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Transnational Histories of Children’s Media – Literary Canon Studies With a View to the Turn to Digitality I would agree with the author of the call for papers for this international workshop that there is a need for more transdisciplinary, transmedial, and transnational histories of children’s media. We are currently experiencing the advent of the digital paradigm, which, in Alan Liu’s words, should equally spur a “new media encounter”, e.g. a re-imagining of textual and mediated narratives and the discourses in which they have been enrolled. In the vein of genealogy, this new media encounter could be envisaged in generous and intellectually generating terms - as a meeting between “old” and “new”, which can throw new light on both. The medium that is the focus of my scholarly attention in this presentation is children’s literature. As Anne Lundin has argued, “[c]hildren’s literature is an intersection of two powerful ideological positions: our ideas about childhood and our ideas about literature, ideas often conflicted beyond our knowing” (2004: 147). This perhaps sounds simple but, in fact, it is very complex. In short, canon studies examines the notion of children’s literature as a field of contestation – not only historically but also in Pierre Bourdieu’s more structural terms of there being “rules of art” governing the cultural and symbolic capital of specific expressive forms. I consider the notion of the “canon” to be the backdrop of the literary, e.g. literature’s institutional and societal functions, which can, interestingly, also be studied on the medium’s aesthetic and expressive levels. Culminating in the 20th century, in many nations children’s literature was, for instance, “singled out” as a literature of its own – with its own type of “single address” (Wall) that distinguished itself from the “throes of the written word” of the modernist canon (Rose). Some would call this a step forward – others would call it a parenthesis being questioned today. Paradoxically, the view of children’s literature as a “secret garden” was more powerful in the 20th “century of the child” than in the 19th century when ideas of “high” and “low” had still not been fully institutionalized and connected to ideas of Art and cultural with a capital c. The cultural background of “singling out”, which could then, in turn, be put to work to write national histories of children’s literature, is described very well by Felicity Hughes, who argues that the modernist winnowing of literature as verbal art became a shaping of literatures that needs to be read against the grain: “Within twenty years of the publication of “The Future of the Novel” [Henry James, 1899], the views expressed in it were widespread, in particular the view that the serious novel is one that children cannot read was generally accepted among writers and critics. The impact that this exclusion has had not only on the development of children’s literature but on attitudes towards it is still overwhelming. The segregation of adult’s and children’s literature is rationalized, even celebrated on all sides. It has assumed the status of a fact, a piece of knowledge of the world, that children read books in a different way and have to have special books written for them.” (Hughes 1978: 548) But why canon studies? And what are its contributions to, for instance, a cultural studies paradigm? How can canon studies help us to interrogate national conceptions of children’s media history? First, canon studies can give us a more truthful picture of the literary part of media history – an approach to historic literature which is genealogical and contingent instead of reproducing 20th century constructions and divisions between “high” and “low”. In a line from the Romantic vernacular canon over the hybrid heteroglossia of the 19th century novel (often catering to a broad and intergenerational reading audience) to the modernist divisions (and often forgotten cross-fertilizations between art and the child) to postmodern “reading against the grain”, the interrelations, dialogism and intersections between separated literatures and between “high” and “low” literatures and art forms could again be highlighted. Secondly, canon studies can help us revise literary history and the study of literature itself, for instance, by interrogating its historiography – and thereby its exclusions of “other” literatures. Thirdly, canon studies does not follow a “literary into cultural studies paradigm”, though it builds upon the central insights of power and the linguistic turn. This allows it to build further upon, yet problematize, literary studies instead of abandoning its cumulated historic insights, which would amount to a loss of historic understanding (according to Chris Barker a central criticism of cultural studies has been that it has abandoned the insights of disciplines and domains, e.g. literary studies, in order to cultivate a much more easily obtainable “meta-perspective”). Finally, the study of historically separated literatures and other modal forms as “structural others” (Guillory) to each other would enable deeper understandings of history, media and aesthetics and its cultural processes of shaping. Canon studies could be argued to offer contrafactual readings of the splits of modernity on the level of signification, which would in itself be a valuable contribution to the writing of transnational histories of children’s media (and to its historiography). However, in order to transcend the often national constructions and 20th century “singling out” or reproduction of normalized conceptions it seems important to discuss some “digital” principles for current writings of transnational histories of children’s media. In particular, the following principles seem important to foreground: - - - Literary scholars have often neglected the fact that, historically, literature has usually appeared in a book, which is a medium (equally, media studies have often seen literature as something that is not part of media studies). In a way, “media” or “knowledge media” becomes a central common meeting-ground for children’s literature and other media, inasmuch as the advent of digital media highlights the double of semiotics and materiality (cp. the dual roots of the linguistic turn in semiotics and pragmatism). Different media complement each other in knowledge construction. Young people’s popular narratives today are increasingly organized as transmedial culture, which makes it important for media scholars to work with “cross-media” formats and subcreation. The rise of participatory culture interrogates the knowledge system of print culture, e.g. with children and young people increasingly becoming creative “authors” themselves. Besides, digital culture is an intergenerational space. - As emphasized in the call for papers, national paradigms increasingly appears to be “glocal” adaptations. So where does this brief outline of canon studies as a more contrafactual way of working with children’s literature leave us? And what is the importance of digitality to the development of transnational histories of children’s media? Following a definition of “canon” as the backdrop of the literary, we might argue, with Richard Rorty, that the study of transnational histories of children’s media might be turned into a kind of “intellectual history”. The latter is an analysis of contingency, which attempts to examine past concepts and conceptualisations without being dominated by them. Ultimately, the purpose of historical analysis is to unravel the historical contingency of all concepts. In Rorty’s words: “Unlike historical reconstructions (…) [intellectual history] cannot stay within the vocabulary used by a past figure. It has to ‘place’ that vocabulary in a series of vocabularies and estimate its importance by placing it in a narrative which traces changes in vocabulary. (…) [I]t wants to keep us aware of the fact that we are still en route – that the dramatic narrative it offers us is to be continued by our descendants. When it is fully self-conscious it wonders whether all the issues discussed so far may not have been part of the ‘contingent arrangements’ of earlier times. It insists on the point that even if some of them really were necessary and inescapable, we have no certainty about which these were.” (1984: 61) Digitality highlights this contingency, yet commitment to history. Our readings of history becomes a “new media encounter”. Works Mentioned: Guillory, John (1993), Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press Hughes, Felicity (1978). “Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice”. English Literary History, 3 Liu, Alan (2007). “Imagining the New Media Encounter”. In Ray Siemens & Susan Schreibman (eds.) A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Blackwell Lundin, Anne (2004), Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers. Routledge Nielsen, Hans Jørn, Høyrup, Helene & Christensen, Hans Dam (eds., 2011), Nye vidensmedier – kultur, læring, kommunikation [New Knowledge Media – Culture, Learning and Communication]. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur Rorty, Richard (1984). “Philosophical Historiography: Four Genres”. In Richard Rorty et al. (eds.) Philosophy in History. Cambridge University Press Rose, Jacqueline (1984), The Case of Peter Pan; or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Macmillan Wall, Barbara (2991), The Narrator’s Voice. The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. Macmillan