Widening Circles: Readers, Classrooms, Cultures

Reading Kinderbuchanalysen II is like wandering through the workshop of a master craftsman whose work of different phases lies open for inspection all about. Reinbert Tabbert, professor of English at the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd, is a supple, prolific, and far-ranging critic and educator. This volume, number 22 in the series Jugend und Medien edited by Winfred Kaminski and successor to Tabbert's earlier Kinderbuchanalysen (1989), is a collection of articles and papers spanning the period 1975-91. As the subtitle suggests, it is organized into three thematic sections. The first is concerned with the effects of children's literature on its readers and is heavily influenced by reader-response theory, particularly the work of Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser, who in turn is indebted to the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. The second section is an examination of national cultures, stereotypes, and myths. Instructional models and methods are the subject of the third section.

In section 1, "Aspects of Reader Relativity," Tabbert investigates issues that can be broadly classified as Kommunikationsästhetik, which it is probably a mistake to translate as "aesthetics of communications," because the German term casts a far wider net than most English speakers will associate with the word aesthetics. As Tabbert says in his first essay: "In Germany we have a tried and true method of approaching the unknown: we construct theories about it" (9; this and the following translations are mine). Indeed, Kinderbuchanalysen II is theoretically sophisticated, but despite the gentle self-mockery, theory is not applied narrowly here. Tabbert considers many different dimensions of the communicative process involving children and literature with flexibility and acuity. Whether he is interviewing Astrid Lindgren or constructing a theory of "Rezeptionsästhetik" in children's literature, his writing displays an admirable awareness of the multiple contexts in which children's literature can and should be read. His analyses of writers as diverse as Ivan Southall and Edward Lear, Hilke Raddatz and Maurice Sendak, display a combination of psychological perceptiveness, historical consciousness, and alertness to cultural differences.

The last is central to the second section, where Tabbert reflects on different cultural values and concepts in children's books. Especially fascinating is the lead essay, "National Myths in Three Classical Picture Books," which was originally presented in 1989 at the Ninth Symposium of the International Research Society for Children's Literature in Salamanca, Spain. Here Tabbert examines three picture books about animals—Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit (1901), Jean de Brunhoff's Story of Babar (1931), and Fritz Koch-Gotha's Die Häschenschule (School for little rabbits, 1924)—as embodiments of national myths in animal form, with resonances across the cultural landscapes of English, French, and German history. Peter Rabbit reflects the English love of gardens. Babar, very much an urban creature, is a symbol of the importance of Paris as the luminous center of French culture, and the forest in Die Häschenschule (no English word quite captures the romance of the German word Wald) represents a mythic region of enduring influence in Germanic Lebensgefühl. With absorbing insight Tabbert discusses the animal and human traits and clothing, together with the implications of the characters, who reveal so much about the collective experience and consciousness of each nation.

Wisely and accurately, if sadly, Tabbert notes in "Picture Books Between Two Cultures" (1990) that "the initiation of understanding of foreign cultures, as desirable as it may be, appears to have little chance under present market conditions" (131). He concludes that translators, editors, and publishers should, as far as possible, retain explicit cultural self-representations in the translation of picture books from one language or cultural group to another, a practice often avoided for fear of loss of sales. When the attempt is made to adjust a text to the expectations of a targeted audience in a different culture from that of the original author and illustrator, there is a danger of creating jarring discrepancies between the messages of the words and the pictures, making it easy to miss...