What Is a Child in What Is a Child?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This piece presents an interesting and stimulating thought experiment, but there are several ways in which it could be improved in order to offer a more significant contribution to existing debates about the topic.

The first hiccup occurs when you note that you 'do not know of any critic who claims the concept of childhood does not exist'. This should be nuanced with a reference to contemporary critic, as there was a very forceful claim made in Aries' Centuries of Childhood that, though debunked, uses the same technique that you rely on later in setting out your argument, that of the portrait, to make the claim that the concept of childhood did not exist prior to the 17th century. In a way, your own argument seems to want to reinvigorate that debate in contemporary criticism; at any rate, you need to acknowledge its foundation. Another scholar whose work is relevant in your terms and conspicuous in its absence is Anne Higonnet, which you only include in your reference list as something Cocks talks about--curious that nothing directly related to this piece, or several other texts in your reference list, appears in your own argument. In Pictures of Innocence, she also grapples with the idea of how concepts of childhood can be understood or challenged through portraiture and other forms of artistic representation. These could appear as footnotes.

More importantly, however, would be to engage with ideas of subjectivity and identity that appear both within and outside of children's literary criticism.  At least since Lacan, Habermas,  Girard or even Harry Stack Sullivan (whom very few people know of, more's the pity), for instance, very few people would make claims for an 'independent' subjectivity, so while your observations about subjectivity and identity my be valid, they need to be properly seated in broader relevant discussions of Lacan's, Foucault's and Butler's performativity and the social construction of identity. For discussions closer to children's literature study, take a look at Coats' Looking Glasses and Neverlands and McCallum's Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction. 

Beyond these aporias in your theory, your close readings will seem a bit naive to children's literature scholars. You should use proper terminology (verso and recto, for instance). Double page spread is okay, but opening is better when referring to unpaginated pictuebooks. To that point, while your interpretation of the lack of page numbers is interesting, it's not defensible without noting that many picturebooks do not have page numbers. What you need for support here is the awareness that pb authors and illustrators use other techniques to indicate a sequence--unfinished actions that continue on the next page, for instance (see Nodelman) or narrative techniques. Acknowledging the difference between the conceptual images used here and the narrative images used in other picturebooks (see Painter, Martin, and Unsworth) would defend your interpretation here and make it usefully detachable for other picturebooks, such as, for instance, Shaun Tan's Rules of Summer.  And in fact, the stasis and to some degree the authority of the conceptual images could be said to be reinforced by the use of the large initial letter--do you think this might call to mind the technique used in illuminated manuscripts of sacred texts? That's what I thought of--you might disagree.

As to the ways in which you have structured your discussion, the only way that your argument about a lack of change in opening 8 is compelling is because you have placed it after your discussion of opening 14. If instead you give some credit that the sequencing of the individual images was intentional, there is not only the suggestion of change coming after the bad ideas of opening 14, but also the implicit injunction on opening 8 of the child's need to change, as the image suggests that the child is refusing to eat something that is good for her.

Your walk-through of several of the openings gave me the following pauses: 1) you need to contextualize or define what might be meant by amusing. The fact that the supposed 'small' child in opening three is too big to fit on the page creates the conditions for the image to be read as ironically connected to the text. Further, the image of a kid with his finger up his nose being someone who has big thoughts is incongruent in terms of gestural literacy. Incongruency is one of the main reasons something is funny/amusing. 2) you are giving a lot of weight (too much?) to a marketing blurb to make your points about the content of the book 3) your emphasis on the word 'crypt' in opening 8 ignores the 'coming out' of the bad ideas--this feels like a possible hermenuetical slip in this paragraph even though you address it later. Likewise your equating the work of the sponge with the inefficient chalkboard eraser--As metaphors, they serve different functions, so the visual equation of them as objects is undeniably weird and possibly wrong-headed. Certainly, the child is being directly compared to the sponge, but is only holding the eraser and is attempting to turn away from his mistake because he knows it's wrong (indicated by his red-faced embarrassment). I had a hard time following your movements throughout this section, so would encourage you to think more about what's going on in this section, and perhaps move it to before the opening that suggests that children can and will in fact change.

As a final suggestion that to me is very important to your overall discussion: I would suggest you spend some time with Peter Hollindale's Signs of Childness in Children's Books and then go back into this text with his thoughts freshly ringing in your head. His ideas of what a child is and what childness means for both a child reader and an adult reader could, I think, transform this reading from a interesting thought experiment into a more significant contribution to knowledge in the field of children's literature studies. 

 

Author Response

Reviewer 1

Thank you so much for this generous, detailed, and helpful review. I have thought about your suggestions.

• I added the comments on Peter Hollindale, Judith Butler/Foucault and independent subjectivity, and the work of Ariès at the end of the introduction. However, I have also made minor adjustments.

I do recognise that independent subjectivity has been questioned by Foucault, Butler, Lacan, and etc (although Zizekian/late Lacanians would argue, I think, that an independent subjectivity is precisely what insists). My issue is with the way such theory is called upon in contemporary Children’s Literature criticism. This article is gesturing towards a specific tendency within contemporary Children’s Literature criticism that claims to engage with the work of figures such as Lacan and Foucault. I work within a critical tradition that sees in the work of many of these seemingly theory-indebted Children’s Literature critics a resistance to working through the very questions of agency and selfhood upon which much of what is most celebrated in theory turns. The other Humanities reviewers commended my article for this approach, specifically with what one called my questioning of ‘the liberal framing’ of Children’s Literature criticism they understood to be exemplified by Gubar. I would identify Coats very much with the approach to children’s literature that, although calling upon figures such as Lacan, nevertheless relies upon a notion of the independent reality of the child, its agency, and, indeed, knowable reality in general. For this reason, I would not include reference to Coats’ text as exemplifying anti-subject trends in contemporary theory. Both Coats and Gubar are questioned by one of the founders of the tradition I work within, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, for precisely this reason in her article for Asian Women, referenced in my article.

Sue Walsh has devoted an article to working through why Peter Hollindale – whose writing and theorising I agree is productive and inspiring – can also be read to offer a comparable ‘liberal framing’. My detailed, non-essentialist, and perspective-based approach is a move to work against such framing.

This piece might take a controversial approach. The Special Issue on the Political in Children’s Literature for Humanities is framed in such a way (the Call for Papers encourages perspective based, close reading approaches, and the updated CFP encouraged approaches that experiment with established article forms in the field) to allow me the opportunity to question these narratives using my preferred approach.

I had originally written this article with the intention of avoiding the controversies I have now addressed. The argument between critics like Lesnik-Oberstein, Rose and Walsh and those like Nodelman, Coats, and Gubar is longstanding. My idea was not to revisit battlelines that are hardly going to shift. This is a trial to indicate the advantages of the non-essentialist, close analysis approach through a practical exercise in reading a single text. Your comments helped me see some further contextualisation is needed. However, my desire is to keep this to a minimum.

In terms of Ariès, the tradition I work with does read him to say something other than ‘childhood does not exist’. Lesnik-Oberstein offers a very extended justification of this in her first monograph (1994).

 

• Thank you so much for your great suggestion and observation about sequence. I have included your ideas in the appropriate section.

 

• Thank you also for the suggestions about technical language. I have adopted these where they do not impact upon my reading (verso, recto, openings, and several other phrases from both Nodelman and Painter et al). However, certain terms would work against my reading including ‘gestural literacy’ (which, for me, could result in a notion of the gesture outside of a framing perspective).

 

• The Derridean crypt is a figure of showing and hiding at the same time. I do think it is an apt analogy for what I read in the text, and it is not a slip.

 

• Sponge sequence. The child is holding a sponge, rather than an eraser? I have discussed the way that this visual sponge does not ‘soak’ but spreads out and picks up the chalk dust.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a wonderful article which lucidly but with great theoretical sophistication works through fundamental philosophical and political issues around 'childhood' and the 'child' through the reading of a picture book entitled 'What is a Child?'. These debates, once engaged with throughout children's literature studies, have by now been neglected for far too long and it is of crucial importance to the fields of both children's literature and childhood studies but also much more widely in relation to issues of 'identity' that this is re-engaged with now. This article provides a perfect argument around what is at stake in such debates, drawing on the philosophical and political arguments of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (and in turn on Jacqueline Rose's readings of Derrida for thinking about Children's Literature) but also on those of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (not referenced here, but that does not matter as the references to Derrida's arguments cover Foucault's also in this specific case). The liberal framing of Children's Literature as a field, as analysed by Jacqueline Rose, is in this article re-analysed in terms of the more recent claims of Marah Gubar who exemplifies the repetition of that liberal frame. This is brillliant and this article should be published. Other than these comments I have only a small list of minor typos for correction:

line 184 needs to be corrected

line 219: should be: 'they take up on the page'

line 248-9: 'a one party' should be 'one party'

line 280: The Second Jungle Book as a book title should be in italics

line 287: remove comma

line 474-5: remove 'might'

line 486: 'has' should be 'have'

line 525: should be 'the Marah Gubar...'

A wider suggestion (also for the journal overall): could 'he/she' be replaced by 'they' (and 'themselves')?

Author Response

Reviewer 2

Thank you for your detailed and generous comments on my paper. It was very helpful and also encouraging. I have utilised them to develop my ideas, which will expand on the approach I am adopting here. I have added Foucault, Derrida, and more work from Gubar in the appropriate section.

 

Line 184: ‘The idea is a series of self-contained pairs’ has been removed → ‘The pairs are consisted with different series of portraits and texts.’ And ‘allows’ has been replaced by ‘makes’.

Line 219: corrected as ‘they take up on the page’.

Line 248-9: ‘a’ has been removed.

Line 280: The Second Jungle Book has been changed in italics.

Line 287: removed comma.

Line 474-5: ‘might’ → ‘do’.

Line 486: ‘has’ → ‘have’.

Line 525: inserted ‘the’ in front of ‘Marah Gubar’.

‘he/she’ is replaced by ‘they’.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I'm very excited, this is the first submission I have received where I can simply click the "accept" button.

I had to check my records to see how special a snowflake you are. 77 peer reviews + editorship of three different journals so far. And you are the first. Congratulations!

Just to show that I have read the paper properly, I include a list of things you might want to think about. I also suggest that you look at the abstract again. I was expecting a poorly written rather dull paper going though old ground, not a paper I will want to cite. I think taking "close reading" out of the abstract would be useful (all analyses are close readings, and this analysis is not trying to adopt the theoretical meaning of close reading, on the contrary, it's a dialogue.) Perhaps you might want to express your paper using the idea of "dialogue"? I think that you would also do well to let readers know that this is primarily a philosophical discussion.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer 3

Thank you so much for your generous, detailed, and helpful review. Your comments and suggestions were very encouraging to me. They are all brilliant, and I have expanded them on the approach I am adopting here. These are what I have changed after reading your review:

 

• I have removed ‘close reading’ from my abstract. Instead, I have put ‘analysis’ and ‘approach’.

 

• Line 137: I removed the sentence which includes ‘that interest me’. Instead of introducing what I am simply interested of, I explained in the following part what I am going to with the pairs and portraits.

 

• Line 176-177: In order to avoid double negative, the sentence became two different sentences.

 

• Line 193: Nevertheless, the pairs are not sequential → However,

 

• Line 193: the ideas on ‘page numbers’ have been modified also due to another reviewer’s suggestion: Please see my new manuscript, and it starts from Line 331.

 

• Line 178-183: I have mentioned Nodelman’s work with other scholars works in the appropriate section. Their works are also mentioned in references. As another reviewer did recommend me to read Nodelman’s work, this part has changed by referring to the opinions of the two people.

 

• Line 213: I have put Neil Cock’s analysis on Frozen in order to read the absence of adult. Please see from my manuscript line 618 to 627.

 

• Line 441: I have removed ‘To further read through the stakes’.

*Please see the attachment for the new manuscript. Thank you again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

If consindered for publication - things to solve:

1) in the abstract: "extended analysis" - meaning? The methodology is never explained or justified

2) p. 4 l. 160-162: "I am working with, on the other hand, is one that adopts a detailed analysis of narrative perspective and textual framing to question such appeals to the knowable and discrete independent reality of child identity..." - why is this not clairfied earlier, clearer - narrative perspectives and textual framing (are these key concepts, to be understood as...?)

3) Major academic/ethical problem: The picturebook is not presented to the reader in a way that makes it ethical possible to follow the argument of the text. To start: year of publication, original version not mentioned (as if it is only the English translation that exists). This leads to further problems, such as the discussion of the back cover peritext (blurb). Written by whom - it is not identical with the one of the original version, hence, it may be the publisher's. I really miss an understanding of such texts as an interpretation of the text (the book). Further: the structure, the composition, the encyclopidic or experimental qualities of the picturebook (as a whole) is never fully discussed, and not at all in relation to other sorts of children's literature. And this leads to further problems related to the so-called extended analysis of the picturebook. In my opinion the picturebook is misused (or violated) to fuel a discussion that could have been interesting if the picturebook had been taken serious and read on its own terms. To this manuscript, we may ask What is a picturebook?

The manuscript lacks or is unwilling to see the literary context of BA's picturebook and the picturebook it self as an aesthetic object.

If the literary context is irrelevant to the author of the manuscript, I would like to see a cleary justification of this. That is, an explanation of why it is irrelevant. And the "explanation" in endnote iii is not sufficient. It is possible "to defamiliarise the text through accurate, perpsetcive focused readings" and still apply or respect concepts and perspectives established and offered within the field of picturebook research - that, to tell the truth, is not that standarized as indicated/implied in the endnote.

Author Response

Thank you a lot for your comments. Here is my response to your detailed comments:

 

• in the abstract: “extended analysis” - meaning? The methodology is never explained or justified

I have qualified ‘extended analysis’ in the abstract with the following formulation:

This paper is based on an extended analysis of the English translation of Beatrice Alemagna’s picture book, What is a Child? By extended analysis, I am referring to a sustained engagement with the textual framing and narrative perspective of the picture book. Through this approach, my aim is to draw out the specific antagonisms necessary to its concept of ‘child’. The child, for What is a Child?, is never quite a self-evident and isolated identity. Rather it is (to take just three examples): constituted by a perspective on it, and other to it; other to itself, because of the various contradictions in its pictorial and textual constructions; split between name and being. The understanding of the child that emerges runs counter to Marah Gubar’s subtle critique of the child as a contradictory identity, knowable, but only in a piece-meal fashion. My understanding of what Jacqueline Rose calls the ‘impossibility’ of the child is rooted, instead, in an understanding of it as self-cancelling, unavailable as an in-itself identity shorn of its constitutive others, an identity, I argue, that can be addressed only through an approach that is non-essentialist and narration-focused.

 

• 4 l. 160-162: “I am working with, on the other hand, is one that adopts a detailed analysis of narrative perspective and textual framing to question such appeals to the knowable and discrete independent reality of child identity...” - why is this not clairfied earlier, clearer - narrative perspectives and textual framing (are these keyconcepts, to be understood as...?)

→ I have transferred a variant of this formulation to the abstract. Therefore, the point is now clarified earlier.

 

• Major academic/ethical problem: The picturebook is not presented to the reader in a way that makes it ethical possible to follow the argument of the text. To start: year of publication, original version not mentioned (as if it is only the English translation that exists). This leads to further problems, such as the discussion of the back cover peritext (blurb). Written by whom - it is not identical with the one of the original version, hence, it may be the publisher's. I really miss an understanding of such texts as an interpretation of the text (the book). Further: the structure, the composition, the encyclopidic or experimental qualities of the picturebook (as a whole) is never fully discussed, and not at all in relation to other sorts of children's literature. And this leads to further problems related to the so-called extended analysis of the picturebook. In my opinion the picturebook is misused (or violated) to fuel a discussion that could have been interesting if the picturebook had been taken serious and read on its own terms. To this manuscript, we may ask What is a picturebook?

→ I realise now that I should have referenced the fact I am working in translation, and that it is important to acknowledge this context. I have adjusted this in the text. As a Korean academic, I became aware of Alemagna’s work through the recent New York Times award for her illustration of a work in translation, and consequently I have engaged her work through the celebrated English translations. Although I did learn some European languages, my Italian is, unfortunately, not sufficiently advanced for academic study. I am interested in the framing effects of translation and have adjusted my text to make this clear.

Established ways of reading picture books are diverse and productive. However, my sense is that I have to move away from them in order to offer my specific, defamiliarsing, and questioning reading. My work can be read as a counter to the diverse established readings for that reason. This is, perhaps, an advantage to my work rather than a flaw. As indicated in the comments, my approach is rare. It offers a different approach, one that might help established methodologies by pointing out what is seemingly off-limits or assumed within debates. Scholars do not have to agree with my ideas. My aim is to foster some reflections and debates from my ideas. This is a modest enterprise. This is not an overthrow of established approaches but neither a reading that works within established traditions. Or, rather, it works within a tradition of Children’s Literature scholarship (Rose, Walsh, Lesnik-Oberstein, etc) that asks questions other than those offered in established picture book research. The CFP for this special issue is particularly interested in addressing structures that often go unquestioned, and so is my approach.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

no further comments