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Cross-CuKurallsm and Inter-Generational Communication In Children's Literature by Peter Hunt This conference-'Cross-Cutturalism in Children's Uterature'-is based on an act of faith. I do not mean that "Cross-Culturalism· does not exist, or has no place ki "Children's Literature": quite the contrary. "Children's Literature" Is always concerned with forming attitudes, providing views of the world and bases for allusion, simply because its audience is developing-and regardless of didactic intent. Nor do I mean that "Literature" should not have a place ki the interaction of cultures; any text must necessarily embody conscious and unconscious features of its own culture, and therefore confirm or challenge the reader. Rather, the act of faith is in the process of rearJng-in the capacity of text to transmit a' message not just to one reader, but the same message to many readers-whole cultures to whole cultures. Al practitioners of books and literature know that plurality is basic to reading; we cannot prescribe what meaning will be generated by any text for any person in any given circumstance. Theories of reception and response vary between Derrida's view of "the impossibility of determining the text's true meaning" (Hall 108) to Holland's ideas on replicating the seif. Common sense tends towards Fish's theory that there is a commonality of meaning determined by the "reading community," from which there are less significant personal deviations. Thus are we able to (broadly) understand each other, and see much the same thing in a given text. The "reading community" is "a social construct whose operations are delimited by the systems of Intelligibility that inform It" (Fish 335). in other words, the meanings that are received from a text are controlled as much by the culture of the reader as the culture of the writer, and so when we speak of cross-cultural transmission we can in reality only speak of the appearance of transmission. This may be obvious, but it is particularly apposite to children's literature, because, ki my view, the most important and difficult form of cross-cultural transmission-and one which underlies al others-is that between adult culture and chid culture. intergenerational communication has provided a rich vein for soclo-dnguists, who have found important differences in expectation, meaning, and language patterns between young and old (Coupland). Childhood, as I have suggested elsewhere (Hunt 1985), is very different from adulthood; not only does it involve rapid development (and shifts of perspective), but different perceptions and thought processes, it can be seen as a sub-culture or an anticulture , which is subversive and partakes of oral-based thought rather than text-based thought (Ong). Children have their own culture, which may wel be truly cross-cultural: it is prior to ajj adult-perceived cultural differences. it could, of course, be argued that I am simply talking about sub-cultures which will be specific to any given culture. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "culture as a "particular form, stage, or type of intellectual development or civilization," and I would suggest that the adult/child gap is as wide, and perhaps even more fundamental than the black/white, male/female, US/Canadian, American/European divides. My argument is that if we are reaty going to communicate between cultures, we must first recognize the difficulties inherent in the adult-writer/child-reader cultural relationship, it is not sufficient to provide artifacts from contrasting cultures, or to write about other ways of life In simple terms. (One has only to think of the difficulty that most adults have in sustaining interest in, say, eighteenth century children's books-which represent a cultural gap not just in their content, but in their mode of transmission.) Nor should we assume that because we can elicit "correct" responses from a child-reader, that reader has absorbed the cultural message we wished to transmit. I would like to examine very briefly some of the adult/child cultural differences, and I would like to treat them optimistically-as challenges to our literary and critical thinking, and, perhaps, as sources of insight into cross37 cultural transmission in general. My categories are arbitrary and Incomplete, largely...

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