The Argument from Parenthood

Posted on 16/10/2013 by clembeauvais

I briefly mentioned the accursed phenomenon in this post. That phenomenon, well-known both to children’s writers and to academics in children’s literature or education, is the dreaded, dreary, dreadful deadlock of the argument from parenthood.

An argument strangely overlooked by Schopenhauer in his Art of Being Always Right.

This argument goes like this:

A: What I mean is that Book X can be criticised for its sexism.

B: Well, my little Phlox loves it!

A: I’m not saying children don’t like it, I’m saying it’s ideologically problematic.

B: Well, she isn’t bothered by the ideology!

A: It is quite possible that she might not notice it.

B: Children notice everything. They have the third eye. They are magical clairvoyants of miracle.

A: I’m not su-

B: Do you have children?

A: No.

B: If you did then you’d know. At the moment you don’t so you don’t.

A: Oh, ok then.

B: You know, I used to be like you, believing all the myths. For example, the idea that we can bring up girls not be girly and to be equal to boys. But then I had Phlox, and I gradually realised I was wrong. I observe her closely. She is naturally attracted to pink, and even at two years old she was enthusiastically helping me clean the house.

A: Ah, I guess essentialism is right then.

B: I used to believe that there was no maternal instinct, but then I held little Phlox against my chest and took my breast out of my bra and pressed the nipple against…

A: Can we not talk about this.

B: I love my children.

A: Oh I know.

B: Do you hate children?

A: No, I…

B: You must do, if you spend all your free time nastily disparaging all the books they like.

A: I don’t have anything against children.

B: THEN WHERE ARE YOUR CHILDREN?

(etc.)

I am barely exaggerating, and please don’t go and think that those things don’t happen at the most inappropriate moments, e.g. in the Q&A session at the end of a conference paper. It happens at least once in every conference, but often more. The following is a real (honest, unedited) argument from parenthood we heard at a conference last year.

The paper was a Marxist critique of the commercial myth of Santa Claus. Right after the talk, a hand shot up into the air. At the other end of the arm, a middle-aged lady. Her question, verbatim:

‘Do you have children?’

The youngish lady who’d given the paper looked for a minute like we’d have to push her eyeballs back into her head in a very short while. Eventually she stammered: ‘Well, I … Actually, I don’t think I should be answering this question…’

Not in the least disturbed, her questioner said, ‘Ok. Because I have to say, you talk about all these things, but I have children, and you don’t take into consideration the sheer magic of Christmas, the beautiful moment that it is for them, you can see it in their eyes…’

Bis repetita. I’m not quite sure what makes those people so OK, in the midst of an academic discourse, with bringing to the debate their own personal experiences of having created another human being from scratch. And more staggeringly, with asking straight out if their addressee has achieved the same ‘feat’ (presumably they would then be on the same wavelength).

What if the presenter couldn’t have children? What if she’d lost a child? This isn’t exactly the kind of revelation you want to hear in a busy panel sessions.

What if she didn’t ever want children? Would that make her Marxist reading of Christmas less valid?

Even when people don’t directly ask if the person has children, the argument from parenthood must be, I’m sure, extremely offensive and painful to academics who for some reason that they don’t need to disclose cannot or do not want to have children, and/or have had traumatic experiences in this very personal side of their lives. They must feel like they should be able to carry on with their academic work on childhood without it being hammered into their heads that it is incomplete without the insights of actual parenthood, whether or not from choice.

You don’t hear haemorrhoid specialists being asked by other haemorrhoid specialists in the Q&A session, ‘Excuse me, but have you got haemorrhoids yourself?’ You don’t see fruit fly specialists lyrically raving on about the cuteness of their three-legged, twelve-winged, forty-eight-eyed wonders in the middle of an academic conference. OK, maybe you do. But why is it that children’s literature criticism – and education in general, I think – which makes people think it’s an OK thing to do?

It is NOT an OK thing to do, for the following reasons and many more:

Arguments from parenthood, in general, are extremely conservative. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard parents implicitly justify patriarchy, ‘fear of the racial other’, etc, and their own life choices as academics, thanks to their kids. Simply from observing that their boys tend to prefer gun toys (‘even if I offer him dolls, he’ll choose guns!’), that their babies are more scared of the black neighbour than the white postman, they happily spring back into obscure essentialism.

Arguments from parenthood are a form of religious speech, in the sense that there is no possibility for anyone to refute them. If you’re not a Parent, you can’t know because you’re not a Parent. (“argument from belonging to a completely different sphere of experience”). If you’re a parent, you can’t know either, because you don’t realise that my kids are more right than yours. All I can say is that I respectfully tolerate your faith, but I personally belong to cult of the Non-Childed, or to the cult of the Childed-With-Other-Children-Than-Yours, and therefore according to your rules I can’t know.

Arguments from parenthood come from the absolute and intimate and clearly wrong conviction that one’s children can’t possibly be biased, influenced, deficient in some way or ignorant. If Phlox, Amaryllis and Cyprian are acting this way, it’s because it’s in the Great Nature of Childhood to be so. They are eternal vessels of truth. My obsessive-compulsive observation of their every move is therefore putting me in touch with Pure Childness. And it is beautiful, oh is it beautiful. (This brutally changes, by the way, at adolescence – I have much more patience for parents bemoaning the constant annoyance to their lives that is their teenager, since it at least promises some anecdotal entertainment.)

No one likes arguments from parenthood, even those people who engage most often in them. In fact, those people are probably the biggest haters of arguments from parenthood – when used by others. You can tell from their scrunched-up faces that they are exceedingly annoyed when another person has the cheek to argue from parenthood before them. They want to yell out, ‘That’s my argument!’. They want to interrupt the impertinent speaker and give their version (the true one) of Pure Childness.

Sometimes a verbal ping-pong game will engage whereby two people will issue arguments from parenthood in the attempt to prove, superficially, an academic point, but in reality, one’s superior parenting skills and superior children.

Variations on the argument from parenthood include the argument from grandparenthood, the argument from aunt- or unclehood, the argument from godparenthood, the argument from teachinghood (which I would consider slightly more acceptable), and the cutest of all, the argument from siblinghood, which is the property of young PhD students who think with anguish that there must be some truth to this type of argument and they should do their best to get into the clique. I’ve been there.

Questions containing arguments from parenthood are not questions, they are family stories. Answers containing arguments from parenthood are not answers, they are family stories. Arguments from parenthood are not arguments, they are family stories.

I’m more than happy to listen to family stories over coffee and cake. But when giving or listening to a conference paper, I want to be free to analyse your daughter’s favourite book and say that it reinforces male domination and racial discrimination without it being perceived as a personal attack on her aesthetic taste. I want to be free to say that the fascination we have for childhood stems from existential concerns incommensurate with the objective value of the human beings that represent it without being told that I’ll understand when I squeeze the glutinous fruit of my own entrails in my arms for the first time.

And I really, really don’t want to hear about episiotomies.

Especially after I finally caved in and Googled the thing and realised it means this.

WHAT.

The Post-Doc Complex

Posted on 02/10/2013 by clembeauvais

On my long journey towards maturity, I have reached the stage where I can now identify fully with the existential plight famously analysed and narrated by that great prober of human crises that is Britney Spears.

Or rather, ‘I’m not a PhD student, not yet a lecturer’. Ms Spears, shrewdly identifying the specific requirements for this predicament to end, further argues:

All I need is time

A moment that is mine

While I’m in-between

Or rather:

All I need is grants

For conferences in France

While I’m in-between…

(or: / All I need is more

Free access to JSTOR

/ All I need for sure

Is to give a lecture

/ All I need is three

New lines on my CV

/ All I need is you [looking intently at venerable prof]

To give me peer-review

Etc.)

Not being endowed with the same curves as the inspirational figure of my early teenage years, I’m not sure writhing half-naked on a mountaintop would alleviate my own concerns: what is this no man’s land of limboey in-betweenness that they call post-doc?

Not being a student anymore is, I would like to point out first and foremost, an absurd situation for anyone to come to terms with. I have twenty-four years of studenthood behind me (before you object that I must have been a baby for at least some of that time, I will specify that my mother, who doesn’t care much for non-adults, spent most of that time trying to make me quit that bad habit as fast as possible).

All of a sudden, I’m not a student. It all happened very unexpectedly, on my PhD viva day. Just when I thought everything was going well, my examiner said congratulations, and then:

From this day onwards, you are not a student anymore, and you will never be a student ever again. Well, unless you decide to study something entirely different at some point later in your life.

I couldn’t possibly have prepared for it; I wasn’t ready. Immediately the panic generated by the first sentence was replaced by feverish imaginings of what I could study next. An undergraduate course in Klingon could be followed by an MPhil in Advanced Crocheting? But it was too late, my supervisor came up to me and cut off my tiny Padawan braid, and it was the end of my student life.

I am now in the strange situation of having to answer to no one. Lecturers and professors always seem to have someone above them telling them what they’re doing right or wrong, usually with the help of statistical diagrams and numbers preceded by pound signs. My own post-doc contract (a very Oxbridgey Junior Research Fellowship, to be precise) doesn’t come with any particular demands that I should do anything concrete in the next three years.

It is implicit in the wording, I guess, that I shall not use them to improve my skills at dodging banana skins on Mario Kart, but there’s no precise to-do-list. I don’t ‘have to’ publish a book, write a certain number of articles, do a number of hours of teaching, present conference papers. I just have to get on with my research, and because I had an interview where they assessed that I wasn’t career-suicidal, they are simply assuming that I will do my best to improve my CV in those three years in the ways I see most fit.

Not this.

So here I am, beginning a three-year job where I don’t have a boss, or externally-defined objectives, or a possibility of being fired (as far as I know), but where I can decide exactly how to organise my days and/or nights, what to refuse and what to accept in terms of teaching, and what to do in my spare time. Even in my most lucid dreams I didn’t think you could upgrade to that level of adult independence until you retired, and I’m not even long-sighted yet.

But at the same time as having all this freedom at my disposal, I will also be frantically applying, in those years, for all the jobs in the world, hundreds of much less comfortable positions but more durable ones, which will drag me into a whirlpool of admin, CV-writing, referee-bribing-with-macarons-from-Ladurée, and anguished monthly transfers to my savings account. I will be writing articles I don’t want to write but that might have a better chance of getting published than the ones I do want to write.

The bribery that always works.

So I’m barely beginning my career as a researchling and I’m not sure if I should try to enjoy the most luxurious three years of my life because this is pretty much as free as it gets, or grimly memento-morise: this job is just a formidably lovely transition chamber towards a terrifying academic job market, where proper academic positions are melting away faster than the North Pole, and dancing on a bare mountain in ripped jeans begins to seem like a very reasonable option to keep at bay the weird despair of in-betweenness.

New job, new book, new blog schedule

Posted on 30/08/2013 by clembeauvais

The holidays have ended; I am now all splattered with freckles and full of salmon oil and maple syrup and scarred everywhere from fighting grizzly bears with my bare hands. Guess where I went to?

My holidays.

I am now looking forward to October which is going to come into my life with the sole intent of modifying it completely. This is because the following things are going to be happening in it:

1) New job!

I am starting on the 1st of October my very first job as an Emerging Scholar, which is a newspeak way of saying mini-researcher-playing-with-tiny-shovel-in-the-corner-of-the-big-research-beach. I’m going to be a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge. It entails doing research on my own like a grown-up, having lunches with other fellows like an adult, and still teaching the lovely undergrads (and also the unlovely ones) the mysteries of children’s literature and of the philosophy of education.

So I’m moving out of my flat, and beginning my new life of maturity as a non-student (!). In the meantime, the hardback version of my thesis, with corrections, will have been submitted to the University Library! Don’t rush there all at the same time to read it; I don’t want to cause a riot. I decided to get it bound in pretty wacky colours because every boring scientist picks red, black or blue, and what’s the point in being a Humanities student if you don’t take advantage of the fabulous freedom of submitting a baby pink thesis to the UL?

Funky coloured theses

In my new job I’ll basically be starting a new research project, but also finishing what I’m currently working on, which is turning my thesis into a proper academic volume – to be published next year. This is proving very tricky and interesting – I’ll write more blog posts on the subject. The new project involves researching the concept of child precocity, and I’m sure I’ll write a bunch of things about that in months to come.

Another new thing I’ll be doing for the first time in October is go to a French conference and presenting my work in French. Easy, right, since I’m French? NO. French people terrify me, and I’ve completely lost my academic French. I’ll keep you updated, should I survive.

2) New book!

‘GGAWOL’, as it is affectionately known

But that’s not all, because October also brings the release of the second book in the Sesame Seade series, Gargoyles Gone AWOL! more to come, of course, on the matter. I’ll also be doing my first big event – a talk to kids at the Bath Literary Festival.

I’ve been working on tons of projects recently. I’ve got two picturebooks in French coming out next year, as well as a YA book. In the UK as well, projects are bubbling but still in the top-secret category. It sounds exciting, but basically it’s a sexy way of saying there are no contracts yet.

3) New blog schedule!

And to celebrate all this – new life, new job, new books, new projects – and fight existential angst, I’ll be trying to stick to a new blog schedule. Since I feel slightly schizophrenic on this blog – I’m interested both in the academic and the writing aspects – I‘ll be doing one post per week, alternating each week – one roughly for the interests of academics and academic-minded people, or people who’d like to know more about research; and one about writing and specifically writing children’s books, which will probably appeal more to other authors, readers and students of creative writing. I’m thinking Wednesday, and all in a partnership with the French side of myself.

Also, I’ve been getting quite a few emails recently, from students of children’s literature in particular – either about the course at Cambridge, or about studying children’s literature in general. I’m always happy to help, so do email me at clementine at clementinebeauvais dot com (but please don’t ask me to write it for you…!)

Meanwhile

A bientôt!

Clem x

My Boyfriend Ate My Homework

Posted on 25/07/2013 by clembeauvais

Or: ‘Emotional Proximity in the Ivory Tower: Between Emulation and Rivalry.’

(academia-related post = academic-souding title)

I am endowed with a boyfriend who’s also trying out this whole academia thing that I’m sort of into as well. In other words: we both want to be researchers and lecturers when we grow up. Granted, he’s in another corridor of the Ivory Tower, but not very far from mine – he’s in the English Literature and Theory office, as opposed to Literature for Nanohumans and Philosophy Thereof, which is where I currently occupy a cubicle. He’s also slightly younger than me, because I’m a cougar like that, so we’re not (yet) on the jobmarket at the same time. And finally, we’re not leaning on the same theoretical frameworks – in fact our favourite thinkers couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.

Although someone wrote a very good book on how they're actually on the same wavelength (BF doesn't agree)

Although someone wrote a very good book on the connections between their works (BF doesn’t agree)

But of course these differences don’t mean that the comingling of the personal and the professional doesn’t happen. It happens all the time, and it’s mostly wonderfully enriching and stimulating, because we’re exactly on the same wavelength re: what we think research should be about, and how ambitiously we should aim to Transform the Whole of Intellectual History. And yet there’s much more than stimulating debates and mutual encouragement in this kind of relationship, as I’m sure the 99% of academics who are going out with other academics already know.

The individual in question would hate me to ramble on about his greatness, but in all objectivity, I have never met anyone at this stage of their PhD who is as knowledgeable, intellectually sophisticated and ambitious, who’s achieved so much already, and who writes so well. Furthermore – it shouldn’t matter, but it does – he’s doing a Proper Discipline, not one with Nanohumans in it. One that makes people go ‘blimey, it sounds difficult’ rather than ‘whoa, you read Spot the Dog all day?’

‘Having discovered the haunting presence of nothingness in being, Spot undergoes an existential crisis’ (Beauvais, 2013)

We’re in the same sort of area – so I can judge what he does as well as he can judge what I do. And if it’s doing wonders for the evolution of my thoughts, and constantly pushing me further, it’s sometimes at the cost of a good chunk of self-esteem. Because it’s not the same when your supervisor, or the anonymous peer-reviewer of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, or your mother declares that your latest textual analysis is ridiculously overgeneralising, and when it’s your boyfriend who says so. In the first three cases, you get back to work. The fourth one sounds like you are running the risk of never being loved again. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

Some people say that the face of 20th-century French philosophy would have been different if Simone de Beauvoir had been ranked first at the Agrégation of Philosophy, the highest academic distinction in France. Jean-Paul Sartre was ranked first, she came second. It doesn’t matter that he was taking the exam for the second time as he’d failed it the first time; it doesn’t matter that she was coming from a much less privileged background, and the youngest candidate that year. In some people’s minds, Beauvoir was condemned to remain Sartre’s follower, to expand on his work, but never to develop a system of her own. What if she’d been first?

She got her own back by dying second as well. C. Le Grand Portage

I think that question is actually counterproductive. I’m not going to get into everything that Beauvoir did far better than Sartre, but they’re not quite the right people to bring into that debate. It’s not them, the controversial superstars, who highlight the dangers of erotico-academic relationships – it’s the others, the ones we never hear about. Or rather, the ones with the partner we never hear about. The couples with the superstar professor and the mid-level lecturer. The ones with the genius theorist/radical thinker with the partner who writes textbooks and does a lot of teaching, even though s/he seemed to enjoy theory too, once upon a time (more often she than he, judging from what I see around me…)

Academic couples who regularly read each other’s work are, I think (I think!), always engaged in that precarious tightrope-walking exercise of offering constructive criticism that doesn’t end up ruining the mood of the whole Sunday afternoon, spotting when the other is really asking for punctilious peer-reading or if they simply need reassurance, and above all, making sure that whatever successes one encounters don’t lead the other one to think, ‘That’s it, I’ll be the one who’s the footnote in his/her biography a century onwards, I might as well give up now.’

So yes, there’s always a risk that the one with the lower self-esteem might not survive the peer-reviewing pillow talk and that all embryonic ideas conceived in that bed might end up on the CV of only one of the two. And not necessarily in an evil, ‘Every consciousness wills the death of the other‘ way, either. Just as many bright people gradually overshadow their beloved sibling just by being themselves and there, despite all the love and sincere admiration they can have towards them, it’s sometimes a quiet, tender, unconscious battle of assertiveness that takes place in academic couples.

It’s mysterious, that anguish you get when you give your latest chapter to read to someone who will be enthralled only by Hegel, and the crushing disappointment when you realise that your own writing still doesn’t have the same effect on him. And the moments when you say ruefully, ‘You don’t like my ideas as much as you used to!’ as if there was something about your theorisation that’s become as routine as that dimple in your cheek that first caught his eye.

‘And my subpart, do you like it too? And my transition to chapter 3? And my literature review?’

But mostly the intimacy of bodies and ideas is glorious and neat, a dangerously far-reaching, all-in-one package, like having a research diary that responds to you with reading suggestions, annoying-but-terribly-useful counterarguments, and encouragements; that makes you tea when you’re struggling with a paragraph; that rereads your damn post-doc applications thirty times; that knows you so well that it can tell you exactly which traumatic episode of your childhood is responsible for the fact that the literary analysis you just did makes no sense at all. All that nicely tied-in with the typical comfortable monogamous relationship of two child-free people in their mid-twenties with little disposable income but no taste for luxuries.

So I don’t know who’s Socrates and who’s Alcibiades, or who’s Sartre and who’s Beauvoir (I’d rather do away with the extran bisexual affairs, though, if you don’t mind), or who’s Arendt and who’s Heidegger (erm, hopefully neither), but I know there’s always more seductive potential in my monograph-writing than in my shopping at Ann Summers, and that I don’t care about the early white hairs as long as I can see his serious concentrated face listening to Bernstein’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Towards Frenglish Research in Children’s Literature?

Posted on 30/11/2012 by clembeauvais

A long time ago I was an exemplary (i.e. completely stressed-out) student at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, and I hated it. Desperate to escape the constant humiliations, threats, existential worries and intellectual rigidity imparted by the French university system, I ended up ~~setting up my own wicker-basket-business~~ ~~backpacking up Mount Annapurna~~ ~~becoming a horse-whisperer~~ studying at Cambridge. Ironic, I know, but happiness levels rocketed.

Me, before moving to the UK.

Anyway, as a result of adolescent trauma, until very recently I’d never really tried to get in touch with French researchers in children’s literature, even though I use a ton of French philosophers in my own work. There’s so much research in English already, and so little time, and of course I suspected that it would be done quite differently across the Channel.

But last year, as I was browsing the Internet, I stumbled upon the blog of children’s literature lecturer and researcher Cécile Boulaire, from the University François-Rabelais of Tours. I left a comment, and got an email in return. Our correspondence resulted in my inviting her, and other French researchers, to a day symposium at our Research Centre in Cambridge. The symposium took place last week.

Our five guests were members of the Afreloce (French Association for Research on Books and Cultural Objects pertaining to Childhood): Cécile Boulaire, Laurence Chaffin, Matthieu Letourneux, Mathilde Lévêque and Christophe Meunier. They happened to be much less terrifying than my past teachers.

Me, not terrified.

The main purpose of the symposium was to present and compare theoretical perspectives and methodologies in children’s literature research in France and in English-speaking countries. The programme was as follows:

Current Francophone and Anglo-American Research

in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Session 1. History and the Children’s Book.

9.30-10.00. Kate Wakely-Mulroney (University of Cambridge)

· The conventions of nonsense in Charles Dodgson’s correspondence.

10.00-10.30. Laurence Chaffin (University of Caen)

· Literature for girls in the 19^th century.

Session 2. Geographies of Childhood and Adolescence.

11.00-11.30. Erin Spring (University of Cambridge)

· Answering ‘Who am I?’ by asking ‘Where am I from?’: Constructions of place-based identity through young adult fiction.

11.30-12.00. Christophe Meunier (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon)

· Children’s picturebooks : actors of spatiality, generators of spaces.

Session 3. Reading Words and Pictures.

13.30-14.00.Cécile Boulaire (University François Rabelais, Tours)

· Poetics of picturebooks.

14.00-14.30. Yi-Shan Tsai (University of Cambridge)

· Young readers’ critical responses to manga.

Session 4. New Theoretical Perspectives and Territories of Research

14.30-15.00. Professor Maria Nikolajeva (University of Cambridge)

· Memory of the present: empathy and identity in young adult fiction.

15.00-15.30. Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris Ouest/ Nanterre)

· Youth literature: series logic and cultural series.

15.30-16.00. Clémentine Beauvais (University of Cambridge)

· Desire and didacticism in the children’s book.

16.30-17.30. Round Table. Chair: Clémentine Beauvais.

· National and International Trends in Children’s Literature Research.

The day, and especially the round table at the end (which was square, as an unplanned tribute to Descartes) confirmed some of my assumptions and invalidated others concerning the differences between children’s literature studies in France and in the UK/US. Here’s a quick overview:

Children’s literature research in English-speaking countries is much more driven by power theory. The children’s book is perceived as a space of adult (and sometimes child) powers – indeed it is the object of my thesis. In France, as Cécile and Matthieu confirmed, it isn’t a recurring question at all. Paradoxical, of course, since it’s a very Foucauldian analysis. Which brings me to my next point…
The French don’t do ‘French Theory’. Foucault is apparently studied quite a bit still, but Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Bourdieu and all the thinkers cheerfully grouped under the magic ‘French Theory’ umbrella by anglophone researchers seem to be much more rarely found in France than abroad.
French researchers study children’s literature mostly ‘as literature.’ I know this may sound very strange, but it’s far from being always the case here. Personally, I don’t see myself as studying children’s literature as literature. The child in the book isn’t necessarily the focus for French researchers- aesthetic criticism of children’s books ‘as literature’, ‘as works of art’, regardless of the audience, seems to be prominent.
The Anglo-Saxon approach seems currently more theoretical, the French one more aesthetic and historicist. Of course, this has to be nuanced to a great deal – a lot of UK/US researchers do historical criticism. But the theoretical effort which underscores current publications in English – definitions, axioms, ‘towards a theory of children’s literature’, etc – doesn’t seem to have a French equivalent. This is counterbalanced by a very high level of detail, in French research, of aesthetic analyses and of contextualisation.
But we also have a lot in common. As one of the sessions (on geography/ecocriticism in children’s books) showed, emerging fields of research are concomitant in both ‘bubbles’. And we’re asking the same questions – how do picturebooks work? What’s a children’s series, and what can it tell us about the sociocultural contexts of its creation and distribution? And of course, what is children’s literature?

But a haunting question remains, one which Maria Nikolajeva develops on her blog: what can we do to develop research partnerships, to overcome the language barrier, to be aware of what other research centres abroad are doing? The Internet helps, but without regular and sustained interaction between different countries we might be condemned, in the Arts & Humanities, to reinventing the wheel terrifyingly often.

For French-speakers: Mathilde Lévêque wrote a blog post on this symposium, and so did Cécile Boulaire.

Note: I am very grateful to the Research Centre and to Christ’s College for funding this event.

Meanwhile, in the Ivory Tower…

Posted on 08/11/2012 by clembeauvais

… I’ve been painstakingly trying to sort out the rest of my life. This is the last year of my PhD, so I need to figure out what to do with myself and all my earthly possessions when they kick me out of my flat in July.

The PhD thesis is progressing ok, with a first draft done and amply commented on by my supervisor – back to the drawing board for draft number 2.

I’ve got a new peer-reviewed article published in Children’s Literature in Education: ‘The problem of power: Metacritical implications of the concept of aetonormativity for children’s literature research.’ Yep, it’s deliciously jargonny. Basically, what it means is this: currently, children’s literature theory is very much inclined to see adult power everywhere. In this article, I ask – why does this ‘power’ have to be so all-encompassing? Doesn’t the child have a share of the big bad word of ‘power’?

I’ve also got a new review in International Research Society for Children’s Literature, on the academic volume Philosophy in Children’s Literature, ed. by Peter Costello (2012). I love writing and reading reviews of academic books – it’s vaguely addictive.

And post-doc applications, of course… I’m just sending off my 20th application today for the extraordinarily competitive Junior Research Fellowships (JRFs) in Oxford and Cambridge. So far, I’ve been rejected from one and longlisted for another; so all hope is not lost. JRFs are everyone’s dream: three or four years of funded research in a college, with some teaching allowed… and yes, the associated prestige. Chances to get one are very slight, but some people must get them, I guess.

My research proposal for those is quite different from what I’m doing at the moment: I’m trying to branch out into Childhood Studies and the philosophy of childhood, which I do a lot of indirectly in my thesis anyway. Fingers crossed that I get to do it, one way or another. The job market situation is extremely tough for graduates at the moment, especially in the arts & humanities, and I’m not too optimistic.

I’ll blog about the Children’s Literature Research Centre soon – we’ve had some exciting events recently!

Clem x