Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Childrens Literature

Galbraith, Mary.
The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 25, Number 2, April 2001, pp. 187-205 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/uni.2001.0019

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Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Childrens Literature
Mary Galbraith

Whenever we enter the experiencing of anything that is being talked about, we immediately find an intricacy with vast and obvious resources that go beyond the existing public language. Eugene Gendlin, On Cultural Crossing [E]ach book proposes a concrete liberation on the basis of a particular alienation. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent. Mrs. Reed to the child Jane in Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre Of course what I felt then as an ape, I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated. Rotpeter the Ape in Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy, The Complete Stories

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Jrgen Habermas conceives of the pursuit of knowledge as motivated by three different fundamental interests: technical, practical, and emancipatory. According to Habermass model, an emancipatory human study must actively pursue three aims:
first[,] to understand the ideologically distorted subjective situation of some individual or group, second[,] to explore the forces that have caused
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that situation, and third[,] to show that these forces can be overcome through awareness of them on the part of the oppressed individual or group in question. (Dryzek qtd. in White 99)

In Critical Theory as a Research Program, political scientist John S. Dryzek lists several global approaches to human studies that fit Habermass emancipatory model, including feminism, Paulo Freires pedagogy of the oppressed, and liberation theology. The silenced groups thematized by these approaches are females, the poor, and the geographically colonized. Another silenced group has yet to find an emancipatory home in academia, but this absence is not due to a lack of available intellectual scaffolding. At least three current approaches to childhood fit Habermass criteria (with a significant twist to be elaborated below): Alice Millers radical revision of psychoanalytic theory, Lloyd deMauses psychohistorical hypothesis, and an emerging theory and practice of aware parenting based on the emancipatory effects on children when adults reevaluate their own childhood, adopt bodily attunement practices with babies (e.g., attuned touch, molding, nursing on cue) and practice nonviolent communication, including providing children with a safe space to express the full range and intensity of their feelings while being listened to (Solter, Omara, Wipfler, Walant, Gordon, Rosenberg). These emancipatory theories of childhood are being argued and advanced primarily outside of mainstream academic discourse, through grassroots community groups, electronic mail, and conferences under private auspices. They are mutually compatible in many ways, though they concentrate on different areas of practiceadult psychotherapy (Miller), historical analysis (deMause), and day-to-day parenting (Solter et al.)and there are serious disagreements within and between each camp.1 What the three theories have in common that makes them emancipatory is a commitment to understanding the situation of babies and children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block childrens full emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome. The significant twist is that this emancipation must be accomplished through adults transforming themselves and their own practices. The primary project of these theories and practices is not to change children but to change adults, especially adults as parents, teachers, and therapists. Whereas in a socializing model of childhood, adults try to mold children through training them (using methods ranging from brutal to humane), in an emancipatory model, adults look for ways to reenter and reevaluate their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory human

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project as well as a larger project to be with, support, and negotiate conflict with children without oppressing them. Why are these emancipatory approaches taking root outside of academia? Why are they so little known and discussed within the disciplines associated with childhood experience? And how is the study of childrens literature relevant to an emancipatory project of childhood studies? These questions might be answered in many waysand I hope they will be. In the space available here, I will venture my own way through these questions and urge that the academy consciously open the project of an emancipatory childhood studies. Childhood studies is currently an emerging multidisciplinary field that takes for its central starting point the nature of childhood experience and [the] ways cultures construct and have constructed childhood (Travisano 22). In this sense, childhood studies is analogous to older, still emerging multidisciplinary fieldswomens studies, postcolonial studies, African-American studiesthat take a particular form of subjectivity for their starting point. But there are important structural differences between these other studies and the study of childhood that complicate the latters epistemology and emancipatory potential. One clear difference between childhood studies and other cultural studies is, of course, that all of us have been children, and, in academia at least, none of us is a child now. In studies of other oppressed groups, those who belong to the group under study have a prior epistemological claim to the territory. But because childhood is a universal passage, and because higher education begins after we have emerged from this passage, no one in academia can properly claim experiential priority with respect to this category of subjectivity. In fact, controversy has been raised over whether there can be any adult experiential access to this subject position. At the same time, it is fairly uncontroversial to say that our own undergoing, from the child position, of the meeting between childhood and adulthood determines how each of us experiences existence, freedom, belonging, and possibility throughout life. Therefore, childhood studies is in some sense a conceptual trunk linking all other critical and emancipatory human studies, but a trunk not easily perceived through its surrounding branches. Another structural difference: the emergence of babies and children as subjects must necessarily take place within a dependent relationship to adults. The conceptual equation of emancipation with articulate independence, problematic enough with respect to different adult categories such as men and women or minority-majority cultural groups, absolutely cannot be sustained in the case of childhood. Children need adults to care

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for them, protect them, and help them articulate their desires. The central emancipatory question with respect to childhood is not how children can escape from adults, but how children and adults might enact dialogue within a relationship where one partner is intensely vulnerable and capable of suffering but developmentally dependent and relatively inarticulate. What is really called into question by childhood studies, what is raised to visibility that was previously taken for granted as given, is the meaning of adulthood in relation to childhood. The crisis of legitimacy in all areas of authority in the last half of the twentieth century is particularly urgent with respect to the category adults. In fact, it may be that it is only by consciously reentering a childhood perspective on adulthood that we can find our way through some of the most difficult moral and intellectual challenges of our era. Permit me some bald and sweeping assertions that arise from my own conceptualizing of childhood studies both in and out of academia. For the past twenty years, the reigning theories in what used to be called the liberal arts have been those of postmodern skeptics. This persistent skepticism is motivated at least in part by despair over the failure of some progressive European intellectuals to anticipate or prevent the Holocaust, and the collaborationist role played by other philosophers whose legitimacy had been previously unquestioned. The dominant schematic metaphor of much postmodern writing seems to be to puncture all balloons of transgenerational zeal and referential confidence, since such zeal and confidence led to or allowed the unspeakable. The crisis of intellectual confidence in the face of this absolute breakdown of a developed civilization pervades all serious philosophical and ethical endeavors with respect to childhood since World War II. Whereas World War I destroyed confidence in state authority as the source of adult rightness among intellectuals and artists (Fussell), the Holocaust destroyed confidence in intellectual and artistic cultivation as an indicator of adult ethical legitimacy. The cry of never again demands of all adults a thoroughgoing critique of so-called civilizing practices and adult authority, since the perpetrators of this atrocity came from a civilization generally seen as intellectually and artistically superior and developed. The academy, as the traditional site of adult claims to rationality and principled authority, is radically implicated by this demand. And western philosophy, German philosophy in particular, is at dead center:
We are still left with the simple fact that future generations grow up in a way of life in which that was possible. Our own way of life is bound to the life context in which Auschwitz was possible [ . . . ]. (Habermas qtd. in Horster 17)

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The scope of the we of this passage is ambiguous even when read in context (see Strong and Sposito). We clearly includes Germans, but in an important sense, we applies also to all academics and all adults who lay claim to authority over others. In the wild, frequently brilliant, and always marginalized world of emancipatory childhood studies outside the academy, the pioneering theorists are also motivated by and preoccupied with the nature of those who perpetrated the Holocaust as the ultimate case by which all moral and intellectual claims to adult authority must be tested. Alice Millers work has concentrated on German parenting as the epitome of the normative abuse she finds in virtually all western cultures, and she has written a psychobiography of Hitlers early childhood. Lloyd deMauses Journal of Psychohistory returns again and again to the analysis of group fantasies as a causative factor in World War II and to the way adult atrocities are fueled by the rage created in babies by widely institutionalized bodily violations (e.g., daily forced enemas). The grassroots emancipatory parenting movement has one of its strongest centers in Germany, where American radical parenting authors such as Aletha Solter (Aware Parenting) and Thomas Gordon (Parent Effectiveness Training) are greatly in demand for workshops, as those Germans who grew up after World War II struggle to discover and change the distorted thinking about childhood handed down to them by their forebears. This effort links them with Habermass project of finding a way to legitimate their own identities as Germansbut with the added task of finding an ethically defensible identity as German parents. Nowhere in academia do I see such emancipatory ideas about adultchild relations being consistently engaged with and articulated.2 My own intellectual arena, critical childrens literature scholarship, itself a relatively new field, is still permeated by the postmodern skepticism (better characterized, perhaps, as a refusal to enlist in historical adult enthusiasms) found elsewhere in the humanities. This skepticism serves an emancipatory interest insofar as it critiques the study of childrens literature (as well as much of the literature itself) as propagandistic for adult-serving interests, riddled with canned ideas of childhood, and lacking in rigorous reflection. But those who see and wish to avoid these traps of adultism, including both postmodernists (Rose, Coats) and progressives (Hunt,3 Nodelman, McGillis), seem either unable to come up with a literary project that allows them to say anything of substance about childrens literature in relation to the emancipatory interests of childhood, or to see such a project as inherently delusional. The central sticking point seems to be the problem of showing theoretical access to

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or even existence of something we can call childhood experience: the postmodernists see this as a delusional project, while the progressives seem lost in a maze of good intentions without a program.4 Meanwhile, radical critics in childrens literature who work in an emancipatory way using other forms of critique, including feminist (Trites), reader-response (Steig), Marxist (Zipes), and textual-cultural (Stephens) approaches, use arguments that seem to me to cry out for a childhood-studies elaborationchildhood being, after all, the central category that distinguishes our field of literature, however problematically. I have cobbled my own philosophical path through this tangled wood using psychoanalytic and philosophical theorists little known among literary scholars. I have already mentioned Jrgen Habermas as the theorist of emancipatory studies, who almost alone among postwar Continental theorists sees the possibility and desirability of continuing the project of the Enlightenment and in whose eyes, radical postmodern skepticism represents a capitulation to the forces of historical denial.5 I subscribe to a psychodynamic model that, contra Freud, Klein, and Lacan, sees the meeting of childrens needs for continuous live support (Winnicotts phrase) as an achievable goal that need never be renounced in favor of so-called transitional objects so long as adults adhere to two basic principles of human intimate care: prevent all attachment breaks you can, and recognize and repair all attachment breaks you cant prevent. This model is coming together from several directions: work on attachment (Main), attunement (Stern), psychoanalysis (Schore), and trauma (van der Kolk). Since normative European-American parenting practices still mandate attachment breaks and forbid the processes required for repair, it is not surprising that this model has been slow to emerge. I also get inspiration from wild theory that radically revises the basic assumptions of Freud about childhood and culturethe pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, Lloyd deMause, Alice Miller, Arthur Janov, and lesser-known thinkers in the grassroots primal psychotherapy movement. While these theorists are viewed by non-followers primarily as zealots whose scholarship is off the map, my own sense is that they come far closer to the feeling truth of childhood than tamer heads, and that their work has been, in Kafkas well-known metaphor, an axe for the frozen sea inside [me] (Letters 16). The trick is to use their work judiciously keeping contact with the childhood predicaments and adult blindness they identify while continuing empirical inquiry into particular claims. For my theory of relations between language and experience, I look to the work of three American philosophers: Eugene Gendlins phenom-

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enology of articulation and felt sense (see Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning) and Mark Johnsons and George Lakoffs theory of embodied pre-propositional schemas (see Johnsons The Body in the Mind and Lakoff and Johnsons Philosophy in the Flesh). In these theories of language, a precise vocabulary has been developed to theorize the unarticulated without depriving it of its experiential status. Experience may be always already saturated with language, but language is always already saturated with experience, not in a single way, but in a whole variety of ways that these philosophers have carefully described. Their vocabulary is of particular value for a theory of childrens literature, since this literature is centered on the representation of incomprehensible and inarticulate experience. Apropos of a crossing between adult and child experience, what we share with childrenright nowis an embodied understanding of basic image schematarecurring structures of imaginative processes by means of which we have coherent and meaningful experiences (Johnson 539)as they impinge upon our existence. The primal situations of human existence permeate language in ways that all humans can recognize, despite their different cultural and material situations. An example central to childhood and to childrens literature: all people understand the schemas of closed and open containersanyone reading these lines who is in a room or a car is aware of how they can get out of the container in which they now sit, who might come in to it, and they can imagine various threats to themselves posed by such scenarios as being trapped, crushed, or invaded in the container they occupy.6 One of the central preoccupations of artistically motivated picture books is the precise nature of the primal container in which a particular child finds herself. The essence of literature in general is to present SELVES7 in predicaments from epistemological perspectives unavailable to ordinary interaction, but resonant with our own vulnerability as embodied creatures (as an example apropos of the projects of childrens literature, literature in general, and childhood studies, see Kafkas Report to an Academy, in which an ape kidnapped from Africa lectures urbanely on his experience of no way out). In addition to this primal level at which humans share the predicament of existence, there are many indirect ways of approaching and formulating childhood experience, all of which are problematic but not thereby rendered useless to the pursuit of emancipatory knowledge: introspection of episodic memory, dynamic and expressive psychotherapies that revisit childhood, intimate listening adult relationships with children, measurements and analysis of experiential indicators in babies and

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children (e.g., muscle tension, pupil dilation, cortisol output) in response to various situations, and readings of literary child characters. None of these fingers pointing at the moon is the moon itself, but that in itself is neither surprising nor fatal to the enterprise; used collectively and critically, they may help us to lift out and characterize the phenomenon we seek to studyin this case the experiences and predicaments of childhooda phenomenon that belongs, in Gendlins term, to a responsive order: an order whose responses to our explorations exceed our questions in their precision and intricacy. An emancipatory vision of childhood studies brings a fresh perspective to every intellectual question in human studies, from epistemology to literary interpretation, and a new research program to the disciplines of history, anthropology, philosophy, and literature. Its obvious that this vision has much in common with the century-old project of psychoanalysis. But there are two crucial differences. First, whereas Freuds model schematizes the child as the key to the adult and sees the renunciation of childhood desire as a necessary and inevitable precursor to civilization, childhood studies in the models of the emancipatory approaches I have mentioned focuses on childhood experience first and foremost for itself and assumes that childhood desires are both legitimate and admissible into the conscious human community. In fact, this project assumes that finding ways to admit childhood desires, experience, and predicaments into all practices of the human community is the only path to human emancipation, although the category of the unbearable (terror, agony, and impossible loss) beyond human intention will never be eliminated. Second, we are fortunate to have access not only to Freuds own writing, based on introspection of his own memories and dreams, the reports of adult patients, an intimate acquaintance with the parenting practices of his own time and place, some limited anthropological literature, and the fantasy structure of popular fiction and belles lettres, but to the elaborations of his intellectual heirs and apostates as well as developmental sciences in a multitude of disciplines (e.g., neurobiology, psychology) that are producing an explosion of findings about childhood experience from different perspectives and using different conceptual tools. Literatureincluding childrens literaturehas been the real pioneer in presenting the experience of individual child SELVESthink in particular of the early chapters of works by Bront, Dickens, Proust, and Joyce, or the pioneering representations of child SELF in Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. To the degree that it has been literature at all, childrens literature has tapped into a particular childs deep-structure fantasies and revealed something pro-

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found about the SELF of that childthe child who grew up to create this work of literature. Though biographical interpretation of literature has fallen on hard times over the past forty years, such interpretation, like that of psychoanalysis, can be not only contributory but central to the understanding of literaturethe chief difficulty with such deep-structure analysis is that it has been done clumsily without an adequate theory of what it attempts. A childhood studies approach to literature in general and to childrens literature in particular can, it seems to me, produce such an adequate theory, though this form of analysis must always be in danger of falling into crassness. Psychobiographical interpretation is only one possibility of a childhood studies approach to childrens literature. For example, recent avowedly formalist work on time, tense, and modality in childrens literature brings new insight into the centrality of time sense for the experience of childhood as captured in childrens literature (Nikolajeva 1999). There is no single right approach to childrens literature or to the experience of childhood, but the overall motivation for ones use of particular approaches should be part of the topic for discussion. Beyond simply borrowing the work of other disciplines and existing literary theory to interpret childrens literature, departments of literature should develop their own emancipatory childhood studies approach and offer this approach a home, while building institutionalized communication links with the other disciplines relevant to childhood studies. In my own current work, I focus primarily on artistic (versus pedagogical, therapeutic, or commercial) presentations of child SELF characters and on potent climactic scenes in which these characters cry out to be heard. Such analyses can take place on many levels. At the story level, one can study how adult characters cope with the voice and interests of the child, both to see how adults meet or fail to meet children and also to see how authentically the adult-articulated text dramatizes and internally motivates the emotional truth of these scenarios. At the discourse level, one can point out where narration defers to child characters versus when this level shows bad faith toward child characters. The study of plot logic and motivation is particularly crucial to childrens books. I consider that the plot is serving other than emancipatory interests to the degree that its logic panders to unrealistic fantasies of childhood independence and power, thus promoting the view that children can overcome the failure of adults by rising above their own needs or by receiving unique favors from the universe.8 One quick general example and a longer specific example of my childhood studies approach: if there is one scenario that characterizes

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childrens experience as represented in literature, it is adults not stopping to hear out a childs distress. In response to childrens cries for the helpful attention of their elders, adults in literature give orders (Soto 123); dismiss (Pearce 2); smile sadistically (Hoffman n.p.); soothe (Cleary 93); offer homilies (Wilder 2427, Fitzhugh 106), food (Sendak n.p.), and reassurance (Brown n.p.); lecture (Babbitt 63); contradict (Pearce 13); pleasantly agree without hearing (Cleary 153); or shame and threaten children into silence (Travers 24). By imaginatively constructing scenes as they impinge on a child SELF, these authors and their readers co-create situations in which a particular predicament is brought to life. Authors cross (again, a Gendlinian term) these predicaments with their own traumatic schemas, creating characters who are, in an important sense, alter egos. Readers also cross these predicaments with their own experiences in schematically resonant communication situations: paradigmatically, all of us who have been traditionally parented have cried out for help and have been betrayed by not being heard or responded to by those we depended on for life; at some point, it became unbearable to cry out at all, and we fell silent. We became, ourselves, sealed off in our containers of need.9 My second example aims to distinguish between a nuanced and aesthetically informed critical approach to childrens literature and the recent tendency to treat childrens literature as material for ideological agendas and promoting correct portrayals of children and adults analogous in many ways to a Bakhtinian versus soviet view of literature. I take for my text Chris Van Allsburgs Polar Express, a book that captures masterfully the fantasy of a lonely child to be chosen out of a crowd for a special gift from a powerful and charismatic adult, and a book that embodies many of the points that I have raised about adult and child historical positions. Once it has been noticed or pointed out, one cannot shake off Polar Expresss resonance with the imagery of a Nazi Youth rally: a lonely and yearning child travels by a magical night train through a Northern European folktale/operatic landscape to a mass gathering of children and elves; all the children hope to be favored by a fhrer-like Santa Claus attended by his anonymous elf-masses in a city full of busy factories. The first-person narration ends with an adult testament of faith: Though Ive grown old, the bell [Santa Clauss special present] still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe. The question of how to take this book is a lot more complicated than whether it is appropriate for children or whether something about it could be fixed so that it would not disturb us. The book does capture something

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profoundly evocative in a very skillful way and therefore is worthy of our close aesthetic attention and interpretation. What does it evoke about adults and children, and what might the motivation be for these evocations? I write here in ignorance of Chris Van Allsburgs childhood, his ethnic background (other than the evidence of his name), and his private intentions with respect to this book. His own publicly declared intention for Polar Express was to write a story about faith and the desire to believe in something (Silvey 661). Van Allsburgs skill and depth as an artist are demonstrated by the fact that his images succeed so powerfully in evoking the lineaments of such a desire. I cant help wondering, though, how he or his editorsor even the Caldecott Award committeewould have proceeded differently had they been fully cognizant of the link between his images and historical nightmare (I am assuming that he and they did not consciously make this connection). I maintain that this link is motivated within the work itselfthat my seeing this is not simply a product of my own obsessions, though of course I am primed to see such things through my own interpretive lens. Alice Millers analysis of a contemporary film can well be applied to the analysis of Polar Express:
Germans who experienced the victories of the Third Reich as children or during puberty [ . . . ] necessarily ran into difficulties in this regard. As adults they learned the terrible truth about National Socialism and integrated this knowledge intellectually. And yet there still live on in these people [ . . . ] the voices connected with the songs, the speeches, and the jubilant mass rallies that were heard at a very early age and were accompanied by the intense feelings of childhood. [ . . . ] How is a person to bring these two worldsthe emotional experience of childhood and the later knowledge that contradicted itinto harmony without denying an important part of the self? (Miller, For Your Own Good 14041)

Whether or not Van Allsburgs personal references in Polar Express are to a family experience with fascism or to another trauma that dips into this public imagery and crosses it with his own experience, the magic spell of Polar Express is both profoundly rooted in this imagery and ruined as an innocent narrative by the recognition of this fact. Once one links the fantasy ideology that says if we really really believe in a Great Man, then we will get what we need from the universe despite our deprived condition in reality to horrific historical evidence that this ideology is delusional and dangerous, the fantasy becomes ominous. This noticing also pops the balloon that says if we as adults encourage children to believe irrationally in this way, we will protect them from the pain of our own failures toward them.

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It may be, then, that Polar Express has the overall emancipatory potential of revealing the failure of adultsthe childs own parents in the story are distant and alienated from the childby its revelation of both the adult seductiveness and childhood deprivation behind fascist fantasizing of a Great Man. Didnt I too fall for it when I first read the book, and wasnt I jolted to see the postural resemblance between Santa Claus and Hitler, as the child looks up at him adoringly? I am stuck, oscillating between my innocent view of Santa Claus and my recognition of the evocative imagery of the Reich. You may say, But children will not read it that waythey are truly innocent, which is correct in the sense that they are unlikely to get the historical allusion, but upon consideration, I see this allusion as central rather than peripheral to the thrust of the book, so my silence about it becomes a form of collusion. I as adult reader thus occupy many positions while reading this book from a childhood studies perspectiveas a parent reader committed to shielding my own children from trauma; as the fictional child who responds with wide-eyed joy to a mysterious adventure and a special present; as a horrified but fascinated adult who sees the historical allusion and wonders what to do about it; as a triumphant critic who outs a hidden agenda; as a hurting person who recognizes the unbearably lonely predicament presented by the book; and as a crusader who wants other adults to see, understand, and address this predicament among the children in their lives. Oscillation between and focusing on these big and little positions, bringing them from vague inarticulate felt senses into the arena of discussion, creates a reflective space in which a childhood studies approach can be practiced. Peter Hunt proposes that we read as a child in order to produce a childist perspective, analogous to a feminist one. His project has been roundly criticized as unnecessarily limiting what childrens literature criticism can do. Childhood studies as I see it here endorses Hunts childist project, but with an important theoretical second deck childhood and adulthood SELF positions with respect to each other must themselves be articulated and theorized using all the philosophical, historical, critical, literary, and personal tools at our disposal.10 Deciding just what constitutes the emancipatory in childrens fiction is part of this project, and Hunt implicitly tackles this when, for example, he questions the integrity of Roald Dahls seemingly child-allied work: The supposed contract with the child [ . . . ] distracts attention from what might be seen as [Dahls] books covert, anti-child (and perhaps anti-human) purposes (191).

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Despite his claim not to bring value judgments to the literature he describes, it is clear that Hunt privileges works, such as those of John Burningham, that allow childrens SELF perspectives to emerge as distinct but complexly interacting with those of adults, and as avoiding canned expressions. In this, I submit, he is right and that he is practicing literary judgment consonant with Sartres conception of literature as essentially rather than prescriptively constituted by a liberatory space cocreated by author and reader, and thus also with an emancipatory childhood-studies conception of childrens literature. Whereas Hunt seems content, at least in his overt arguments, to dispense with hierarchical value judgments about literature, seeing that these judgments seem only to end in oppressive prescriptions to children about what they should read, a more ambitious childrens studies can intentionally distinguish and celebrate texts that skillfully evoke profound and difficult existential childhood predicaments and follow out their own narrative logic, while valuing less those that content themselves with promoting wishful thinking, just as we make these discriminations in adult literature. Such discriminations need not lead to reading prescriptions for children any more than they must for adults. Childrens literature raises many ethical questions in its appeal to deep-structural truth. This is worlds away from pedagogical, questionsat-the-end-of-the-chapter (Was Jane right to throw the book at John? What should she have done instead?) ethics that forfeits its own integrity by never asking the crucial question: how are you and I not free to speak here and now?11 The postmodern critiques of adult representations of childhood have done a great service to the field by promoting methodological skepticism about the real child (Rose, Lesnik-Oberstein). Such critiques of adult interests in the portrayal of childhood must be returned to again and again in a childhood studies whose mission it is to investigate, describe, and critique the distorting interests of adults in communication communities. But childhood studies should not finally limit itself to a brashly accepted helplessness (Horster 12, referring to post-leftist theory in general) with respect to adult understanding of childhood experience. To do so would be to refuse the possibility of any meaningful interaction between adults and children, and in fact, between any two people at all, since by this (self-contradicting but nonetheless potent) argument, intersubjectivity must be impossibleindeed, intrasubjectivity must also be impossible. While this impossibility may be an accurate schematization of the way many intellectuals feel, the pragmatic truth is that this has not

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stopped them from speaking, writing, or otherwise putting out their words in hopes that someone is listening. To be honest, such skeptics should admit their own lingering hopes for human contact. (Reciprocally, of course, those such as myself who take our confidence from the transformative effects of human contact should notice and articulate our own despair over whether anyone can really stay with us when the unbearable encroaches.) My own childhood studies model, which resembles in many ways the Winnicottian model of adult-child understanding proposed by LesnikOberstein, focuses not on an apocryphal child reader but on different children in the literary transaction who can be approached as individual beings who have left a verbal and artistic trail that can be studied: individual child characters, the unique childhood of the author, and the unique childhood of the critic. The evidence for each of these types of inquiry is different, but the underlying hermeneutic strategy is the same: to approach childness and adultness as motivated positions within a literary creation and to discover the childs contextualized truth enough to fulfill the role that I find to be asked of me as an enlightened witness (Alice Millers term) by the child SELF character or by the authors childhood as revealed through the literary work and supporting historical materials, or by my own primal response to a work. This I find is of course audacious, contentious, and greatly subject to interpretive bias, both of the scholarly and personally motivated kind, and should be challenged and tested within the knowledge community of literature. But I cannot see that the attempt is in any way doomed to failure, any more than any other attempt at understanding. While other critical approaches are extremely relevant and applicable to childrens literature, an emancipatory childhood studies approach begins where true childrens literature begins: with the existential predicament of childhood in an adult-dominated world. Without such an articulated emancipatory project, I dont see that we are really getting to the heart of the literature we specialize in interpreting. I submit that we have an urgent call to develop this academic field with all the resources at our disposal. Mary Galbraith teaches childrens literature at San Diego State University. Her recent articles include Agony in the Kindergarten: Indelible German Images in American Picture Books, Primal Postcard: Madeline as a Secret Space of Ludwig Bemelmans Childhood, and What Must I Give Up in Order to Grow Up? The Great War and Childhood Survival Strategies in Transatlantic Picture Books.

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Notes
1 The most salient current disagreement is over interpretations of anthropological data on parenting in hunter-gatherer societies: deMause sees all parents in these societies as either intrusive or abandoning, while attachment parenting advocates see certain of these tribes (e.g., the Yequana and the Bushmen) as models to emulate (see esp. Liedloff).

A breakthrough exception is Joseph Zornados Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood. Below, I join with Peter Hunts call for a childist criticism, but with some modification.
4 Note, for example, McGilliss wry title for a recent theory column in Childrens Literature Association Quarterly: The Delights of Impossibility: No Children, No Books, Only Theory. 3

5 Habermas has been called the most influential postwar philosopher, but this has been more true in Europe than in North America, and his judgmental stance toward postmodernism, along with the nonliterary bent of his discourse ethics, may account for his comparatively low profile in literature departments.

Thus humans all over the world are gripped with fellow-feeling for the men who are trapped, as I write (August 15, 2000), in a disabled submarine.
7 From Banfield, I adopt the term SELF rather than the more usual narrative theory term focalizer for the subject of experience in narrative.

8 This is, of course, the plot logic of most popular fairy tales, but I consider these as occupying a different category from the literary. Most popular fiction for both adults and children falls into the category of fairy-tale plot logic.

9 Research on trauma has shown that traumas deform the world-organizing narratives of the traumatized person. Lenore Terr, in Too Scared to Cry, shows how the childhood traumas of Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock show up again and again as characteristic signatures in the plot structure and style of their work. Similarly, I have found in classic picture books that their creators early traumas are restaged in their work, and that furthermore, this restaging is one essential source of the books continuing appeal. Again, the fascination that readers and viewers have with the traumas depicted in Kings novels, Hitchcocks movies, and childrens classic picture books has everything to do with the ways that these presentations cross with our own childhood experiences of awakening into trauma (Caruths phrase).

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10 In addition, I think Hunts choice of the child reader as the focus for his prototypical child SELF position (this seems widely true of British theorists) is an unfortunate one, since this is, I venture, the least approachable or accessible of all the SELF positions that we as literary critics could focus on. Explicating the experience of a particular, nonfictional child reader to a particular work of literature might profitably be attempted through a nuanced expressive-arts therapy with individual children, but this project seems to me to be epistemologically uncongenial to those doing literary criticism at the university level, at least in the United States.

To illustrate the invisibility of this key omission from diversity discussions, note that in a recently published book by Pat Pinsent called Childrens Literature and the Politics of Equality (1997), prejudice on the basis of race, gender, disability, and age in terms of being elderly are considered, but there is no mention whatsoever of the most obvious and relevant oppression faced by children: prejudice against themselves by adults. This omission in diversity materials is nearly universal. An articulate childhood studies would go a long way to making this omission not only visible but intolerable.

11

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