A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders Gretchen Papazian (bio) A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child. By Joe Sutliff Sanders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. I have been waiting for a book like Joe Sutliff Sanders's A Literature of Questions for a long time. A deeply layered, complex scholarly study of literary nonfiction for children and young adults (aka trade nonfiction), it fills a gap in the study of the genres of literature for children and young adults by creating a structure for understanding nonfiction that parallels the deep and complex discussions of fiction and poetry. It identifies salient features and delimits tools and techniques for analysis, while it also models ways of working with them. Perhaps even more importantly, it makes a highly convincing argument for reconceptualizing how we think about nonfiction and its purposes. Over the course of an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion, Sanders examines a broad range of American nonfiction texts for children, from the colonial-era to the contemporary, to determine the generic features that invite or deter reflective engagement with facts. Broadly oriented through Paolo Freire's notion of critical engagement and its role in democratizing educational structures, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's description of textual dialogism and Roland Barthes's poststructural understanding of textual exegesis, Sanders argues that looking to how and when children's nonfiction invites or refuses questions reveals what ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing a text [End Page 493] is willing to make vulnerable—that is, which ideologies it opens to critical inquiry and which ones it avoids. In then identifying and working with a portfolio of devices, or what Sanders calls "a set of hallmarks," A Literature of Questions creates a methodology for revealing where and how nonfiction for children and young adults makes efforts to share and humbly humanize (or hold on to and arrogantly objectify) epistemological authority. In the book's introduction, Sanders gracefully weaves together a massive amount of scholarship, contextualizing his project within discussions of children's nonfiction, children's literature more broadly, genre theory, notions of ideology, the possibilities for and histories of radicalism in literature, and theories of learning, all the while delineating his own approach, justifying his textual selection and analysis methods, and clarifying and defining terms both established ("critical," "engagement," "critical engagement") and novel ("punctuated plurality"). Chapter 1 begins developing the book's perspective by engaging with one of the most basic assumptions about what nonfiction is and what it should do—that is, to provide information and answers. In demonstrating that disciplines of facts never see themselves as having the final answers but are instead engaged in "fact cycles" that circuit through question sequences, while emphasizing that nonfiction is a genre with great potential to engage children and young adults in this very activity, Sanders asks that children's literature scholars, teachers, and writers reorient our most basic sense of this genre: from being a literature of authority to one of inquiry, from being "a literature of answers" to "a literature of questions." In the remaining chapters, Sanders pinpoints and investigates specific aspects of nonfiction for children and young adults that consistently mark where texts actively invite or, depending on how they are used, purposely discourage critical engagement. Chapter 2 looks at the devices of voice, tone, and narrative—specifically, the use of "hedges" to break textual authority, visible narrators to humanize the text's mindset, and what scholar Samuel Wineburg calls "necromancers" to generate a sense of plurality and/or an unfinished conversation. Chapter 3 fixes attention on the textual construction of character (broadly defined) in nonfiction for children, arguing that texts that represent their central figures as imperfect, "touched by vulnerability," prone to mistakes, and "in the light of becoming," while dwelling on the long process of discovery and unfinished inquiry, are more likely to invite critical engagement. Chapters 4 and 5 shift attention from narrative aspects to textual apparatus, with the former attending to peritextual features and the latter fixing attention on the genre's deployment of photographs. Chapters 6 and 7 turn the spotlight on the epistemological operations of the...