Is There a Text in This Child? Childness and the Child-Authored Text

Abstract

This article explores child-authored texts, both real and fictional, and the adult discourse surrounding or commenting on such texts. It focuses on the example of young Marcel's writing in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and on the critical commentary on the juvenilia of child authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I argue, using Peter Hollindale's concept of childness, that adult texts written about and around child-authored texts have a tendency to perform, themselves, the kind of childly characteristics that they hope to see in the children's texts. The childness of child-authored texts is an all-but-illusory characteristic if it is envisaged as an intrinsic or essential feature of the texts; however, the adult awareness of the existence of a child-authored text shapes and deforms adult discourse around it in ways that are attributable, at least in part, to the characteristics of childness expected of young writers in a given place and time. Thus, I conclude, the adult text ends up more childly than the child's; and, by conditioning the reader's approach to the child's text as childly, it is the adult's text, paradoxically, that contaminates it with childness.

Intersections of Children’s Poetry, Popular Literature, and Mass Media: Fujimoto Giichi’s Adaptation of Holes in the Tin Roof like Stars from Tomo Fusako’s Poem to Radio Drama

“…Film companies and broadcasters established a system wherein they could produce "original" works based on children's compositions (from Toyoda to Tomo) without ever providing proper compensation. On the other hand, as Clémentine Beauvais has responded to Rose, we can also see Tomo possessing a certain affective power over the adults creating and consuming this very same media by virtue of her voice as a child (Beauvais 2019). Here, we might point to Fujimoto's reciprocal creative relationship with Tomo, in particular.…”