Cerebral Pleasures; Children's Literature And

CEREBRAL PLEASURES; CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY by Kathleen Sarah Pendlebury BA Honors English, Rhodes University, 2006 MA English, Rhodes University, 2008 Submitted to the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH The Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences This dissertation was presented by Kate Pendlebury It was defended on April 10, 2013 and approved by Nancy Glazener, Associate Professor, English Department Troy Boone, Associate Professor, English Department Amanda Godley, Associate Professor, School of Education Philip Smith, Associate Professor, English Department ii CEREBRAL PLEASURES; CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Kate Pendlebury, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 Cerebral Pleasures brings together two fields concerned with the edification of children’s minds: childhood studies as it occurs in the English department and a number of interdisciplinary programs; and a minor movement in academic philosophy whose proponents argue for the philosophical education of children. While childhood studies tends toward a bleak view of children’s literature and culture, often implying that it has a potentially deadening effect on young people’s powers of critical thinking, I contend that a category of children’s book, which presents philosophical material and introduces its readers to cerebral pleasures, has neglected educative value. Hence, I argue against stock cynicism about juvenile literature, and examine a number of disciplinary premises that have led to a stalemate in the field, including: the polarization of essentialist and constructivist approaches to childhood, an oversimplified understanding of the way texts manifest ideology, and the injunction to restrict criticism to matters of representation. I explore the diverse responses to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to illustrate some of trends in, and difficulties of, literary interpretation, noting that a great range of contradictory readings of the Alices are often simultaneously accurate, but proceed from different interpretive assumptions. At the same time, I am concerned with another critical commonplace in childhood studies: that children’s books are either instructive or entertaining, and that “pleasure” and “pedagogy” are opposites. To the contrary, philosophical children’s literature demonstrates that these faculties can not only occur simultaneously, but that they can be intimates: such that it is iii sometimes difficult (and invariably unnecessary) to differentiate learning and play. In my sampling of texts, I sacrifice breadth for depth, analyzing the Alices, L. Frank Baum’s portion of the Oz series, and Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round for their philosophical content, and exploring the ways in which the books attempt to entice readers to participate in what Lewis Carroll called “mental recreation.” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………….……………………....1 I. MAPPING THE FOREST……………………………………...………………….29 II. A PLEASANT EXAMPLE……………………………………….……………….53 A. THE VAGARIES OF ALICE………….……………….…………………62 B. ALICE AND THE PROBLEMS OF IDENTITY……………..…………..81 III. MENTAL RECREATION IN WONDERLAND…………………….…...……103 A. LEARNING PLEASURES: CONVERSATION-PLAY IN ALICE……...119 IV. THINKING, EATING, AND LIVING IN OZ……………………………..…137 A. OF MIND AND MANIKINS: THOUGHTS ON THINKING IN OZ.....151 B. THE BEST AND SAFEST TREASURE……….……………….………...168 C. THE METAPHYSICS OF MEAT……………..……………….….…...….178 V. A CASE OF INTROSPECTION……………..………………………………......199 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….………...240 REFERENCE LIST……………………………………..………………………..…244 v INTRODUCTION Children’s literature should not be condescended to. One reason is this: some very good children’s poems and stories – not all, or even most, but some – excite in young minds (and old ones, too) perplexities that can’t be assuaged by merely passing on information, even information of a very sophisticated sort. These perplexities demand to be worried over, and worked through, and discussed, and reasoned out, and linked up with each other, and with life. Gareth Matthews1 While philosophers and educationists have been paying critical attention to philosophical material in children’s books since at least the 1970s, literary scholars working in the field of juvenile literature have yet to remark upon the phenomenon. I proffer this study as an inaugural comment. My central argument is that philosophical children’s literature – of which my examples are Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, L. Frank Baum’s portion of the Oz series, and Gertrude Stein’s The World is Round – model the sorts of conceptual manipulations that are the usual province of professional philosophers, and in so doing, aspire to teach the cerebral pleasures of philosophical concept-play to their readers. My secondary aims are to bring English department childhood studies and the “Philosophy for Children” movement into greater proximity, to contribute to research in the latter field as much as the former, to demonstrate to my home discipline what philosophical readings of children’s books unveil, and to explore the sometimes misunderstood relation between 1 “Philosophy and children’s Literature” (1976, 15-6). “pleasure” and “pedagogy” in literature. In all these, I join a faction of literary scholars who protest the bleak vision of children’s books as inevitably repressive or conservative, whilst also discussing some misconceptions that I believe persist in the arguments of critics who advance the notion of a progressive literature for children. I have a final motive that is simple and pragmatic: to entice parents and teachers to provide young people with philosophical literature and cultivate the cerebral play that some small children do without any instruction. The first riddle raised by this list of purposes is the perhaps unnecessarily vexed question of what sorts of concerns I am including under the legend “philosophy.” I would prefer to avoid this dispute, since it seems to me that the solution to what constitutes philosophy is simultaneously obvious and impossible: obvious because “philosophy” takes whatever it likes into its purview and because, like games as they are described in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance, it seems the sort of thing that is recognizable if undefinable;2 impossible because so many very different traditions lay claim to the field – or its contents, or its methods – and some ardently protect their territory. As it happens, all of the works of children’s literature that I examine here contain ideas that are familiar content from Anglo-American analytic philosophy. However, some of the books that I will recommend for philosophical analysis in my conclusion do not so obviously partake of this tradition – which is flexible in its subject matter, but consistent in certain important aspects of method and temperament. And since there is no good reason to be exclusive, and because many of 2 Richard F. Kitchener makes this suggestion in his critique of the “Philosophy for Children” movement (henceforth, “P4C” – the abbreviation adopted by the Montclair Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children) (1990). 2 the concerns of analytic philosophy are shared with other fields, I shall attempt to sketch a concept of the sorts of issues with which the books that I describe as “philosophical” are concerned. As I understand it, part of the trouble with “philosophy” involves disciplinary ownership: that is, the question of which academic field holds the rights to the ideas of a long line of scholars. Of course, the different fields can and do uncontroversially share the thought of a number of consequential historical figures. The conflict that I anticipate, then, attaches to the decision to call a particular pursuit “philosophy,” as opposed to something else – which could be anything from “critical thinking” to “cultural studies.” As an unproblematic, but representative example of disciplinary haziness, one may imagine a scholar using Immanuel Kant’s concept of the sublime as an organizing device for a discussion of a set of literary texts. She inhabits an English department and calls her project “literary,” although she examines and problematizes Kant’s concept just as a philosopher would. Similarly, there are philosophers who investigate literature (and they may keep Kant in their toolboxes), and in both cases disciplinary allegiance most likely has more to do with the scholar’s knowledge of conventionally bound methods and contents than what she happens to be pursuing at any one time. In the humanities, there is probably research going on that could legitimately be called “philosophy” behind many doors with different markers on them. Indeed, historically, philosophy included a variety of fields of study that “now happily housekeep for themselves” (Matthews 1976, 15) – but at least some of the time there are reasonable distinctions between what is material for philosophy and what is not. 3 The instances in which the sciences have acquired content formerly treated by philosophers are perhaps more informative than those where the reins have been taken by humanities subjects. While curricular change is partly the result of transformations in institutional structures and the evolution of conventions, the epistemological status of the subject-matter also has a significant role in the movement from “philosophy” to “science.” That is, as I understand it: the transition occurs

Load more