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Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. By Maria Nikolajeva. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Reviewed by Karen Coats
During the Q & A portion of a session at the Children's Literature Association Conference in Ann Arbor, conversation turned to a sort of collective frustration with the texts under study: Why is it, participants wondered, that no matter how much power a child character gains over the course of a book, he or she still returns to a disempowered state at the end? Worlds could be saved, enemies slaughtered, any number of problems cunningly solved-but in the end, the protagonist, if a child, must necessarily go back to a parental lecture or explanation that diminishes the experience, an existence hemmed in by rules, or simply the same oppressive situation left behind during the adventure.
According to Maria Nikolajeva in her latest book, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers, there's a word for that. In fact, it's the word that might very well hold the key to a theoretical perspective both unique and adequate to the study of children's literature. Such a perspective has eluded scholars of children's literature over the years, as we have tried to sort out other problems: definitional problems that carve up the question "what is children's literature?" in various ways; positional problems that seek to locate children's literature within disciplines (English? Education? Library Science?) via differing emphases in our scholarly foci (Child readers? Literary polysystems? Popular culture?); and theoretical problems that arise when we attempt to use maps designed for other terrain to find our way through the landscape of children's books. Most often, literary scholars of children's literature have been bricoleurs: borrowing analytical tools from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, education, anthropology; or other literary theories, including feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, queer theory, or ecotheory, to guide the close readings we perform.
Nikolajeva, however, approaches the problem in the manner of an engineer rather than a bricoleur, to use Levi-Strauss's contrasting metaphor. Whereas a bricoleur uses whatever tools she finds at hand and thus adapts and often limits the project to those available tools, the engineer surveys the problem and then secures...