Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies

Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; García-González, Macarena

doi:10.1111/chso.12619

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 65 publications

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“…In "Thinking and Doing with Childism in Children's Literature Studies," an article co-authored with Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak (Deszcz-Tryhubczak & García-González, 2022), we notice how Rose's text coincided in time with Peter Hunt's call for a "childist criticism" in which young readers' multiple individual responses to literature would inform adults' critical practice as a way towards a more accurate understanding of what "reading as a child" meant in particular cultural contexts (1984, p. 45). While Rose's groundbreaking essay has been widely discussed in the field, Peter Hunt's call for what he termed a "childist criticism" has been rather marginalised and upon consideration, as it has been described as "more a position than a methodology" (Reynolds, 2011, p. 54) or as a position that would reject the literary in favour of the didactic (Nikolajeva, 2012, p. 4).…”

Section: Towards An Affective Childist Literary Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

García-González

2022

Child Lit Educ

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A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and new materialist epistemologies could reorient our critical practice in and with children's literature. Using the concept of childist criticism (Hunt 1984(Hunt , 1991 and Maggie MacLure's (2013) notion of the "wonder of data," I follow different encounters between children (and researchers) and the book La madre y la muerte/La partida (Laiseca et al., 2016). This book tells a macabre story about a mother that cannot bear to have her child taken away by Death. By following the book's agency (García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020) in the research assemblage of different projects, I propose possible affective methodological orientations to post-representational research for children's literature criticism.

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Section: Towards An Affective Childist Literary Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

García-González

2022

Child Lit Educ

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Agency and Intra-textual co-creation in Punchdrunk Enrichment’s Immersive Story Worlds for Children

Osborne

2023

Child Lit Educ

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Recent immersive theatre practices being developed by UK theatre companies invite children to believe that a book story has come to life and is really happening to them within their school environment. The thrill of being able act within a story motivates children’s embodied agency to physically explore an immersive set installation and acts of creative writing performed during the story experience, which allow children to co-create the narrative alongside the adult practitioners. These acts are fictionalised into the narrative frame of the children as heroic story writers, offering new perspectives on how child co-creation of adult narratives can be enabled intra-textually, within the bounds of the adult-initiated story, rather than extra-textually after it has finished, as is the case with fan fiction. However, it raises questions about the nature and limits of this co-creative agency the experiences purport to elicit from their child participants, especially in terms of their critical agency to manipulate fictional devices presented to them through such a hyper-real aesthetic. Drawing on theories of children’s literature and participatory performance, this article argues that it is the way these immersive productions uncannily overlay real and fictional temporalities that enables the child participants’ critical agency within them. Approaches for further participatory, practice-based research in this understudied corner of children’s reading universes are suggested for harnessing the potential of immersive story worlds to generate research data from within children’s first aesthetic engagement with stories.

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Ethics, epistemologies, and relational ontologies in researching children’s cultures

Deszcz-Tryhubczak¹,

García-González²

2023

Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition

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This chapter argues for a new materialist and posthumanist understanding of children’s cultures as formed by naturalcultural assemblages destabilizing anthropocentric notions of childhood, adulthood, agency, age, creativity, and text. The chapter provides an overview of recent developments in childhood studies – in particular around the decentering of the child (Spyrou 2017, Diaz-Diaz & Semenec 2020) and the “after childhood” approach (Kraftl 2020) – to propose that they may enable new methodological openings in textual and empirical work with texts and media (co-)created for/by/with young audiences.

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Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies

Cited by 6 publications

References 65 publications

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism

Agency and Intra-textual co-creation in Punchdrunk Enrichment’s Immersive Story Worlds for Children

Ethics, epistemologies, and relational ontologies in researching children’s cultures

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