is the party over?’.
This book seeks to demonstrate how theory informs readings of children’s literature and film. Rather than writing off theory as irrelevant, we argue that theory is alive and well, and its prognosis promises a long and healthy life. We have briefly noted the genealogy and high points of theory; now we want to engage with some of the arguments put forth by its detractors and consider the value and weaknesses of these positions.
One claim is that theory fails to take account of ‘real readers’ and ‘real viewers’. Now that reader-response theories and audience studies have fallen out of favour with proponents of critical theory, those who insist on empirical evidence claim that theory is unable to explain the experience that reading a book or viewing a film offers ‘real’ people. Stephen Prince (1996) asserts that film theories construct spectators within the theory, but that ‘real’ spectators are missing. The absence of real readers is often noted by assessors when children’s literature scholars apply for grants or discuss their work outside their field; a recurring question is – ‘But what do the children think?’. In responding to this question, we need to consider the assumptions that are behind it: namely, that only real readers can offer ‘authentic’ interpretations about a text’s content or assessments of its worth. Presumably these unbiased accounts are immune from any ideological predispositions on the part of readers, and the responses are therefore untainted by the stain of theory. Assumptions about ‘real readers’ are often based on the liberal humanist tenet that there exists a universal reading experience. While proponents of reader-response theories claim the benefits of learning from real readers, critics of this approach point to its potential for making generalizations about readers and particular texts which fail to take account of the diversity of readers, cultural contexts, and reading practices.
A second claim is that theory uses a lexicon or stock of words and phrases that is often obscure or elitist, but which nevertheless carries critical currency in specialist scholarly contexts. Valentine Cunningham (2002) illustrates this point with reference to what has become known as ‘the Sokal hoax’, where a spoof article, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a transformational hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, replete with references to cultural theory, sociology of science, post-modernist views about quantum physics, and so on, was published (after peer review) in the journal Social Text. While Sokal’s hoax focused more on deriding cultural theorists and sociologists by demonstrating that they couldn’t distinguish the genuine ‘article’ from a false one, it also mocked the way theoretical language, especially that which proposes post-modern ideas about science, and the characteristically slippery, allusive, and paradoxical discourses of post-modern theories, can be easily mimicked, becoming prey to its own cleverness. However, there is another side to this claim which Culler takes up with reference to Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory (1986). As Culler puts it: ‘a certain resistance to reading and to theory is not just a lapse or a failure of theory but is inherent in the theoretical enterprise’ (2007: p. 83). This observation comes from de Man’s argument that the language that theory speaks is ‘the language of self-resistance’ (1986: pp. 19–20). In other words, the point of theory is to resist the reading it advocates. While theory provides us with concepts and metalanguage as part of its systematic approach to understanding phenomena, it also makes mastery impossible, ‘since theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and of the assumptions on which they are based’ (Culler, 2007: p. 79). Consequently, criticisms concerning the language of theory work to remind us of the questioning and sceptical nature of theory. This characteristic of theory is easily forgotten in what can sometimes become a single-minded endeavour to advocate a theoretical point of view without either attending to its internal paradoxes and dilemmas or accepting its methods as provisional and self-critical.
A third claim with particular relevance to literary studies is that theory fails to take literature as its object. This claim argues that we have become distracted by other texts and discursive practices and that literature (and reading) is now passé or elitist. Eagleton’s thinly veiled lament at young scholars’ interests in ‘vampirism, and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies’ is an example of this kind of distraction (2003: p. 3). Children’s literature scholarship has similarly developed an interest in a wide range of topics (including cyborgs and vampires). The field is marked by inclusiveness, ranging across ‘literary’ texts in different forms and formats (picture books, novels, graphic novels, comics, film, videogames) and including adaptations from one form to another. This inclusiveness has contributed to a broadening of the idea of ‘literature’ as an object of study. The variety of texts also points to the interdisciplinary nature of literary studies, which draws on a wide range of cultural theories. Culler’s observation that ‘literary and cultural studies take place within a space articulated by theory or theories, theoretical discourses, theoretical debates’ (2007: p. 2) applies also to children’s literature studies.
While Culler suggests that the turn from a narrowly defined and elite strand of literature has been in progress for the past two decades, he concedes that there is ‘evidence of a new centrality of the literary’ (2007: p. 14), which has seen the return of aesthetics and of the propensity for scholars (often outside literary studies) to use literary works to ‘advance and to question theoretical assumptions’. In support of Culler’s first point, texts written for teachers, such as Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic (Misson and Morgan, 2006), argue that secondary English classrooms can profit from an engagement with post-structuralist theories and aesthetics in teaching literature. Culler’s second point is demonstrated by Judith Butler’s (2004) use of Antigone in theorizing models of kinship, and David Baggett and Shawn Klein’s (2004) edited book, Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts, published in Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy Series. Baggett and Klein’s text is one example of how this children’s book in particular has prompted interest and criticism from both inside and outside children’s literature studies, attracting the attention of other disciplines (including philosophy) as well as religious communities. It would seem that once the doors were opened many chose to enter what was once a closed community. Frank Kermode makes the point that when theory became not theory of literature but Theory, it became inclusive of other interests and a loss of ‘intimate contact with literary texts’ occurred (2003: p. 58). Thus, the assertion that literature is no longer the main object of literary studies is true, but not in a totalizing way. What this claim fails to consider is the concomitant effect of theory on literature and of literature on theory, a dual project that Culler describes as ‘bringing theory to literature and bringing out the literary in theory’ (2007: p. 5).
A fourth claim is that theory encourages poor reading. Poor reading in this instance refers to the ways in which theory is said to misdirect readers into distorting the text to suit a particular theoretical point, or what Cunningham terms ‘interpretative excess’ (2002: p. 79). Of course, theory cannot be anthropomorphized into a force which directs the hand that writes or the mind of the one who reads. The argument is, however, not as simple as this. While Cunningham argues that theory ‘distorts reading’ (p. 88), and offers several accounts of blatant misreading of texts, he also concedes that theory ‘has massively enriched reading by precisely inducing readers to pursue its multi-directional potentialities’ (p. 39). A problem with the kind of mixed-blessing argument about theory is that it fails to consider readers as active in the process of interpretation. Readers do not come to texts as innocents (neither are texts ever innocent). Even when young children encounter picture books for the first time, they bring to the text, unless they have been living in an isolated environment, a sense of story, experience of human actions, desires, motivations, and a functioning language. Their lived experience in the world has already shaped them so that they arrive at a text with a predisposition towards a story, certain expectations, and so on. So too scholars and students carry their own repertoire of competencies, assumptions, knowledge about texts and intertexts, as well as a critical tool kit of theoretical concepts, interpretative rules about genre, symbol, language, beliefs, and assumptions. Theory, therefore, is only one element in the reading of texts, but it can be a significant element.
Related to the claim that theory produces poor readers is the argument that readers influenced by theory may fail to grasp the ‘right’ meaning of a text or to divine what the author intended it to mean. As Culler notes, theory seeks to ‘adjudicate’ among various sources, practices, discourses, conventions, habits, and so on that come into play when a reader interprets the meanings of a text. Poor reading, then, is not simply a matter of being led by the nose by theory or of failing to get into the head of the author. Rather, it is about failing to take account of other factors that comprise valid evidence for determining a justifiable meaning or interpretation of a text.
While these four claims (and there are more) may not necessarily constitute arguments against theory in toto, they nevertheless highlight the ways in which theory has been used and abused and the potential traps that await those who head off like fearless knights errant determined to prove themselves worthy of any theoretical challenge they encounter. They also offer us a way of taking stock, by considering how children’s literature scholars and students are best served by a critical reflexiveness, exemplified by a willingness to scrutinize the value of theory they wish to deploy and a preparedness to locate themselves in relation to theoretical discourses. Perhaps most importantly, contemporary work in children’s literature requires novel combinations of theories and the adoption of new fields of enquiry as the forms and modes of textual production change.
Scholarship in children’s literature began to develop in the 1970s, when academic courses in the field were established and key journals were instituted, including Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Signal, Children’s Literature in Education, and The Lion and the Unicorn. These developments coincided with the rise of literary and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s.
While scholars in the fields of literary and cultural studies quickly responded to the theoretical turn which dominated literary and cultural studies until the mid-1990s, children’s texts, and the critical discourses associated with them, continued to rely to a large extent on liberal humanist notions of individual growth and maturation, often expressed in terms of an individual who recognizes or accepts an identity which constitutes the core of being. As noted earlier, these liberal humanist traditions are to a large extent at odds with post-structuralist, post-modernist and postcolonial theories which contest notions of a fixed, stable identity and of the universality of (Western) human experience. Moreover, children’s literature scholarship has always paid close attention to the readers (and implied readers) of texts which are implicated in processes of socialization; in critical work, this emphasis has often found its expression in reflections on what might be confusing or unsettling to child readers, or in the idea that children ‘need’ narratives which give them hope. Many children’s literature scholars have, of course, drawn upon various forms of critical theory such as feminist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories.
In the 1990s a rich collection of scholarly texts emerged which brought a wide range of theoretical perspectives to children’s literature. Significant works include: Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1992); Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992) by John Stephens; Peter Hunt’s edited collections, Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism (1990) and Understanding Children’s Literature (1999); Rod McGillis’s The Nimble Reader (1996) and Voices of the Other (1999); and Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (1999) by Robyn McCallum. These texts provided sustained, scholarly discussions of how theories drawn from a variety of fields – psychoanalysis, linguistics, critical theory, stylistics, literary theory, cultural studies – could be employed to the study of texts produced for young people.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen other scholarly works contribute to the critical discussions begun in many of these earlier works (and others). Often these new works consider texts from within a new millennial context of a world characterized by increasing cultural, political, and social flux. These include: Clare Bradford’s work on postcolonial theory and children’s literature Reading Race (2001) and Unsettling Narratives (2007); Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult (2008) which engages with the ongoing problematic relation between adult and child that haunts children’s literature. Gender and its discontents continue to inform children’s literature criticism in works such as John Stephens’ edited volume Ways of Being Male (2002), Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’ The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature (2002), Victoria Flanagan’s study of cross-dressing fiction in Into the Closet (2007), and Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction (2009) by Kerry Mallan; psychoanalytic theory and its application to popular texts is deployed in Karen Coats’ Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature (2004). The gothic returns in The Gothic in Children’s Literature (2007) co-edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis; the aesthetic and social vision of children’s literature is the subject of Kimberley Reynolds’ Radical Children’s Literature (2007); and the impact of changing world orders and the utopian impulse in children’s fiction is taken up in New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature (2008) by Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum. This listing is not exhaustive; rather, it is indicative of the activity that is apparent in the field. In addition to these authored and edited collections there are also handbooks, guides, textbooks, and encyclopedias that tease out the significance of theory to children’s literature.
Given all this lively scholarship, one could be forgiven for asking why we need another book on children’s literature and theory. One answer is that the field continues to evolve and respond to changing times. Hunt noted two decades ago that children’s literature criticism was finding ‘a unique voice’ (1990: p. 3). How this unique voice has been modulated and heard, particularly in the twenty-first century, is a key thematic of this book. While the preceding section made a case for the continuing value of theory, our primary concern in this book is about bringing innovative approaches to contemporary texts and theories. To this end we have included the work of familiar scholars as well as those who are new to the field so that we can take up our challenge to deliver fresh and innovative discussions that demonstrate how children’s texts engage with contemporary issues and how theory can assist us in our reading of these texts.
‘Children’s Literature’ is an inclusive term that accommodates the study of literature and other media, and extends to a wide demographic of readers from preschool to young adulthood (adults too are often drawn to children’s literature for various reasons). While we have selected literature and film as the textual modes on which we focus, this is not to dismiss the significance of ‘new media’ such as computer games and social networking sites that rely on interactive technologies and computer-enabled devices. The work of theory in relation to new media is an important field but is beyond the scope of this book. However, the primary texts discussed in the following chapters include a wide readership across children and young adults.
While literary studies and film studies are discrete disciplines with their own fields of study and critical language, they also share some common ground, especially with respect to aspects of their narrative form and function: character, point of view, focalization, plot, and theme. Their individual styles and aesthetics are created by literary or cinematic elements that are integral to the medium, but which are often expropriated to achieve a certain mixed-form aesthetic or affect. In their discussion of the animated film Madagascar, Clare Bradford and Raffaela Baccolini (Chapter 2) draw attention to the film’s use of cinematic techniques to signal narrative shifts, create a visual aesthetic, and achieve intertextual resonances. Picture books too use cinematic techniques – framing, ‘camera’ angle and distance (far shot, medium shot, close up), montage – to extend and complement conventional artistic elements, principles of composition, and use of symbol. Picture books are one example of a hybrid visual–verbal form common in children’s literature which enables different theorizing of its ‘literariness’ – its narrative, rhetorical, artistic, performative qualities. In a related way, children’s film – live action and animation – is another form which warrants our critical attention. Like literature, film does not simply reflect the world but actively constructs worlds and meanings. One such other world is vividly delineated in Maria Takolander’s discussion of the film Monster House (Chapter 5), which she reads through a prism of gothic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories.
Another area which is receiving renewed interest in children’s literature research is adaptation (book to film, book to multimedia, film to book spinoff). In her article in The Lion and the Unicorn, Linda Hutcheon recognizes the value of children’s literature for theorizing ‘everything from postmodernism to parody, from irony to adaptation’ (2008: p. 169). David Buchbinder in this collection (Chapter 7) expands on Hutcheon’s points and draws on a rich and varied range of texts and discourses to consider adaptation with respect to young adult fiction.
These connections between children’s literature, film, and critical theory are not limited in their significance, nor do they appeal to a small age-defined demographic (children) or to a small section of the academic community. They also reflect the way in which children’s texts are caught up in wider cultural, political, and social spheres of activity. Texts and theory are performative: they do something, and therefore incur important ethical responsibilities. These ethical responsibilities are not narrowly conceived in terms of moral content and values (or lack of them) advanced by texts. Rather, they are concerned with larger issues of truth, representation, and being (selfhood, identity, subjectivity). Such issues form the touchstones of literature and film, regardless of age classification; they are also the enduring concerns of theory. Several chapters illuminate how different theoretical perspectives – cognitive schemas and scripts (Chapter 1), spatiality (Chapter 2), globalization (Chapter 3), gender (Chapters 4 and 5), ecocriticism (Chapter 6), and posthumanism (Chapter 8) – cast light on how texts seek to represent and validate notions of self, cultural identity, being, place, and belonging.
Our dual focus on literature and film enables us to broaden our scope in examining the performative function of theory: what theory can do and how it asks questions about meaning, common sense, and reality. We also want to put theory to the test to see how it opens up alternative ideas, challenges basic assumptions and premises, and unsettles the taken-for-granted with respect to authorship, literary conventions, and the contexts in which texts are produced and consumed. We want to explore how theory can proffer new ways of being, new forms of belonging, and new relations in a world that is increasingly affected by change, globalization, threat, and fear. How it sees the dialogical relations between history and tradition, on one hand, and the new and the fashionable, on the other. How it offers insights into the paradoxes of capitalism, consumerism, and identity politics. How it directs our attention to the layers of the palimpsest – the intertexts, sources, and constant referentiality – that constitute literature and film. How it can demystify and expose cultural forms and structures we often take as natural. These are ambitious goals and this book cannot engage in depth with all the possibilities we raise. Nevertheless, this account of the capacity of theory – to engage and stimulate our thinking, assist in our formulation of ideas, and scrutinize ‘facts’, discourse, and language – offers a useful conceptual framework for thinking about theory.
This book is not a survey or history of theory. Many books offer useful guides to the chronological development of fields of theory. Rather, the chapters of this book seek to consider the dynamic interplay between children’s literature, film, and theory. Our aim is to elucidate the relations between theory and text by working on a select range of theoretical concepts and discourses, social and cultural issues, and texts produced for children and young adults. To achieve this aim we invited the contributing authors to address certain topics which we felt would yield a lively discussion of theory, contemporary issues, and texts. The range of possible topics is endless, but as in all works the final decision involves a degree of shared interest and preference. In the following chapters, the work of pioneering theorists (Lacan, Foucault, Appadurai, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Deleuze) mixes and mingles with more recent theoretical discourses and concepts (performativity, queer, ecocriticism, spatiality, posthumanism, monstrous-feminine, globalization, relationality, utopianism, cultural geography, technoscience).
The collection opens with ‘Schemas and Scripts: Cognitive Instruments and the Representation of Cultural Diversity in Children’s Literature’ by John Stephens. Working with insights offered by cognitive poetics, Stephens examines a range of picture books and novels to develop his argument that the cognitive instruments of schema and script can function in texts to assist with positive representations of cultural diversity, which may transform an existing ‘script’ into another way of understanding the world. This chapter is followed by ‘Journeying Subjects: Spatiality and Identity in Children’s Texts’ by Clare Bradford and Raffaella Baccolini. The authors have called on concepts and reading strategies developed across three fields of research – cultural geography, postcolonial theory, and utopian theory – to inform their analysis of the complex intersections of place and identities in children’s texts. In ‘Local and Global: Cultural Globalization, Consumerism, and Children’s Fiction’, Elizabeth Bullen and Kerry Mallan draw on theories of cultural globalization to explain some of the ways in which broader globalization processes are translated into narratives written for children and young adults. Their discussion considers the impact of globalization on the marketing of children’s texts and culture and their engagements with the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. Maria Takolander’s ‘Monstrous Women: Gothic Misogyny in Monster House’ takes up perspectives from the field of gothic theory – itself a hybrid field drawing on psychoanalytical and political theories – to consider representations of women in the animated film Monster House. Shifting the focus to bodies, identities, and performativity, ‘Splitting the Difference: Pleasure, Desire, and Intersubjectivity in Children’s Literature and Film’ by Christine Wilkie-Stibbs draws on a range of queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories to examine how identities are negotiated in a selection of Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender (LBGT) narratives that break ranks with the heterosexual imaginary. She argues that these texts develop ideas of self that are more complex and more diverse than the standardized discourses of the child would have otherwise admitted. In ‘Children as Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts’, Geraldine Massey and Clare Bradford provide an overview of the field of ecocriticism from its beginnings in the 1960s, discussing the extent to which children’s environmental texts mobilize concepts and approaches from this field. In ‘From “Wizard” to “Wicked”: Adaptation Theory and Young Adult Fiction’ David Buchbinder examines the historical and contextual nature of adaptation. He argues that it is more profitable to consider the adaptation of an originary text (regardless of the medium) on the merit of what it sets out to do as an autonomous text, rather than being viewed simply as always-already a poor imitation of a better original. In an essay that returns to the spirit of the Introduction, Kerry Mallan concludes the volume with ‘All that Matters: Technoscience, Critical Theory, and Children’s Fiction’. In this final essay, she argues that science and children’s fiction open up a new theoretical space to explore questions about life, death, and what matters as considerations of our posthuman existence.