Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought by Kenneth Kidd

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought by Kenneth Kidd Annette Wannamaker (bio) Kidd, Kenneth. Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought. Fordham UP, 2020. Theory for Beginners, Kenneth Kidd's third researched monograph, is both playful and tricky: playful in the way much theoretical musing is play and tricky in the way that children's literature scholarship often performs the role of the trickster. As is the case with his first two books, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (2004) and Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (2011), Theory for Beginners traces the archaeology of an idea in unexpected and refreshing ways. Making American Boys unravels the paradoxical social construction of naturally wild boyhood, and Freud in Oz resituates decades of psychoanalytic readings of children's fiction by looking instead at the ways the popularization of psychoanalytic theories influenced authors of children's texts. Theory for Beginners tangles with current approaches to both theory and children's literature by situating its subject matter in a space of opposition between two widely held assumptions: First, theory, as we always already know, is so very complex and inscrutable that even the sharpest graduate students are brought to tears of frustration by their first reading of Derrida or Cixous. And, second, children's literature is so very simple that, well, even a child can understand it. What could these two possibly have in common? Indeed, these two modes of thinking, writing, and reading—separated based on assumptions about simplicity or complexity rooted in the child/adult binary—are seen by many as being so incompatible that any attempt to join them or put them into dialogue with one another is laughable. Kidd begins his book discussing a 1963 book titled A Child's Guide to Freud, which is, obviously, a parody: "The joke here is that while Freud certainly had a lot to say about children, he did not usually talk to them, and we certainly have no business sharing Freud directly with them" (1). In this tongue-in-cheek way, Kidd sets up the idea of philosophy and theory for children as an impossibility, which is, after all, a perfect place to begin any discussion of children's literature. Just as the very idea of theory for children has been parodied, so have attempts by scholars to theorize about children's fiction. The most wellknown examples are Frederick Crews' satirical books The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, which make various critical approaches look ridiculous by applying them in far-fetched ways to discussions of a children's book. [End Page 244] Through hyperbole, Crews performs a mock analysis, a silly exercise meant to expose those academics so besotted by theory they have lost their collective minds and have started to theorize about children's books. Our field's vexed and ambivalent relationship with theory is also troubled by children's literature's connections to low-brow art and popular culture, our continued redheaded stepchild status in departments of English, and the devaluing of texts thought to be narrowly pedagogical. Within these contexts, the field's efforts over the past few decades to turn theory's gaze toward children's books in order to elevate the status of children's literature studies in the academy oftentimes merely ended up elevating the status of theory. This is the morass Theory for Beginners wades into and seeks to navigate, and Kidd's clever strategy is to unsettle these existing assumptions by shifting disciplinary perspective. The book is separated into three parts. The first shares perspectives of philosophers working to teach philosophical thinking to young people through works of literature; the next chapter shifts to a focus on "theory for beginners" books, those comic book primers many of us used to survive our first encounters with Foucault or Lacan; and the last chapter focuses on works of literature for younger readers that function as theory or philosophy. The argument that the structure of the book makes is that philosophers want to make philosophy accessible to children and theorists want to make theory accessible to beginners of all ages. Indeed, schools of...