L’Auteur pour la jeunesse: de l’édition à l’école (review)

This collection of fifteen articles shows that the author, in the average French child’s literary experience, is simultaneously dead and alive, sidelined in most teaching but also emphatically present via the school visits that now constitute one of the principal activities of children’s writers. The more nuanced and complex version of the author that emerged in the wake of the infamous assassination attempts of the late 1960s and early 1970s has proved difficult to integrate into teaching practice and is often simply ignored. Most of the authors in this volume argue for the inevitability, and indeed the importance, of inclusion, although many also signal the risks, limitations, and potential problems of author-based approaches (see, for example, the contributions by Patrick Joole and François Quet). That children’s literature is a particularly interesting test case for ongoing debates about authorship emerges in several articles: issues of multiple authorship (writer/illustrator (and editor) collaborations, as well as rewritings), of anonymity (folk and fairy tales), or authorial eclipse by heroes are addressed by Agathe Salha, Dominique Jouve, and Quet, among others. The self-reflexive nature of much contemporary children’s fiction, in which school visits are a common theme, also becomes apparent in Gilles Béhotéguy’s fascinating article. In the works he discusses, there is a significant degree of ambivalence about the performative role that children’s writers are called upon to fulfil, and the considerable potential for encounters with readers to fall flat as well as to inspire is made more than apparent. With the exception of Florence Gaiotti’s highly revealing article on pamphlets produced by the École des loisirs, there is — despite the volume’s title — little about publishing to be gleaned here; the focus is almost entirely on the author’s place in the classroom. One might also have expected rather more engagement with the ways in which contemporary technology and modes of communication have changed author–reader relations (via blogs, fan sites, etc.). Overall, however, this well-documented (if geographically restricted) volume has much to offer different kinds of reader. Those with a particular interest in children’s literature will be reminded of its dual nature, not just in the sense of crossover (read by adults and children), but also in its multi-sitedness (read both at school and at home). Its initiatory and intertextual dimension is also interestingly explored, particularly in articles by Françoise Demougin and Christa Delahaye. But the collection will be equally relevant to those interested in issues of authorship and, more widely, to all engaged in the teaching of literature of whatever kind and at whatever level. It can only be a good thing for university teachers of literature, for instance, to have some sense of how their students may have encountered the figure of the author in the past. And there is much to learn here, too, about the frequency of comparative and intertextual work on the part of young readers, and about the often staggeringly sophisticated analysis and insights they are capable of producing.