Topic
While late literary and cultural theory increasingly concentrates on a subject’s agency and autonomy, the active and creative potential of children and adolescents as agents in children’s literature has so far only rudimentarily been considered. Rather more characteristically for current research in ChL is an argumentation within the literary sphere. Here, the innovative potential of ChL is, for instance, analysed in connection to other literary genres, but not with regard to cultural practices (cf. Reynolds 2007). Another trait of ChL research is an individualising perception, which describes the potentials of agency with view to the private actions of an individual (usually represented through characters) rather than understanding this as collective order or common social practices.
This literary immanent orientation (often related with an attempt of appreciation of ChL in the literary sphere) also defines discussions of canonisation within ChL. Although canonicity was discussed in relation to its cultural functionalisation during the 1990s’ canon criticisms, such a relation has, so far, not been recognisable within ChL research. However, the opportunity arises to apply the concept of the imaginary as social practice to questions of canon formation, since it helps the construction of collective identities (cf. Castoriadis, Anderson, Appadurai or Taylor): texts, which are perceived as constitutive of national or transnational canons, possess not only common perceptions of aesthetic values, but also of a collective cultural self-conception. If ChL is given a central position within a process of enculturation, it is obvious to examine supposedly canonical children’s literary texts (or so-called classics) towards representations of mutual social orders which are supposed to determine social actions. Accordingly, a historical change of a canon might be explicable because of the historical contingency of the social imaginary, in which a literary canon participates. This research perspective definitely exceeds Hans Heino Ewers’ suggested differentiation between timeless traditional texts (“Traditionstexten”), which are handed down from generation to generation and represent a time-transcending image of the child, and temporal key texts (“Schlüsseltexten”), which characterise a certain era and serve the understanding of childhood in this period (cf. Ewers 2007). On the one hand, these texts are not merely defined by their references to concepts of childhood; on the other, the coincidence of era and idea/concept implied in Ewers’ conceptual pair is allocated by replacing a purely temporal orientation with a multi-dimensional concept of social order.
The suggested project will try to counter the following desiderata within ChL, which result from the so far outlined state of research: It is necessary to extend the theoretical spectrum of ChL research, regarding particularly politically oriented approaches. The extensive focalisation on the private individual’s actions and the only hesitant inclusion of public and especially political questions and theories in ChL research might be explicable by a missing dissociation of theoretical-critical reflections towards ChL of intended concepts of childhood. With this, research in ChL seems to reproduce patterns of childhood concepts in modern societies’ (separation of family – public; locating the child in the non-public space of the family; individualisation; criteria of ‘suitability for children’), although, as critical meta-discourse, it should not necessarily adopt its objective mechanisms but rather dissociate from it.
Concerning the question of canon formation, another desideratum to be countered by the project at hand is the cultural functionalisation of the canon concept. By situating ChL thus in a broader cultural context, the restriction of ChL to a merely literary-aesthetic space is at the same time counteracted. If ChL is granted an essential part in enculturation processes within the framework of educational notions, a critical analysis of ChL within a broader cultural context and with help of methods from the field of cultural studies is accordingly required.