Cover not available

In:Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 201–217

Get fulltext
PDF logo with download linkDownload Chapter PDF

Afterword

New materialist insights for the text-based scholar

 | Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.13coa
Abstract
This chapter presents the critical and sometimes polemic misgivings a desk-based scholar might have about applying new materialist and posthumanist theories to the study of children’s literature and culture. Reflections on personal stories, a recent school shooting, and two picturebooks raise questions about the optimistic claims made by new materialist and posthumanist researchers that challenging human exceptionalism, blurring binaries such as adult/child and human/nonhuman, and embracing a notion of agentic objects will necessarily lead to more ethical inter- and intra-actions between the human and more-than-human world. This chapter thus encourages scholars to think carefully about the unintended material consequences of a full embrace of new materialist theories.
Article outline
  • Epistemological entanglements
  • Questioning the theories
  • Children’s brains and children’s texts: Exceptionalism and ethics
  • Proceed with caution: Unresolved questions
  • References
References (27)
References
Primary sources
Deacon, Alexis. 2015. I am Henry Finch. Ill. Viviane Schwarz. London: Walker Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elliott, David. 2017. Bull. Boston & New York: HMH Books for Young Readers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
King-Smith, Dick. 1983. The Sheep Pig. New York: Puffin Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Samworth, Kate. 2014. Aviary Wonders Inc.: Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual. Boston & New York: Clarion.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
White, E. B. 1952. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer Max. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloom, Paul. 2013. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology: What’s it’s like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brian Bilston (). “Here’s a poem entitled ‘America is a Gun.’”, Twitter, February 17, 2016, 2:40 p.m., [URL].
Chukovsky, Kornei. 1963. From Two to Five, translated and edited by Miriam Morton. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crews, Frederick Campbell. 1964. The Pooh Perplex. London: Arthur Baker Limited.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Egan, Kieran. 1997. The Educated Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
García-González, Macarena & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna. 2020. New materialist openings to children’s literature studies. International Research in Children’s Literature 13 (1): 45–60. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Girard, René. 1961. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haynes, Joanna & Murris, Karin. 2017. Intra-generational education: Imagining and post-age pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (10): 971–983. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunt, Peter. 1998. Review of Children’s Literature and Critical Theory: Reading and Writing for Understanding. The Lion and the Unicorn 22 (3): 387–392. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kraftl, Peter. 2020. After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Abingdon Oxon & New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 11, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York & London: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Écrit: the First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink. New York & London: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neiman, Susan. 2016. Why Grow up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2011. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stevenson, Deborah. 2015. Review of I am Henry Finch. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books 69 (3): 142–143. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turkle, Sherry. 2015. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winner, Ellen. 1988. The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and Irony. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue