Why Theory Matters

Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory sets out to reveal how theory informs critical interpretations of children’s literature and film. It includes essays from both leading and emerging children’s literature scholars from around the world who examine children’s texts from a plethora of theoretical approaches: John Stephens uses cognitive poetics to demonstrate how picture books model attitudes toward significant social ideologies such as cultural diversity; Clare Bradford and Raffaella Baccolini analyze the representation of space in children’s books and films using a theoretical framework that interweaves cultural geography, postcolonial theory, and utopian studies; Elizabeth Bullen and Kerry Mallan employ cultural theories of globalization to argue that children’s texts provide evidence of a dynamic interplay between the global and the local in their depiction of modern life; Maria Takolander makes a disquieting case about the pervasive Gothic and thus inherently misogynistic construction of femininity in the animated film Monster House; Christine Wilkie-Stibbs furthers this gendered theme in her exploration of transgender subjectivity in a range of young adult fiction and in the excellent French film Ma vie en rose, using a conceptual framework that draws on the theories of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; David Buchbinder’s topic is adaptation theory, which he uses to illuminate the relationship(s) between an “original” text and its adaptation(s); and the book closes with Mallan’s chapter on posthumanism and its increasing relevance to children’s literature.

The book is ambitious in scope, opening by asking readers direct questions: “Does theory matter any more? Is it time for its obituary? Or are reports of the death of theory greatly exaggerated?” (1). Mallan and Bradford answer these questions in an introduction that is both compelling and intellectually provocative. They consider the claims against theory (that it fails to take into account “real” readers or viewers; that it is elitist; that it fails to take literature as a subject; that it encourages poor reading) carefully, in a manner that clearly establishes the relevance and necessity of theory to current academic discussions of children’s literature. As they put it, the connections between children’s literature, children’s film, and critical theory

reflect the way in which children’s texts are caught up in wider cultural, political, and social spheres of activity. Texts and theory are performative: they do something, and therefore incur important ethical responsibilities. These ethical responsibilities are not narrowly conceived in terms of moral content and values (or lack of them) advanced by texts. Rather, they are concerned with larger issues of truth, representation, and being (selfhood, identity, subjectivity). Such issues form the touchstones of literature and film, regardless of age classification; they are also the enduring concerns of theory.

(8–9)

According to the editors, the intention of this particular collection of essays is thus to show the capacity of theory to “engage and stimulate our thinking, assist in our formulation of ideas, and scrutinize ‘facts,’ discourse and language” (9).

Does the book succeed in its goal? Several chapters do an extremely commendable job of showing how theory can achieve all this and more. John Stephens’s chapter on schemas and scripts deals with subject matter that seems to be emerging as the latest trend in contemporary children’s literature criticism: the application of cognitive science to literary criticism. Using the representation of cultural diversity as his context, Stephens analyzes the cognitive processes that a reader uses to make sense of a text, suggesting that the “sustained mapping of a schema throughout a text is a key element in drawing out the significance from the story world, because once readers recognize and mentally instantiate the schema, the recurrence or addition of further components enables the schema to be modified for socially transformative purposes” (15). He focuses on picture books, arguing that the modification of cognitive scripts and schemas in a text—particularly in relation to self/other relationships—can play an extremely powerful...