Words of Power

Abstract

Words of Power Gillian Adams (bio) Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjær . Language and Control in Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 1996. David Rudd . Culture Matters: A Communication Studies Approach to Children's Literature. Communication and Information Research Group 3. Sheffield: Hallam University, 1992. Since the publication of Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan (1984) and Peter Hollindale's award-winning essay "Ideology and the Children's Book" in Signal 55 (1988), there has been no lack of work, some of excellent quality, on ideology and on the means that adult authors use, consciously or unconsciously, to influence their child readers. Thus, particularly after John Stephens's 1992 Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction, a book on the subject should justify its publication by presenting new material in a new way. Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjær promise that their examination of children's fiction from "a strictly linguistic approach" will "attempt to fill . . . a gap in the discipline" (262). Do they, in fact, succeed in their enterprise? Language and Control gets off to a shaky start with a general survey of English children's literature based on books published by British historians prior to 1985. Since this material is readily available and to some extent has been superseded by recent research, one wonders why the first twenty-nine pages of this book exist. Given the subject of the book, the next section on genre and text-type, narrator position, and Seymour Chatman's communication model in Story and Discourse (1978), although it will be familiar to academic readers, is arguably more to the point. But it is not until we get to the end of the first chapter that we learn that the authors' intention is to take the results of two surveys of children's reading habits and favorite books and authors, one conducted by Edward Salmon in 1888 and one by Knowles in 1989-90, and to examine some of those favorite books and authors using linguistic analysis, particularly in regard to institutions such as home and family. The second chapter is the only one that provided material new to this reader. Here, in the first section, we finally get a statement of the authors' project: "to make more explicit the linguistic means writers employ in their efforts to support, undermine or simply comment on particular relationships of domination, including those which obtain between children and their adult mentors" (46). We also learn that the authors intend to use a "critical conception of ideology . . . the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination" (43). The next section, "Ideology and Narrative," combines J. B. Thompson's five general modes of the operation of ideology, a number of associated strategies of symbolic construction, and Hollindale's three levels of ideology; the five modes may operate at each of Hollindale's levels. The modes, Legitimation, Dissimulation, Unification, Fragmentation, and Reification, are clearly illustrated by passages from English children's books. The final section of the second chapter, "Ideology and Linguistic Categories," introduces us to such terms as collocation, "the tendency of certain words in spoken and written texts to appear in the vicinity of certain other words" (69), as located primarily by computer searches. The authors become more technical when they discuss linguistic analysis at the level of the clause in terms of "Theme and Rheme" and "Transitivity" (active and passive constructions) as illustrated by The Secret Garden. But while their analytical techniques may be new to non-linguists, their conclusion to their analysis of Burnett's work will be no surprise: "Mary is a far more active person towards the end of the book than she was in the beginning" (80). Thus the claim "linguistic analyses can be a powerful means of support for textual interpretation" (80), at least as demonstrated in this chapter, raises a number of questions. For example, does such an analysis result in anything more than what seems obvious to the expert reader and has been previously noted by critics? And to what extent does the ideology (in the general sense of belief system) of linguistic researchers influence their results since they mirror those of the traditional critics...