Abstract
Situated at the intersections of ethnography, childhood studies, literary studies, and education research, this reception study seeks to access real children’s responses to a particular text, and to offer empirical description of actual reading experiences. Survey data is generated by taking advantage of an online resource: an archive of children’s book reviews of Roald Dahl’s The BFG posted on the website of the Spaghetti Book Club, a for-profit educational organization that provides web hosting services for school classes and their students’ book reviews. Thirty different reviews and their accompanying illustrations are analyzed; all were produced by fourth-grade students ranging in age from 8 years old to 11, and representing a broad diversity of American demographic groups and geographic areas. Far from revealing an “essential” or passive child reader, this sample set bears witness to children’s capacity to derive highly personal meaning from the text while simultaneously manifesting self-awareness about their status as children in a larger reading community. More importantly, these child-reviewers represent themselves as capable of sophisticated negotiations between self and story. A significant number of individuals demonstrate a capacity or propensity to approach the text as an aesthetic—rather than a bibliotherapeutic—experience. This study prompts us to re-evaluate the primary significance of categorical distinctions between fantasy and reality when analyzing reader response.
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Notes
All quotations of book reviews are drawn from the Spaghetti Book Club website, which indexes posted reviews by author, class, and title reviewed.
Jacqueline Rose’s semi-famous response to the problem of “What is children’s literature?” (in The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, 1984) was to declare that children’s literature is impossible. Adults, she claims, write something called “children’s literature” for their own purposes, and as part of a self-serving image of childhood in general; this all entails implicit and ultimate disregard for “real” children, even though they are ostensibly targeted by the label of the genre.
For reading-response research on child audiences, see particularly Wolf and Heath, The Braid of Literature: Children's Worlds of Reading, and Simpson (1996), “Fictions and Facts: An Investigation of the Readings Practices of Girls and Boys.” For a study particularly concerned with the ways in which the reader’s gender influences response, see Holly Virginia Blackford’s Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls. For a useful survey of the recent history of reader-response research in children’s literature, see Benton (1999) and Flood (2003).
Dahl himself has had to respond to these charges directly, as he is occasionally asked interview questions like Mark West’s: “Why are many adults made uncomfortable by your children’s book?” (p. 74). See also Roald Dahl (West, 1992, pp. 67–77) for an overview of the controversies surrounding Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The Oompa-Loompas are the most notorious offenders here. In 1972 Lois Kalb Bouchard made the initial charges of racist stereotypes (p. 112) that prompted Dahl to revise his characterization of the Oompa-Loompas in subsequent editions.
For an overview of the controversies surrounding Dahl’s books, and a summary of the criticisms of his work for children, see Culley (1991, pp. 59–60) and West (1988, pp. 70–73). The most aggressive critic of Dahl’s work is Eleanor Cameron, who published a series of articles in the early-to-mid-1970s declaring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory unsuitable for its purported child audience. The Horn Book website (http://www.hbook.com/history/magazine/camerondahl.asp/) offers a “Virtual History Exhibit” with a timeline of the debate, including links to full-text versions of the relevant articles; see “Eleanor Cameron vs. Roald Dahl.” See also Charles Sarland (1983).
Alasdair Campbell (1981) is Dahl’s most stalwart defender against charges from Eleanor Cameron and like-minded critics.
See particularly Sarland, 1991, pp. 121–123.
Although all of the students whose work is included in my study resided in America at the time of writing their reviews, their reading choices reflect a larger pattern among children’s reading choices in which Roald Dahl—and The BFG in particular, when individual titles are solicited—tops the list of “favorites,” according to a 1994–1995 survey conducted in England (Hall and Coles, 1999).
Besides the liberties taken with illustration, I use the term with the general limits described by Genette. He suggests that illustrations would be considered part of the paratext rather than the text itself (Genette, 1997, p. 406), but I would insist that this is the result of his own focus on literary studies. At any rate, the child reader/reviewers in this archive include discussions of both text and nominal paratext without distinguishing between the two, so I will defer to their orientation(s).
For a survey of research pertaining the active/passive audience dichotomy see Pertti Alasuutari (1999, pp. 4–6). In this study I will not be able to take into consideration the larger cultural experience of media that Alasuutari describes as a concern of the “third generation” of media studies (p. 7).
The conventions of book reviewing are implicitly determined by the Spaghetti Book Club’s supervisory staff; according to the website, “The Spaghetti Book Club offers curriculum, training and web publishing services to schools, after-school programs and libraries. The curriculum consists of standards-based lesson plans to help teachers guide their students through the process of writing and publishing book reviews. Through this process, students learn to make personal connections to what they are reading, summarize stories, construct meaning from text, express their opinions and reactions, and compare literary works” (Rosemarin, “About the Spaghetti Book Club”, http://www.spaghettibookclub.org/about.html/).
In a reception study based on her own two children, Virginia Lowe (1991) determined that “There is no doubt that young children are able to grasp this concept of the author before they are five” (p. 86).
My own study dovetails in some respects with his longitudinal study, which integrates the transaction model with a developmental timeline and thus positions the transactional model as one that children effectively grow into. He found that “for young children the authority of any interpretation of the text is simply a nonissue; indeed, at this age texts are not interpreted, they are only enjoyed or rejected. Interpretation first becomes a matter of concern to older juveniles and adolescents, who are concerned with figuring out the truth about the world and their own lives and therefore with discovering what the writers of books have said about these subjects” (Appleyard, 1990, p. 18). The groundwork of his approach was laid by Harriet H. Ennis (1986).
Thomas Travisano (2000) contests Nodelman’s suspicion (2000) that this might produce “some weirdness in terms of the way in which texts construct childhood as something children are both involved in and detached from” (p. 13, n. 1) by insisting upon the term’s applicability to adults’ experience(s) of identifying with characters dissimilar from themselves.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mary Saracino Zboray and Dr. Ronald Zboray for their invaluable feedback and suggestions during the writing of this essay.
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Robin Hoffman received her MA in the History of Art from University College London, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing and teaching focuses on illustrated books, representations of childhood, and nineteenth-century British culture.
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Hoffman, A.R. The BFG and the Spaghetti Book Club: A Case Study of Children as Critics. Child Lit Educ 41, 234–250 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9106-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9106-z