Deleuze in Children’s Literature by Jane Newland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deleuze in Children’s Literature by Jane Newland Kenneth Kidd (bio) Deleuze in Children’s Literature. By Jane Newland. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. The subtitle of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan—“The Impossibility of Children’s Literature”—was inspired, its author notes, by an encounter with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who upon learning that Rose was writing a PhD thesis on children’s literature asked, “Est-ce qu’il peut exister une litérature pour enfants?” (“Can there be children’s literature, or is children’s literature possible?”). But if Lacan seemed skeptical on that [End Page 335] question (Rose certainly was after him), scholars have had no trouble finding Lacan in children’s literature, that is, seeing Lacan’s ideas already at work there, not just applying them to such. Children’s literature seems not only quite possible but also quite permeable, part of the broader universe of discourse extending even to what we call philosophy and theory. And in what might be described as a philosophical-theoretical turn in our field, children’s literature scholars are now routinely treating children’s literature as its own form of philosophy or theory, akin to the work of Walter Benjamin, or Giorgio Agamben, or Judith Butler. I describe this turn in my recent book Theory for Beginners, linking it with the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement, which has likewise moved from using children’s literature to support P4C to approaching children’s literature as philosophical work in creative form. One important voice in this turn is Lisa Sainsbury, who writes compellingly about children’s literature as a series of thought experiments in her Ethics in British Children’s Literature and Metaphysics of Children’s Literature. Jane Newland makes another significant contribution along these lines with Deleuze in Children’s Literature. That “in” is key. We can find philosopher Gilles Deleuze within children’s literature, she suggests, even as we can see children’s literature in Deleuze—sometimes directly. Whereas Lacan makes brief reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in his Rome discourse, Deleuze gives considerable attention to that same famous book, using it to ground A Logic of Sense and especially its tracings of paradox. Deleuze picks up on a long critical as well as aesthetic engagement with Alice, extending through modernism and well beyond. I knew about the Alice connection and mention it briefly in Theory for Beginners. But I had little idea of how/ where else we might find Deleuze in children’s literature. Newland’s study is a revelation on that front, even as it’s also a very good introduction to Deleuze through children’s literature. Newland shows that while Deleuze may not have engaged explicitly with many children’s books, he clearly believed in children’s literature and its possibilities. There’s a Deleuzian spirit in much children’s literature, she suggests, regardless of what titles Deleuze did or didn’t encounter. Newland is a French professor, and one of the book’s joys is learning about Francophone children’s books, including Jacqueline Duhême’s L’Oiseau philosophie, a picturebook of Deleuzian thought published just after Deleuze’s death. Newland’s book appears in an Edinburgh UP series called “Plateaus—New Directions in Deleuze Studies,” so it will be read by Deleuze scholars and theory buffs as well as French specialists. But it should be read by children’s literature scholars also, as it’s important and overdue. I appreciate, too, that Newland knows children’s literature studies well and has been publishing in our journals (she also won a ChLA grant for interview work with Duhême). Deleuze in Children’s Literature features an introduction, five body chapters, and a brief conclusion. (Thankfully, the book’s organization is not only rhizomatic.) Newland’s introduction [End Page 336] smartly makes the case for the relevance of Deleuze to children’s literature by emphasizing the importance of paradox in both his thought and in children’s literature. “Children’s literature,” she writes, “forces us to consider the slippery idea of an implied child readership from the outset, and in doing so takes us into a Deleuzian looking-glass world of paradox and...