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Book Review: Children's Literature as

Communication: The ChiLPA Project (Studies in
Narrative, 2)

Article in Language and Literature · May 2005

DOI: 10.1177/096394700501400209

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Children’s Literature as Communication: The ChiLPA Project.
Ed. Roger D. Sell, 2002. (Studies in Narrative, 2). Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. xi + 352. ISBN 90 272 2642 3 (Eur.
hbk), 1 58811 258 6 (U.S. hbk).

José Ángel García Landa

Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)
garciala@unizar.es
http://www.garcialanda.net

The acronym ChiLPA stands for ‘Children’s Literature, Pure and Applied’,
a research and doctoral training programme at Åbo Akademi, which is the
origin of this collection of papers. The high points in the book are Roger
Sell’s introduction and his chapter ‘Reader-learners: Children’s Novels and
Participatory Pedagogy’, together with Maria Nikolajeva’s ch. 6. There are
other good contributions by Niklas Bengtsson and Rosemary Ross
Johnston. Most other chapters in the volume are middling, with little to
recommend them to a readership not immediately involved in the subject at
hand (although all of them may be rewarding enough to academics working
on the same subject as the authors). The volume is divided into three parts:
‘Initiating’ and ‘Negotiating’ are more theoretical/critical, while
‘Responding: Pragmatic variables’ is more directly concerned with
pedagogical research projects and curricular design.

The editor’s introduction (‘Children’s Literature as Communication’)

relates the present project on children’s literature to Sell’s ongoing research
on the communicative function of literature and criticism, brilliantly

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expounded in his two recent books on Literature as Communication (2000)
and Mediating Criticism (2001) (both reviewed in Language and
Literature, nos. 11.2 and 12.3). Sell emphasizes the negotiating, interactive
side of literature and indeed of language at large – ‘to produce a piece of
language for other people’s attention is always to aim at some kind of
interaction with them’ (p. 4) – but he is also most attentive to the fact that
analyses of literary communication cannot be reduced to a study of the
author’s intent, communicative outcomes being unpredictable. The central
concepts of Sell’s pragmatics (co-adaptation between the communally
given and the personally new, the historical-but-not-deterministically-
historicist perspective, the mediating role of texts, etc.), are likewise
applied in an illuminating way to children’s literature. His theoretical
attention to the construction of implied addressees is present as well in
most papers in the book. Several of them emphasize the role of a dual
implied addressee in children’s fiction, an adult co-reader (parents or
teachers being the ones who buy children’s books). Another function of
this dual communicative structure is educational, ‘coaxing children into a
wider human community’ (Sell, p. 8). Roger Sell’s theory, and several of
the papers’ analyses, emphasize the way in which children’s fictions are
‘for real’, as they engage crucial ethical and cognitive issues, meeting their
audience ‘half-way’ the better to achieve their communicative effect.
Students of linguistic interaction (as well as narratologists, etc.) will find
this approach very rewarding, and theoretically wide-ranging, as it opens
up a dialogue not only with the classics of literature and criticism, but also
with contemporary linguists, theorists of literature and pedagogists.

To demarcate Sell’s position: it is a critique of such approaches as

Jacqueline Rose’s (1984) The Case of Peter Pan (whose subtitle declares
the impossibility of children’s fiction from a psychoanalytic viewpoint) or

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of theories of children’s fiction which denounce its ‘manipulative’ nature,
like Perry Nodelman’s (1992). Sell, Nikolajeva and others advocate a
‘postlapsarian’ children’s literature which deals (in communicationally
appropriate ways) with issues of sexuality, violence, oppression and death,
while preserving an awareness of children’s undiminished potentiality for
the best – a humanist ethics of hope is here, as in Sell’s other books, quite
prominent on the critical agenda.

Another chapter by Sell, on ‘Reader-learners’, lays out the bases of

his approach from the viewpoint of linguistic theory (with much emphasis
on context, parole, individual agency in language use, language variety,
and a critique of formalist abstractive approaches). His approach is largely
commonsensical, spelling out the implications of the fact that language is
also acquired, not just consciously taught or studied; that language is rooted
on social structures and cultural practices, etc. Debates on this matter with
mainstream linguists or critical theorists make one think of a phrase of
Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s, to the effect that something must be wrong when
obvious things need to be explained; anyway, Sell’s explanations of the
obvious are always rewarding, even when he preaches to the converted –
who perhaps needn’t rediscover ‘the older insight: that linguistic and
cultural proficiency can be greatly promoted by reading literature’ (p. 287).

There is overall a strong emphasis on intercultural communication

and bilingualism, with contributions emphasizing the importance of reading
children’s literature as a mode of acculturation as well as language
acquisition, ‘trying out the other culture for size’ (Sell, p. 19). There is a
corresponding analysis of the role of the language teacher as a cultural
mediator as well as a mediator between the worlds of adults and children,
after M. Byram’s (1989) intercultural language pedagogy – although Sell

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also notes that one of the advantages of using children’s literature is that
the role of mediator is internalized by learners themselves, who are asked
to imaginatively empathize with another cultural identity. Language
learning need not thus become excessively teacher-centred.

Maria Nikolajeva’s chapter ‘Growing up: The dilemma of children’s

literature’ addresses the way books for children offer ‘a symbolic depiction
of a maturation process (initiation, rite of passage)’(p. 112) (again, issues
which are dealt with at length by Nikolajeva in other works). The
psychological assumptions of traditional idealizing or ‘prelapsarian’
children’s fiction are set in contrast to the need to socialize children. This
may be done through ‘carnivalesque fictions’, which provisionally rehearse
the adult world, or through ‘postlapsarian’ novels, which nonetheless
should avoid an excessively demanding pessimism. Nikolajeva’s
discussion of the young reader’s quest for identity also argues against
Jacqueline Rose’s theories; but her treatment of female initiation might
perhaps have benefited from an engagement with Teresa de Lauretis’
(1984) views in Alice Doesn’t. All in all, though, this chapter is one of the
best in the book and is perhaps better than the other chapter by Nikolajeva,
‘The Verbal and the Visual: The Picturebook as a medium’. This is largely
based on Nikolajeva’s and Carole Scott’s (2001) How Picturebooks Work,
and provides a well-documented typology of verbal/visual relationships.
Various modes of consonance, complementation and dissonance between
illustrations and text are discussed, concerning the semiotics and
pedagogics of setting, characterization, perspective, time and movement,
modality and dual address (an all too brief section this one, but one
especially recommended to narratologists). Oddly enough, though, the
obvious connection or overlap between picture books and comics (and their
respective theories) is largely ignored – a more fuzzily intermedial

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approach would have done no harm. A small terminological objection: at
one point (p. 97) the ‘verbal text’ is opposed to the ‘visual sign system’ of
pictures somewhat vaguely, as it is obvious that writing, while ‘verbal’ in a
sense, is a ‘visual sign system’ too. Also confusing at first is the contention
that ‘since modality is a purely linguistic category, a visual image cannot
convey modality’, though Nikolajeva hastens to add that visual images are
of course able to convey to some extent whatever it is that is conveyed by
modality (objectivity, unreality, wishes, etc.).

Rosemary Ross Johnston’s ‘Childhood: A Narrative Chronotope’

also emphasizes mediation across generations in children’s literature; here
a Bakhtinian pedagogical model of narrative is put forward, with
multivocality, double address, visual/verbal interaction and other concerns
of this volume being dealt with from a more explicitly Bakhtinian
perspective, in quite an attractive way. An ethics of hope is emphasized
here as well: ‘one of the features of a narrative chronotope of childhood is a
present infused with a future, whereas what many books for adults offer is
a present infused with a past’ (p. 149). And Niklas Bengtsson studies The
Pañcatantra as the first book written for children, and analyzes its peculiar
poise between orality and literacy, at the start of a written tradition which
does not wish to renounce it oral roots.

Children’s Literature as Communication includes, in addition,

chapters by Janina Orlov on Pushkin, Kaisu Rättyä and Yvonne Bertills on
Finnish writers Jukka Parkkinen and Tove Jansson, respectively; Maria
Lassén-Seger on K. A. Applegate’s ‘Animorphs’ series, Mia Österlund on
gender in Ulf Stark’s young adult fiction, Jenniliisa Salminen on Soviet
writer Gubarev’s Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. There are two chapters by
Lydia Kokkola, on children’s fiction and the Holocaust and on early

5
immersion reading. Charlotta Sell and Melina Marchetta address,
respectively, issues of reading in primary-level and secondary-level EFL.
The book closes with an account of the Fabula project of interactive
children’s fiction, which emphasizes the educational role of story-writing
within a computer-assisted environment. As to the role of the ‘new
technologies’, I find the exclusive concentration on written literature
somewhat surprising, since films (animated or otherwise) are now a
prominent medium for language and cultural contact, as well as the major
vehicle for educational narratives nowadays. I am aware the book is about
children’s literature, and not about the ‘not-so-new technologies’, but as the
semiotic overlappings of ‘literature’ (a mere word) are obvious, a greater
attention to literature’s intermediality on TV, video and film would have
been welcome to readers concerned with pedagogy, as well as quite
apposite to the project’s central concerns.

There is no chapter on Harry Potter, although a wide variety of

classics and (rather more prominently) less well-known children’s books
are dealt with in passing or in detail – sometimes too much of both, detail
and passing. The book is, to my knowledge, free from factual errors, apart
from very few minor mistakes and typos – although Sell’s conjecture that
‘the economic base of cultural elitism is itself disappearing’ (p. 283) should
count as a factual error. Another thing which should count as a mistake is a
list prize of $ 113,95 / € 91,62, which is pretty stiff (there is no paperback
edition). But of course these matters are insignificant when set against the
many good things in the volume. Students of children’s literature,
narratologists, theorists of pragmatics and communicative interaction
should definitely read this book, or much of it – although they should be
excused if they choose to borrow it.

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 References

Byram, M. (1989) Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education.

Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Nikolajeva, M., and C. Scott (2001) How Picturebooks Work. New York:
Garland.
Nodelman, P. (1992) ‘The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s
Literature’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17: 29-35.
Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s
Fiction. London: Macmillan.
Sell, R. (2000) Literature as Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Sell, R. (2001) Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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