Tamara Moellenberg on the Child Soldier Novel

Tamara began with a clip from the film Skin (2008), in which a black child is born to two white Afrikaner parents in apartheid-era South Africa. The girl, Sandra, is brought into a courtroom that will decide her legal ethnicity: a courtroom in which the child’s body, not her words, provide the only acceptable form of testimony. Throughout her paper, Tamara explored parallel tensions between body and speech in a number of recent child soldier novels. For example, Chris Abani’s novel Song for Night, published in 2007, is narrated by a mute child soldier in 1960s Nigeria who develops his own form of home sign. This method of communication relies on the truth in, or the truth of, the child’s body—an exteriorisation of interiority. In effect, Tamara proposed, the child’s body provides a way of talking about suffering and physical pain that is resistant to or even defiant of verbal witness, but is at the same time potentially problematic. Moreover, the crisis of credibility around the child soldier novel (Tamara referenced the controversy over Ishmael Beah’s 2007 A Long Way Gone), must provoke a broader reassessment of the nature of testimony, as opposed to the need to challenge false testimony.

Tamara will present further research at the Child and the Book conference at Cambridge later this month—registration and further information now available here.

Green Man/Wild Man in Children's Literature and Culture

Trinity College Dublin will host a conference on the Green Man/Wild Man in children's literature and culture in July this year. For more information visit the conference blog.

Melissa Dickson on the Arabian Nights

In a discursive and thought-provoking session, Melissa Dickson took us through some aspects of her doctoral research at King's College London, which focuses on nineteenth-century receptions of the Arabian Nights. This collection, diverse both in terms of sources (many of the tales came from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria, by way of an eighteenth-century French collector of folklore, and supplemented in many editions with other, unrelated tales) and genres (Melissa listed fables, fairy tales, romances, crime stories, animal transformations as only a few of the types represented), constituted a formative reading experience for such nineteenth-century luminaries as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Melissa suggested that, with history and memory increasingly contested forms of 'time' in the period, the Arabian Nights represents attempts to snatch fragments from the past, to make the past accessible through the retelling of ancient tales. This process also occurred within personal histories, as the famous authors who read the Nights as children recounted their readings as a way of recapturing what was lost in the progression from childhood to adulthood. Moreover, the non-linear quality of the Nights apes the non-linear quality associated with child consciousness in the nineteenth century, as the form of the Arabian Nights becomes metonymically associated with its readers.

We wish Melissa the best of luck with this fascinating project!

At top, the poster for an 1888 burlesque of the Arabian Nights: Melissa concluded by discussing the huge range of such theatrical spectacles as another way of exploring the relation of the Nights to issues of narrative and memory.

James Williams on Edward Lear

James’ paper, the first in a number of bicentenary celebrations of Lear which will occur at Oxford this year, examined Lear’s nonsense verse in the context of children’s language acquisition. Observing that Lear, like Carroll, is a great nonsense writer whose work springs from direct contact with children, James read Lear’s limericks as a form of what Wittgenstein referred to as ‘those games by means of which children learn their native language.’ James ranged over a number of writers on such language-games, from Henri Wallon to the Opies to Roman Jakobson, to explain aspects of the limerick as they relate to children: the limerick’s delight in coincidences of sound, for instance, mimicking children’s own pleasure and delight in sound patterning. James finished with an example of Lear’s direct address to children which is worth quoting at length. ‘You will excuse my familiar mode of addressing you,’ wrote Lear to Ruth Decie in September 1862, ‘because, you know,—you have as yet got no Christian name—;—& to say—“my dear Miss Decie” would be as much too formal, as “my dear Decie” would be too rude. But as your Grandmama has written to me that you are just born I will write to congratulate you, & possibly this is one of the first letters you have yet received.’ Lear’s letter eloquently answers, without condescension or staginess, the question of how adults should speak to children—and provided a charming conclusion to James’ paper.

James is organising a conference on Lear at Jesus College on the 21st and 22nd of September this year, with confirmed speakers including Gillian Beer, Hugh Haughton, and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. For more information, and to pre-register your place, please visit the conference website.






At left, the 'intrinsic Old Man of Peru'—James also pleasurably riffed on Lear's use of 'intrinsic' in this verse.

Hilary 2012 Termcard

Happy New Year!


Our first offerings for 2012 are as diverse as ever. Same location (Seminar Room A in the English Faculty Building) and time (5.15pm). All welcome.

Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to present in the future.

30 January (Week 3): ‘Edward Lear’s Origins’. Dr James Williams, Brasenose and Jesus Colleges
Lear was a writer of and for children, people at the beginning of their life: he is also considered, rightly or wrongly, as a starting-point, the originating ‘Father of Nonsense’. This paper considers Lear’s concern with origins (both a private fascination and a Victorian cultural obsession): where we come from, how we begin to speak, how to make new starts. It also gives some thought to the origins, and originality, of his nonsense, in the context of a Romantic inheritance of writing about children. The paper is part of on-going work towards the first critical monograph on Lear in over thirty years.

13 February (Week 5): ‘Encountering the Arabian Nights’. Melissa Dickson, King’s College London
The Arabian Nights, never adequately situated in historical time, was often first encountered in childhood and became a powerful memory for many individuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Knowledge of this protean collection of Persian, Arabian, and Indian folk tales cannot stem from a first text or clearly identifiable source, but from a series of individual encounters with illustrations, concepts, characters, and stories drawn from different and even contradictory versions of the work. In this paper, Melissa Dickson, a PhD candidate at King’s College London and fellow of the Australian Federation of University Women, will explore the circumstances surrounding childhood exposure to the tales and the potential return to childhood offered by rediscovery of the work across various media in later life.

27 February (Week 7): ‘“The Soul Has No Sign”: A Prosthetics of Pain in the Child Soldier Novel’. Tamara Moellenberg, Brasenose College
Examining recent novels by Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, and Delia Jarrett-Macauley concerned with the experience of the child soldier in regions of West Africa, Tamara Moellenberg, a second-year DPhil candidate at Brasenose, considers the instrumentalisation of the child-body as a vehicle for human rights, bearing witness to physical atrocity. Focalizing her analysis through the representation of pain, Tamara will look at wounded child bodies as ‘narrative prostheses’ for concepts of discursive immediacy, psychic trauma, and the act of impugning blame in international contests of culpability.

Margaret Kean on 'The Young Inferno'

In our last session for 2011 - how time flies! - Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda's) presented on a children's lit-related element from her wider project charting cultural responses to Hell: the picture book The Young Inferno, written by John Agard and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura. Beginning with the premise that much of children's literature depends on either the child saving the adult or the child being saved by the adult (an interesting dynamic where depictions of Hell are concerned), Dr Kean positioned The Young Inferno as a renewal of Dante couched in Agard's own cultural milieu (the damned are updated to include various twentieth-century figures of note, for example) and fully conversant with the picture book's unique techniques for 'making meaning' through word and image. Dr Kean's many pictorial examples showed Kitamura himself visually 'reading' Dante and Dante's illustrators, updating, for example, the bone landscapes Blake used to illustrate the work in the nineteenth century with his own chilling and beautiful piles of skulls and fish skeletons. Kitamura's stark black and white illustrations become a visual pun on Agard's text, which questions the binary between black and white, good and evil (from canto 2: 'neither beast nor man / can be divided into black and white'). Darkness and vivacity, what Dr Kean called the 'double energy' of updated versions of Dante's Inferno for children (she also touched on Dale Basye's Circles of Heck series), generate a rich, multilayered quality in both text and illustration.

Happy holidays, everyone! Next term's programme, as well as a number of special events associated with the new centrally-taught children's literature paper for Oxford finalists, will be posted here early in 2012.

Anna Caughey on Lewis and Tolkien

Beginning with Philip Pullman’s incendiary critique of the Chronicles of Narnia in The Guardian in 1998 (online here), Anna Caughey posed the question why, if the Chronicles and the compositions of C. S. Lewis’s fellow Inkling Tolkien are as disempowering as Pullman and others have suggested—a reading that Anna doesn’t dispute—they experience such enduring popularity with all sorts of readers. Anna’s paper built upon Peter Hollindale’s concept of 'childness' (as a state in which the child continuously negotiates his or her own subject position in dialogue with various messages from the external world) to propose the idea of 'compulsory childhood': a state in which the external world imposes limitations on the child subject, preventing this negotiation from taking place. She demonstrated the ways in which Lewis and Tolkien, in both their critical writing and their fiction, dispute the 'pigeonholing' of the child as either an idolised or denigrated Other of the adult, suggesting that despite suspect gender, race, and class politics, Lewis and Tolkien actively empower the child (and the child’s analogue, the small person) in their stories. Rejecting the idea that children should be contained and protected, both authors depict a masculinity in which there is a level of emotional freedom absent from, say, the boys' school story: one in which moments of vulnerability are permitted to even the strongest of Lewis’s male heroes (Peter crying post-battle isn’t at all a ‘girlish thing’ for him to do). Moreover, Anna suggested that in the character arcs of Merry and Pippin, as well as Peter, both authors represent a liminal space between childhood and adult masculinity: an opportunity for characters to shift back and forward between the respective pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood and childhood, rather than the straightforward opposition between these categories entailed in ‘compulsory childhood’. Of course, female characters are not given such an opportunity to shift between adult and child selves—Susan’s famed fate in The Last Battle being a case in point—and Anna proposed ‘circumlegation’, or reading around, as a possible solution to the problem of why, considering the portrayals of femininity in these books, they continue to draw so many female fans.