Meek - Discussions on Children's Literature
Meek's essay, What Counts as Evidence in Theories of Children's Literature? was written in 1982, yet it still serves as a marker in attempts to understand how we might understand children's literature. Margaret Meek is one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of literacy and children's literature and is well known for asking questions that push these fields into new and exciting terrain. She begins her essay with a reminder of past attempts to theorize children's literature. John Newbery, the 18th century children's book publisher and bookseller, held as his motto "Trade and Plumb Cake for Ever, Hurrah!" a succinct statement that his purpose was to offer children something they would find pleasurable (plum cake) and that he would make a good profit from the selling of these pleasures (trade). This is a statement that could describe most publishers of children's books today.
Newbery's motto also points towards how we might frame inquiry into matters of children's literature. If creating pleasure is a prime motivation for producing children's books, then what counts as pleasure? Who gets to decide what pleasure is? Is pleasure always good? Is pleasure always happy? What kinds of books induce pleasure in children and why? You begin to see how questions of creating books and critiquing books begin to arise. How do we use books with children so that they might experience pleasure?
Then we could bring the matter of trade into question. What kinds of material sell well? Are pleasure and profit always harmonious partners? Are there cases where one overrides the other? So we see that a simple statement of purpose "Trade and Plum Cake for Ever" can drive a series of questions we might wish to research.
Meek goes on to posit that any theory about children's literature begins with ourselves and that our understandings of "literature, children, reading, writing, language, linguistics, politics, sociology, history, education, sex, psychology, art or combination of some or all of these, to say nothing of joy or sadness, pleasure or pain" serve as frames for us to being able to think about children's literature. In other words, it is possible to think about children's literature in an almost infinite number of ways, all of which will say something about ourselves. Research, Meek seems to be saying, is personal.
The bulk of Meek's essay is a discussion of three areas that could inform our thinking about children's literature: literacy, the culture of childhood, and narrative.
Literacy
Meek's thinking about literacy is radical. She is not thinking about acquiring proficiency, but rather how the literature children encounter shapes their expectations for literature as adults. She argues that children's literature is an ever-changing set of reading lessons, that children's literature is the first literary experience youngsters have, and that it should point towards the kinds of literary experiences they will have as adults.
The Culture of Childhood
Meek believes that children's literature is the literature actual children do read. Studies of children's literature have shown an ambivalent feeling towards the popular culture of children, in part because a significant portion of the field sees their task as identifying what is good. Culture is sometimes defined as "shared knowledge." From this viewpoint, children's culture would surely include the stories children hold in common. Where these stories come from isn't a constant. Meek notes that when she was a young girl, she got her stories from books. At the time she wrote the piece, she noted that television is where children get the majority of their stories from. Today, television is still a major source of stories, but we also need to look at electronic media and perhaps new forms of paper-based storytelling such as graphic novels.
Narrative
It's a short jump from here to a discussion of the importance of narrative. Meek was among a handful of scholars in the late 1970s and early 1980s that argued that narrative was a primary mode of thinking that stories are how our brains organize and understand sensory information. This invites closer examinations of how authors organize their narratives and how children interact with their stories.