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200 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 2004
$19.95 paper, 1-58729-586-5, 978-1-58729-586-7
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
“This is a significant and original work which repositions our critical engagement with the literature of childhood and child subjectivity. Uniquely, it explicates, critiques, and comprehensively applies Lacanian psychoanalysis through the close textual analysis of generically diverse focus texts in lucid, accessible prose, while sustaining rigorous academic scholarship. It will be welcomed by children’s literature scholars and people working with young children in therapeutic capacities.”—Christine Wilkie Stibbs, author of The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature
“Engaging, clear, and authoritative—Looking Glasses and Neverlands offers an important contribution to our understanding of children’s literature and reading.”—Marshall Alcorn, author of Changing the Subject in English Class
This groundbreaking study introduces and explores Lacan’s complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of canonical children’s books such as Charlotte’s Web, Stellaluna, Holes, Tangerine, and The Chocolate War. Looking Glasses and Neverlands thus provides an introduction to an increasingly influential body of difficult work while making the claim that children’s textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires. The texts render lucid Lacan’s theory, and the theory helps explain why the texts remain so profoundly influential in constructing a child’'s sense of self.
Coats shows how our literate culture has come to define and cope with the inevitable losses and separations of childhood, and how discourses of race, gender, and desire get written on our bodies, transforming us into the subjects we are. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Lacan’s theories of subjectivity, gender, and ethics and also extends those theories into discussions of race and the distinctions between modernist and postmodernist subjectivity.
Coats explains Lacanian concepts such as the registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, alienation and separation, and the nature of desire, the objet a, and jouissance; she also takes up Lacan’s concept of logical rather than chronological time, showing how picture books facilitate the child’s emerging sense of boundaries and otherness and help her establish the imaginary ideals that will foster her growth. Finally, Coats looks at how children’s books help a child situate herself with respect to language in the symbolic order, acquire a preferred psychic structure, adopt a gendered public identity, and develop a sense of ethics that may or may not respect the space between the self and other.
Looking Glasses and Neverlands will be of great interest to students and scholars of children’s and adolescent literature and readers interested in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic study of culture and society.
Karen Coats is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. |
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