Introduction: Disputing the Role of Agency in Children’s Literature and Culture

Introduction:Disputing the Role of Agency in Children’s Literature and Culture Richard Flynn The papers in this forum were first presented as part of a panel entitled “Children’s Agency: A Panel Discussion on Divergent Critical Models,” hosted by the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) and held at the University of South Carolina on 18 June 2014. The initial impetus for this panel was an email discussion between Perry Nodelman and me that began after Perry sent his book chapter “Discovery: My Name Is Elizabeth” to me after its publication. In response to that chapter and to his subsequent review essay in Jeunesse entitled “The Disappearing Childhood of Children’s Literature Studies,” I told Perry that I thought he was misrepresenting my positions on children’s agency in those essays and he suggested that we organize a panel for ChLA to explore these disagreements. After some back-and-forth email exchanges, we decided to propose our panel and to invite Marah Gubar and Sara L. Schwebel to participate with us in it. Our aim was to present short position papers and to allow for a lot of time for discussion at the panel. [End Page 248] Various circumstances conspired to derail our plans. First, Marah had to withdraw from the panel in order to move from Pittsburgh to her new position at MIT. Then, thanks to United Airlines, Perry was unable to attend the conference in Columbia, SC. I ended up reading both my paper and his, and Sara and I conducted the lively question and answer period that followed. In the course of that discussion period, an audience member suggested that perhaps our differences had to do primarily with our competing definitions of agency. Reading our revised and expanded contributions to this forum, each of us having had the opportunity to engage with one another’s essays, it seems to me that sometimes we are talking about the same thing and sometimes we are not. In her contribution to the forum on “Keywords and the Cultures of Young People” published in the previous issue of this journal, Kristine Alexander argues that “‘agency,’ a term embraced by child and youth scholars from a range of fields, needs to be rethought and used far more critically” (120). Alexander notes a tendency among childhood studies critics to equate “agency” with “resistance,” an equation that perhaps is too easily assumed in the implicit definitions of agency in our essays here. Likewise, her fellow contributor Lisa Weems advocates rethinking the use of the term “[r]esistance” (134) by paying attention to the concept of “intimacy,” drawn from affect theory, “as an analytic category [that] lends itself to the study of affects, logics, and structures that includes—but does not stop at—the level of individual (interpersonal) identities” and that extends to “spatial relations between bodies, systems, and environments” (137). “Resistance,” Weems argues, “needs to be reimagined and nuanced in relation to an understanding of the dangerous, productive, and seductive nature of power. Resistance not only is about fighting an outside oppressive force but also includes dealing with the affective dimensions of difference, conflict, and the struggle of everyday life.” Advocating “intimacy” as a potential “tool to analyze textual and visual representations of childhood and youth as ethnographic subjects, literary characters, and historical figures” might help us “complicate[] notions of power and agency beyond the binaries of oppression/resistance or fear/confidence that structure nostalgia and protectionism” (144). My fellow contributor Sara Schwebel has pointed out to me that discussions of “agency” are far less common in children’s literature studies than they are in childhood studies. She points out, for instance, that while a recent book by Florian Esser and his collaborators on agency and childhood studies begins with the notion that “[a]gency is, without question, one of the key concepts, possibly the key concept, in Childhood Studies” (17), there is no entry for “agency” in Philip Nel and Lissa Paul’s Keywords for Children’s Literature. The contributors to this forum are all primarily literary scholars whose main objects of study [End Page 249] are not children but literary texts and contexts. Our differences seem to arise from the ways in...

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