Correspondence and Care

Abstract

Correspondence and Care Sara K. Day In Jack Cheng's See You in the Cosmos (2017), eleven-year-old Alex dreams of exploring the universe and making contact with the aliens he's sure that he will find. To prepare, he begins a series of recordings on a hand-me-down iPod that he has spray-painted gold, a twenty-first-century version of the Golden Records that his idol Carl Sagan sent into space. These recordings chronicle Alex's journey to set off his own rocket, a trip that introduces him to new friends and forces him to confront challenges to his seemingly unbreakable optimism. Reading Alex's missives—or listening to them in the award-winning audiobook version—gives us insight into a child's desire for connection, the value of correspondence (in whatever form it takes), and the potential for the things that we write and say today to inform the understandings of future audiences. Just as significantly, they reveal the importance of having our dreams supported by those around us. These themes, which drive Cheng's novel, also inform the four articles in this issue, which ultimately share common interests in correspondence and care. Elissa Myers's article "'Something More Than Invisible': Agency as Care in Girls' Amateur Periodicals" draws on feminist care theory—especially Eve Feder Kittay's concept of the doulia—in order to examine a network of late nineteenth-century female amateur journalists. Focusing in particular on The Violet, a periodical created by Zelda Arlington, Myers explores the ways in which both the newspaper itself and Arlington's written efforts to recruit and support other young women's participation centered gender (rather than age) as a means of collectively finding agency in a male-dominated activity. Through the findings of her archival work, including not just issues of young women's newspapers but also the letters that they exchanged among themselves, Myers argues that these young journalists' correspondence and collaborations demonstrate the importance of expanding our understanding of the kinship model. Daniel Feldman likewise explores the importance of correspondence—both in terms of letter writing and recognizing similarities between historical moments—in his article "Address Unknown: German Children's Literature about Refugees." In particular, Feldman considers the role of epistolary narratives in [End Page 101] recent German children's literature about the Holocaust and the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis; he also traces their common interest in the role of family in confronting changing ideas about national identity. While the article focuses on the ways in which such literature about migratory children might affect future citizens—both native and immigrant alike—Feldman also calls us to recognize the larger implications in term of empathy for refugees on a global level. Although the latter two articles in this issue are less concerned with letter writing, they do illustrate a key point raised in Feldman's discussion—specifically, the idea that "children's literature itself represents a mode of correspondence between generations that offers a forum for dialogic exchange between adults and children, ancestors and offspring, polyphonic voices from the past and heterogenous archetypes of the future regarding the most vexing problems of each era" (page). In "Fatherhood, Childcare, and Leadership in David Grossman's Literature for Children," Einat Baram Eshel emphasizes the importance of reading the celebrated Israeli author's children's books through an intergenerational lens. Noting the temptation to read many of Grossman's father figures as representations of the "new father"—a late twentieth-century trope that reconsiders gender roles in parenting—Baram Eshel locates his children's books within the larger contexts of Israeli culture, Grossman's own experiences as a father, and ongoing conversations about parental authority. Finally, Allison Layfield considers the ways in which Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series capture—and, to varying degrees, challenge—cultural ideologies about warfare in "Gaming the System: Militarization Narratives in the Hunger Games Trilogy and Ender's Game." While Card's and Collins's novels were published decades apart and written in response to different conflicts, Layfield argues, they all capture the degree to which war has become spectacle in modern times, as well...