The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies

Abstract

In the opening pages of her groundbreaking book Dependent States, cultural historian Karen Sánchez-Eppler clears a path for children's literature critics interested in challenging the notion that children function solely as passive recipients of culture. Without dismissing the key insights generated by Jacqueline Rose and other literary critics who treat childhood strictly "as a discourse among adults" (xvi), Sánchez-Eppler nevertheless announces her intention to regard children not merely as objects of socialization but also as "individuals inhabiting and negotiating"societal conceptions of what it means to be a child (xv). She thus sets out to analyze not just how American adults in the nineteenth century represented children but also how children represented themselves. To pay attention to children's diaries and other similar sources, she stresses carefully, "is not to pretend that children are fully independent actors, unhampered by the constraints of adult regulation and desire; but neither is it to see children as incapable of defining their own terms and grounds of power and meaning" (xxviii). As a result, Sánchez-Eppler tends to tack back and forth between the two extremes she hopes to avoid. Keenly attuned (and rightly so) to the primacy and clout of grown-ups, she veers strongly toward the "incapable child" pole: the bulk of Dependent States focuses on "how structural and institutional power is enacted" on young people by their elders (xxiii), often resulting in "the abuse and death of individual children" (151). On the relatively rare occasions when she analyzes children's words and deeds, by contrast, Sánchez-Eppler swings back toward the "independent child" pole, as when she remarks on "the difficulties of disentangling the experiences of children from the discourses of childhood" (xxvii). This formulation suggests that somewhere-underneath all the grown-up interference-a pure signal pulses that originates solely from the child. Yet, since selfhood itself is shaped by language taught to us by others,shouldn't scholars who analyze children's writing resist the temptation to sort out which sentiments expressed in child-authored texts are truly attributable to young authors and which to the adults who surround them? After all, adult discourse is not a cloak that covers up some true, essential child; it is a constituting factor. 2 But if we are barred from speculating about the degree to which adult pressure manifests itself in child-authored texts, then we cannot distinguish between, say, a passionate fan letter in which a child assures an actress she "adores" that "[n]obody knows I am writing to you, not even my mother" (qtd. in Bold 171) and the kind of rote note a schoolchild pens to an author that adheres to a teacher-approved formula.3 That seems problematic, too.

Towards a post-age picturebook pedagogy

“…It is here that Marah Gubar’s kinship model ( 2016 ) comes in handy. Arguing against idealising or demonising the child (which, according to Gubar, features the difference model of childhood) and treating the child as inferior to the adult (which features the deficit model), Gubar proposes the kinship model.…”

Productive Remembering of Childhood: Child–Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon

“…As we propose, selected texts may become objects catalyzing memories of childhood from adult readers that can be shared with school-age readers to develop their own connections with these texts, inevitably shaped by children's immersion in present culture and by the needs of their realities, including the challenge of transnationalism and globalization. Such "kinship readings," as Clémentine Beauvais points out (Beauvais 2017, p. 268) appropriating Marah Gubar's kinship model of childhood (Gubar 2013(Gubar , 2016, are possible if we focus on "multiple existing similarities between adult and child," their shared emotions and comprehension, rather than on what sets them apart. Encounters between adults reminiscing about their childhood reading and children engaging with the same texts here and now may result in the emergence of intergenerational mutually beneficial exchanges of lived experience, skills, and knowledge, as well as contributing to stronger cultural cohesion.…”

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

“…v-vi) This process recognisably fits within what Jacqueline Rose (1984) analysed as the central characteristic of the child-adult relationship, whereby the child primarily exists as a stabilising other of adulthood, a projector-screen for adult fantasies, crystallising adult desires and expectations. Because of the dominance of the "Rosean" model in contemporary thinking about the child, it is still difficult to recognise the child as subject, and to acknowledge the existence of childish forms of creation, control, appropriation or analysis of the world, to name just a few operations routinely refused by theory to the child (see Wallace, 2008;Gubar, 2011Gubar, , 2013Gubar, , 2016. In Rose's view, the adult obsession with childhood gives rise to tightly-controlled discursive islets-such as children's books or, here, commentary on juvenilia-which superficially give the child a voice while keeping "the child" as a regulatory ideal, rather than a subject position.…”