children's literature

Literature and art forms contribute significantly to the discussion of epistemological concerns of posthumanism. Which is to say that, literature and art imagine, interrogate and nurture the subjective and embodied attributes of the nonhuman experience. It is through such exploration of the experiential aspects that sensitivity and other similar personal engagements can occur, which can augment our comprehension of nonhuman beings and entities, that in turn can lead to conspicuous epistemological and ethical consequences.

To consider critical posthumanism as established only within critical theory and philosophy, wherein the idea of the human has been the moot point, is to neglect the significant role of popular culture and literature in the revaluation of the concept of the human.

This paper while delineating critical posthumanist ideas in critical theory and discourses like animal and monster studies, techno scientific advancements, vital materialism and actor network theory, also concentrates on literary texts. Therefore, the rationale for conjoining the critical posthumanism with literary texts should be traced herewith.

This paper establishes that children’s literature is a fertile ground where philosophy and representation merge, providing a scope that children might think about their “being” and posits children’s literature as a resource to engage in complex philosophical explorations. The mutation of ontologies in children’s fiction challenges the ideological division between human, animal and the artificial. Since, children’s texts experiment with the idea of being, it puts forth ontological questions to their readers and invite readers to question who they are and what they might become.

This paper partakes in the timely debates discussing the possible ways in which posthumanism could operate in literary research by proving useful as an effective tool of analyzing literary texts for children. Posthumanism may, apparently, seem to be at odds with the traditional purpose of children’s literature to socialize and enculturate.

The essential humanist ideas of agency and selfhood conventionally portrayed in children’s literature are contrasted by the multiple and fluid forms of subjectivity as well as networked and assembled forms of selfhood as identified by posthumanist paradigm. However, posthumanism and children’s literature are connected by their shared interest in ethics. Innately preoccupied with the ethical subject formation, children’s literature provides for a ground ideal for interrogating the exclusionary practices that have historically led to creation of the humanist subject.

Moreover, the everyday state of the child or adolescent subjects as being in-between with respect to their relation with the adults and adult culture is analogous to the position that animals, machines and other nonhuman forms occupy in relation to the human subjects within the humanist scheme of things. In their ability to seek “pleasure in their confusion of boundaries” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 172) children emerge as being the ones who delight themselves in discarding absolute ontologies in favour of posthuman ways of thinking about ways of being.

The primary aim of the paper is to connect posthumanist concerns to children’s texts and thereby examine the ways in which these texts facilitate reconsidering and rethinking the ethical and political questions about the human, nonhuman and posthuman in various aesthetic contexts.

By analyzing a selection of classical and contemporary adaptations of children apps, the article questions the hypothesis of a poetics of hypermedia works, based on their main features: their composite textual materials, their reconstruction of the page, animations and interactivity.

The presentation will explore narrative, intertextual and ideological aspects of The Numberlys iPad/iPhone app (http://www.numberlys.com/). The app, produced by Moonbot Studios and released in 2012, received an American Annie award for excellence in the field of animation in 2013.
The Numberlys is a fanciful tale about the origin of the alphabet. In a world where ways of organization and communication are based on numbers and nobody has a name, only a number, five friends decide to build the alphabet by transforming numbers into letters. By inventing the alphabet the five protagonists let the inhabitants acquire a personal name. Thus the app raises existential questions concerning the construction of identity and our needs for recognition.
The story is set in a futuristic cityscape inspired by the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis. Other intertextual references include ABC books, German expressionism, popular early fantasy epics like King Kong, Flash Gordon and Superman, the Macintosh tv-commercial 1984 and more. Thus The Numberlys seems to address both children and adults.
By referring to the sci-fi universe of Metropolis, the depiction of an urban dystopia, The Numberlys may be understood as a critical commentary of a contemporary metanarrative: technology as a manifestation and a result of progress. Consequently traditional notions of history and nature are questioned in an unusual way.
The tale is worked out as a hybrid of a sequential film and an interactive game. Constructing a media rich mixture of linear storytelling and nonlinear, user driven components, the app challenges conceptions of narration, game activity and reader response.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

This paper will discuss how picturebook applications place themselves within the tradition of children’s literature. In the discussion the various ends of hypermediacy will be emphasized.
Children’s literature is characterized through a child perspective, which is a narratological means developed within literary modernism. It reflects a consideration for the child reader’s cognitive capacity. Even though the narrator may have an adult voice, the story’s point of view reflects the point of view of a child, in order that the reader may be able to recognize—or at least imagine—the story’s universe, characters, milieu and plot. In picturebooks for children the child perspective is equally dominant through the pictures and the verbal text. And in picturebook applications environmental sounds duplicates the effect. One might therefore ask whether the child perspective is highlighted in multimodal children’s literature with hypermediacy as a result.
Picturebook applications seem to combine a cognitive consideration with performative aesthetics. Interactive elements increase the possibility of play. Thus, the applications can be characterized as playgrounds, which is a common way to define postmodern picturebooks (Meerbergen 2012, Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). The interactive elements might also increase the reader’s involvement in the storytelling, which is a common ambition in contemporary picturebooks (Ørjasæter 2014a). Schwebs 2014 argues that the affordances of an app is to bring a story to life in a multi-sensous way, and that the story-telling is embodied in the reader through the finger gestures. My point is that even hypermediated picturebooks such as Stian Hole’s trilogy on Garman have developed means for embodied sensuous experience (Ørjasæter 2014b). But when the picturebook Garmann’s summer is adapted to a picturebook application the multi-sensous story-telling becomes redundant. The story is told out loud as well as presented as scripture. The environment becomes audible as well as visible. The effect of this seemingly redundancy in the storytelling might be regarded as hypermediacy. The question is how it affects the work’s capacity to make embodied sensuous impression.
Apart from Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999) where Bolter and Grusin introduce their hypermediacy concept, the discussion in this paper will be influenced by Software takes command (2013) where Lev Manovich points out that ”computers and software are not just ’technology’ but rather the new medium in which we can think and imagine differently” (13). Thus, the research question in this paper will be: What does hypermediacy do to the way one thinks about children’s literature? Does it in any way alter what one thinks children’s literature is?

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)