This is an author produced version of a paper published in International Research in Children’s Literature. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. Citation for the published paper:
Sundmark, Björn. (2018). Canon Constitution in Children's Literature. Ed. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller. International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 11, issue 1, p. null
URL: https://doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2018.0260 Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
This document has been downloaded from MUEP (https://muep.mah.se) / DIVA (https://mau.diva-portal.org).
Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller (Eds.)
Routledge, 2017
When I teach the introduction course to literature, I (like many of my colleagues) open the first seminar with a discussion of the whats and whys and hows of the subject: “what is literature?” “why study literature?” “how can literature be studied?” and “which literature should be studied?” And if I teach a course in children’s literature, I simply add the modifier “children’s” to the questions, and ask, for instance, “what is children’s literature?” etc. I also bring the “canon” (or canons) and “classics” to the discussion (“what is the canon?” “what is a classic?”). For the idea of a canon in itself suggests that literature is in fact worth studying; it can help us understand better what literature is, and give us the tools with which to analyse and evaluate literature. After all, already the etymology of the word canon (from Gr. kanṓn) is suggestive of “rule,” “standard,” or “measuring rod.” So, going Greek here for a moment would suggest that the canon is constituted by those works (authors, media forms, genres, themes) that have become standard, or which even define a particular category of literature. In other words, canonical works are those that provide a benchmark of excellence and provide a point of comparison. One can think of Dante’s Divina Commedia,
Shakespeare’s dramatic work, Tolstoy’s novels, and so on. Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon is one well-known attempt to systematize and outline what such a fictional western canon could comprise. Beyond the field of literature, briefly, one can also point to religious canons – The Tanakh, The Bible, The Quran – that is, texts that hold a special religious significance and status for the believer. Moreover, there are secular canons of exemplary texts, such as Desiderius Erasmus’s Adagia, to be used as inspiration and models for good writing and rhetoric.
Where does this leave children’s literature? In a recent collection of essays, Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, the editors Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, note that there are two main approaches to the canon – the socio-cultural and aesthetic. Aesthetic approaches value the autonomy of literary texts, and their value is determined from within the literary system. The socio-cultural perspective, by contrast, highlights the underlying power-relations that determine which works are to be included in (or excluded from) the canon. In practice, I believe that it is hard to think of any
canonical work that is not both artistically satisfying and at the same time fulfils important socio-cultural functions.
The editors also conclude that children’s literature is “inherently un-canonical” (4), mainly since children’s literature occupies a lower position in the literary system than literature for adults, but also because it derives much of its perceived value from pedagogy and moral teaching (its socio-cultural function) rather than from its aesthetic qualities. This may mean (I hazard) that even when a children’s text is a literary masterpiece its value will always somehow be dependent on its “usefulness” from an adult point of view.
A third position, sketched already in Peter Hunt’s polemic “prelude” (a pastiche on “The Emperor’s New Clothes”), but also adopted by some of the other contributors to the volume, is to employ a reader-response stance. Hunt writes, “In the Adult world of Canons the book judges you; in the world of Children, you judge the book” (18). In line with Hunt, Alison Waller’s chapter on The Secret Garden, for instance, develops the idea that the canon are the texts that are remembered. Reader-response criticism such as this, paired with a “childist” approach, has the benefit of doing away with the overtly didactic and useful (the hidden adult), while drawing on both aesthetic and socio-cultural methodologies and categories.
Having said that, most of the contributions to this volume do employ a social-cultural (adult) perspective on what constitutes canonical children’s literature. This is not meant as a critique. It is the reality of children’s literature, whether canonical or not. The uneven
power-relationship between adult and child is a given, and it does inform the discourse of children’s literature.
The focus of the collection is – as the title implies – on the dynamic nature of canons of children’s literature; they are constituted and they change. This dynamic is for example apparent in Yael Darr’s fascinating account of canon formation (and re-formation) in the state of Israel. She shows how the Israeli canon has changed over time and talks about innovative (pioneering) canons and traditional canons. She writes:
Due to the blunt negation of the Diaspora, the Zionist Jewish history that was narrated to children was founded on three chapters: the glorious biblical history of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), “two thousand years of futile exile” and the current Zionist realization in the land of Israel (25)
In practice, this meant treating the Biblical accounts as myth and history, ignoring the literature of the exile, notably the rich literature in Yiddish, and creating a new, often socialist, pioneer literature (in Hebrew) for children. These books typically portray glorified childhood life at the kibbutz. Only after World War II was this pattern challenged, and there was a turn towards “European Jewish culture, taken when European Jews were facing catastrophe… which motivated the incorporation an invention of European Jewish folktales” (31). Today, some of the texts that belonged to the early Israeli canon have been forgotten or rejected, while others remain. Those that do have largely survived for aesthetic reasons, according to Darr: “the complexity of the texts [have] allowed certain layers to dominate the reader’s interpretative stance during one period, whereas other strata could come to the foreground during a different period” (35).
But as Etti Gordon Ginzburg argues in her chapter on the nonsense poet Laura Richards, and as Bettina Kümmerling Meibauer shows in her chapter on the German avant-garde, complexity and sophistication does not always lead to canonicity. Ginzburg’s
argument is that Richards, unlike Edward Lear, addressed real children from a feminine/ maternal perspective (and could therefore be dismissed). Kümmerling-Meibauer proposes something different: avant-garde and innovation may be key words when it comes to
acquiring classics status, but mainly in connection with adult literature. Instead, avant-garde texts are often seen as unsuitable for children, precisely because of their perceived difficulty; their aesthetic qualities may actually disqualify them from inclusion in the canon.
A final reflection I made when reading Canon Constitution was that there was very little discussion of transnational, non-national, international or even global canons of children’s literature, or how national and international canons of children’s canons may intersect. An exciting exception to this pattern can be found in Dorota Michulka’s and Anna Czernow’s chapter on Polish canons of children’s literature. Just like in Darr’s chapter on Israeli canons they show how canon constitution is regulated by historical and political processes. Thus, the children’s literature agendas have varied wildly between the Interwar period, the postwar Polish People’s Republic, and the Third Republic of Poland (from 1989). What is canonical in one period is censored in another. The forgotten classics of each period are relegated to what they refer to with a wonderful metaphor as the “Sunken Kingdom” – an “imaginary space where all forgotten literary texts stay undisturbed by today’s readers or scholars” (85). Paradoxically, however, one category of canonical texts remains in the
reading light – classics in translation. They survive since they are not ideologically implicated and invested in the same way as Polish classics. Michulka and Czernow write that Polish children’s literature “can be seen as a process of withdrawing national literary texts from circulation while most texts translated from foreign languages remain untouched” (85). This is a fascinating situation, and one cannot help but wonder if similar processes can be seen elsewhere, or how often it is the case that international classics also become the most enduring national children’s texts.
