The Limits of Literary Criticism of Children's and Young Adult Literature*

Hans-Heino Ewers

I

As I examined pertinent articles and essays of the past 10 years, I gained the impression that discussions about "aesthetic criticism of children's and young adult literature" have been moving in circles. The controversies move between alternatives that are out of date and therefore no longer satisfactory. They present decisions that are less and less acceptable, alternatives that appear more and more as false oppositions. Aesthetics or didactic concerns, pedagogy or art, autonomy or utility--these appear to me to be alternatives that are less and less adequate to grasp the most recent developments of children's and youth literature. These concepts are diminishing as conceptual distinctions that are helpful in our work of literary criticism.

Whenever voices are raised for children's and young adult literature as art, whenever someone pleads for a "new aesthetic awareness" in this literary realm, whenever critics of children's and young adult literature are implored to concentrate on aesthetic values and the judgment of artistic quality, in most cases categories and principles appear that point back unmistakably to the German educator Heinrich Wolgast (1860-1920). References to Wolgast's essay "The Misery of Our Children's Literature," which first appeared in 1896, have been on the increase again recently, according to my observations. The most important of Wolgast's theses are:

1. Writing for children and young adults in poetic form must be a work of art.
2. Poetic art cannot be and must not be a vehicle for knowledge and morality. It is demeaned when it is made to serve alien powers.
3. The concept of children's literature (or literature for young people) in the sense of a body of writing that is created specifically for children (or young people) must vanish. Only our genuine poets should be our writers for children.

Wolgast is everything but an aestheticist: his concept of the work of art is no less political than Schiller's concept of the aesthetic. Like Schiller's aesthetic education of the human race, Wolgast's "aesthetic education of youth" also aims for the realization of a humanity that is free of all onesidedness. I mention this in order to explain why Wolgast was able to develop an impact also among progressive critics.

But first concerning traditional followers of Wolgast: the elements of cultural politics and of social-democratic progressive thinking in Wolgast's position have been widely ignored by this group. What remains at the core are the pleas for poetic form and the rejection of tendentious writing, or politically engaged literature. On the other hand, these followers consider Wolgast's rejection of all literature specifically for children and young adults to be exaggerated. However, this divergence leads only too frequently to a watering down of Wolgast's demand for artistry in children's and young adult literature, just as his verdict against all tendentious writing is generally only cited when unwanted tendencies are at issue.

That there is also a progressive following of Wolgast may be less well known. It is to be recognized by its scepticism or rejection of specifically or exclusively children's or young adult literature, its rejection of all simplistic employment of literature for merely useful purposes and for instruction, and finally by its emphasis on aesthetic considerations. Aesthetics here, however, is not related to a separate sphere of art, as the traditionalists would have it, but is conceived as an indispensable element of the experience of social life and practice. The dimension of cultural politics in Wolgast's theory lives on here. Occasionally it has even been radicalized along the lines of cultural revolution. However, progressive critics have rarely designated themselves as followers of Wolgast. His name probably appears too much associated with other tendencies for them.

Opposed to the followers of Wolgast, who are primarily concerned with aesthetics or the artistic literary features of children's or young people's reading, we find all those who see children's literature as a didactic means to an end, a useful literature to be evaluated for its utility and its orientation toward the target group aimed for in each case. On this side, traditionalists of the most varied sort are also to be found, as well as diverse critics from the left. Most of the progressive critical positions in Germany since the 1960s have been located on this side. For a great number of progressive critics and theorists of teaching, children's and young adult literature was attractive just because of its decided target-group orientation and its functionality. For them, children's literature was a model of nonautonomous, socially relevant and useful literature. In terms of literary theory and methodology, this group was more up-to-date and sophisticated. The alterations and expansions of the concept of literature itself since the end of the 1960s, as well as wide-ranging research in literary communication and reception and critiques of ideology and social/historical research directions were taken up by this group. These critics also succeeded in integrating important theories of developmental psychology (Piaget, Vygotsky, Kohlberg) and of psychohistory (Ariès, de Mause).

As impressive as the methodological equipment of this group appears, and as innovative as it has been in its effects on the entire realm of criticism of children's and young adult literature, its positions have been less convincing lately, in my opinion. They fail to reckon with a phenomenon that has begun to be registered in Germany in the past decade and a half with increasing awareness and that demands an explanation. The phenomenon is that of the increasing literariness of a part of children's and young adult literature. Quite a few areas of this literature can no longer be classified as purely target-group-oriented utilitarian literature, something that has certainly come to be noticed in the realm of the cultural public. Both theory and criticism are challenged intellectually and practically by this development. Instead of being recognized for what it is, this phenomenon of the "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult literature is being fought by the didactically oriented group as something that ought not to be. The designation of children's and young adult literature as target-group-oriented utilitarian literature turns out not to have been merely an analytical determination: it is revealed as an item of faith, a dogma. Obviously we have here a type of negative fixation on the bourgeois concept of "high" or independent literature, which finds expression in an oppositional idealization of utilitarian literature.

The failure of this criticism of children's literature based on communi-cation and reception theories in the face of the phenomenon of "increasing literariness" is responsible, in my view, for the new popularity of Wolgast. ] But this only takes us from the frying pan into the fire. Whether one looks at Wolgast from the perspective of a traditionalist or of a progressive critic, a return to his position always includes the reassertion of a classicist idealist concept of aesthetics or of art, a concept that was anachronistic not only in relation to the actual development of art in the twentieth century, but from the very beginning. An aesthetic Wolgast doctrine of whatever variety leads children's and young adult literature astray, if for no other reason than that the times have passed in which it was thought possible to determine the aesthetic idea ontologically or anthropologically once and for all. Criticism of children's and young adult literature must fundamentally renounce Wolgast's aesthetics. A new response to the "increasing literariness" of sections of children's and young adult literature is needed, with new analytical equipment and with new categories of evaluation.

Of course theoretical development did not cease in the 1980s. Communication and reception theories in children's and young adult literature criticism has at least in part overcome its dogmatic narrowness and addressed itself to the literary side of children's and young adult literature. In this development, structuralist and cultural semiotics theories were of decisive help. Two studies that have advanced children's and young adult literature theory in Germany are: Maria Lypp's Einfachheit als Kategorie der Kinderliteratur (1984) (Simplicity as a Category of Children's Literature), and Zohar Shavit's Poetics of Children's Literature (1986). But this new discussion of theory has only begun haltingly, and has to date hardly reached beyond narrow circles. However, it can already be said that criticism of children's and young adult literature will be able to profit substantially from this new discussion of theory. It is frequently noted that children's and young adult literature criticism lacks a tradition grounded in literary studies in the sense of an "applied literary science." Perhaps my arguments below can contribute toward a methodological framework for the criticism of children's and young adult literature. I shall exclude all the problems that criticism of children's and young adult literature shares with literary criticism generally, and limit myself instead to two areas of investigation in which criticism of children's and young adult literature is confronted with the specifics of its subject matter.

One of these areas is the special complication of the communication situation of children's literature and the resulting consequences for its criticism. The other area that I wish to elucidate is what I mean by the term "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult literature, and how the tasks of a literary criticism of children's and young adult books ought to be defined accordingly.

II

As is well known, models are simplified representations of reality. To represent the circumstances of communication between author and child reader as a straight communication, as sometimes happens, cannot be counted as a simplification, however, for such a representation has little to do with reality. The specificity of the communicative situation of children's literature only reveals itself when it is understood as the complicated interrelationship of several communication processes, a circumstance that reaches into the very core of the children's literature text. Children's and young adult literature generally tends, as Zohar Shavit has formulated it, to have an unofficial as well as an official addressee. The "unofficial addressee" is the adult mediator, who plays a constitutive role in the process of communication of children's literature. For without his or her mediating achievement, communication could not take place. The child is not yet able to act independently in the literary marketplace. The child is dependent on others to recognize its literary needs and to select from available offerings accordingly. We all know that adult mediators have used their indispensable role in order to exercise control and to patronize. We know, equally, how hard it is sometimes to recognize the border where assistance turns into regimentation.

The communication situation of children's literature consists of at least two interwoven communications processes: between the author and the child recipient, and between the author and the adult mediator. Both processes can take place side-by-side, neatly separated. The mediator is persuaded, in this case, by means of prefaces and afterwords, cover blurbs or other publisher's materials addressed to him or her, that the work in hand corresponds to his or her conception of a children's book, and that it can therefore safely be handed on to its actual addressee. Forewords and afterwords specifically addressed to the mediator were once the rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but have since gone out of fashion. However, communication between author and mediator has not disappeared; it simply takes place in more indirect and subtle ways. Even the actual literary text is subliminally always also addressed to the mediator and is formulated with concern for his or her idea of appropriate, "good" children's literature. We are here in the realm where both communications processes interpenetrate.

The children's literature text has two different implied readers throughout, two inscribed roles for readers. The signals directed at the mediator are generally indirect and restrained. Certain choices of theme can constitute such a signal, for example. It is apparent that individual groups ] of mediators (teachers, librarians, or booksellers, for example) have now come to consider certain themes as indispensable to children's or young adult literature. Authors who ignore these preconceptions risk being ignored by particular groups of mediators. Inclusion of even just one of these "hot" topics, on the other hand, is likely to gain them some notice. An author such as Peter Härtling in Germany is fortunate in being able to do this without loss of literary quality. The fact that he addresses a "hot topic" in Fränzie (1989)--the problem of unemployment--pleased many mediators. I can, however, imagine a reading of this book that hardly pays attention to this topical theme, which would not be so far off the mark, because unemployment in this novel is an incidental and therefore replaceable element.

This example illustrates that children's reading does not always correspond to the ideas its mediators have about it. The communication process of author and child recipient therefore falls into two realms: into one sanctioned by mediating authorities and into unsanctioned literary communication. One can imagine an author playing a double game: assuaging the mediators with appropriate signals, while simultaneously offering the child recipients a different reading in disguise. Thus an author might, for example, present a novel to its mediators as a problem novel on the theme of racism, not excluding the possibility, perhaps even hoping, that it will be read by its youthful recipients as a problem novel with educational effect. At the same time, he or she might also offer the latter the possibility of simply reading the novel as a suspenseful crime novel. In this case the author additionally addresses readers' trivial wishes that are not recognized or at least not explicitly praised by the mediating authorities. The reverse is also thinkable: the author can explicitly pay tribute to the ruling system but conduct subversions under the surface. The author is--incidentally--not always conscious of such double dealing.

In addition, a fourth communication process is possible. This one takes place between the author and the adult who is not addressed as a mediator but simply as reader. When he or she reads children's and young adult books as a mediator, the adult is conscious of not being the actual addressee. He or she tries to imagine how a child or youthful reader might or perhaps ought to respond to the text. He or she (the adult) is just a coreader and has to exercise special restraint in this role: to be especially reflective, to be capable of abstracting from his own preferences. As a rule, a system of norms develops for this role, a sort of code of conduct that differs not only from era to era but also from one mediating group to another. In addition, there have always been children's and young adult books that address adults not merely as mediators but as actual readers. [These are children's and young adult books that display two actual addressees. Such two-level or ambiguous children's literature was already being written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the realm of the literary fairy tale in Germany . Think of the fairy tale inventions of Wieland, Musäus, Tieck, Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Andersen, or Mörike. Children were able to regard these pieces as naive fairy-tale narratives, while adult readers participated in the subtle and ironic play of the sometimes humorous, sometimes sentimental stories. The child reader hardly noticed this second level of meaning, which was made possible by the restraint imposed on the ironic play, by its remaining in the background. The ironic fairy-tale creations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be regarded as a model of a children's literature that also includes the adult as reader.

The communications situation of children's literature, to summarize, consists of the interweaving of at least two and at most four different literary communication processes. This results in the multiplicity of inscribed reader's roles in the literary text. Thus in the extreme case, four implied readers can be discerned: the adult as a mediator and as a reader, the child or the young adult as a sanctioned, exemplary reader and as a nonsanctioned, secret reader.

What results from this for the criticism of children's and young adult literature? Let us ask first where criticism itself is to be located within the children's literature communication situation. The process of determination is relatively easy for criticism that is an immediate part of the work of transmission and that organizes itself according to different realms of transmission (public and denominational libraries and book trade, preschool, school, and extracurricular realms, etc.). The addressees of this criticism are generally the mediators. Its object is children's or young adult literature considered from the perspective of its usefulness for that particular realm of children's or young adults' reading. According to its function, it is to be classified as a kind of premediation. Only in cases where it addresses children or youthful readers directly with reading recommendations does it represent an act of mediation itself. It becomes clear that criticism that serves the practical work of transmission is part of the communication process of children's literature as a form of premediation, but that it does not thematize this process in all of its aspects. It does not suffice as medium of mutual communication for those participating in the communication process of children's literature. Therefore, a further kind of criticism becomes necessary. Let us call it an independent criticism of children's and young adult literature. I would like to describe two quite distinctive functions of such an independent  criticism of children's and young adult literature: it ought to challenge the makers and mediators of children's and young adult literature and provoke them to permanent self-reflection; and it has the task of drawing attention to children's and young adults' literature among the general cultural public.

Zohar Shavit's reference to the "unofficial addressee" of children's and young adult literature is accurate. Up to the present, there has been virtually no public discussion in Germany of the activity, power, and influence of the mediating groups and authorities of children's literature, which generally act outside of public literary life. At the same time, these groups and authorities decide not only the success or failure of individual works, they profoundly influence the development of children's and young adult literature itself. This silence needs to be broken by a free criticism of children's and young adult literature. It would be the task of such criticism to reveal where children's and young adult literature seeks to please its mediators, at the cost of damage to itself and without recognizable gain for its young readers, that is, where it seeks to correspond to the mediators' preferences and submits to their decrees. There is probably no other literary realm in which mediating groups have such power. Nowhere else are these groups so removed from public control, which they need all the more, in the form of a hearty corrective: this role can only be fulfilled by an independent criticism of children's and young adult literature.

In addition to this internal function within the realm of children's and young adult literature, independent criticism has a task that is directed outward. More and more picture books, children's books, and young adult books address the adult as reader and present a second, subtle level of meaning, thus demonstrating that they belong to literature in general. It appears plausible to me that this second level is ignored by criticism serving the practical work of mediation, because only the appropriate value as children's or young adult reading is of interest here. There is little prospect in waiting for general literary criticism to discover this subtle and hidden side of children's and young adult literature, in light of the barriers erected in the world of literature. Thus, independent children's and young adult literature criticism receives another task: to alert the general public to children's and young adult books that have a remarkable adult literary side. Beyond this, it should seek to increase the cultural interest of adults not only in multilayered children's and young adult books, but in children's and young adult literature generally. This should happen through the promotion of public participation in and recognition of artistically superior achievements in this field.

In the process of communication in children's literature, an independent  criticism of children's and young adult literature is difficult to locate. It has several genuine functions, but seen in total context, no fixed ones, but rather, so to speak, a free-floating function. It should keep the process of communication in children's literature in all its aspects in view, and be able to judge it from all perspectives, not least from that of the secret child or adolescent reader. Independent criticism is not absolutely necessary for the simple functioning of the system of children's literature; but if reflection on children's and young adult literature is to take place in the public realm, it is indispensable. Its greatest difficulty is generally known: it hardly has a forum for publication.

III

I now wish to explain what I mean by the "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult literature. Here I would refer back to the questions that move the various followers of Wolgast, which I mentioned in the beginning. The following characteristics arouse their indignation: the exclusion of children's and young adult literature from literature in general; its independence as a separate branch of literature, or, to express it polemically, its ghettoization; further, its relatedness to its addressees or its target-group-oriented calculatedness; finally, its functional, purposeful character, its orientation toward use. This is contrasted with a concept of literature in which the following traits appear: a free and open horizon of assignment (the literature is not to be relegated to one realm once and for all); determination only by the intention of the author; and finally, freedom in how it is to be used, or aesthetic autonomy. The intellectual origins of the conception employed here plainly stem from an idealistic aesthetic. As much as it might serve to describe and analyze individual phenomena in the history of children's and young adult literature, the value judgments inextricably linked with such an aesthetic are problematic. These value judgments have become problematic because their foundation, the idealistic concept of autonomous art, has long ago lost its normative power and validity. Criticism of children's and young adult literature needs a new concept of literature, namely a concept that has freed itself from idealistic premises and is not fixed on the aesthetics of autonomy.

This implies a decisive change of literary theoretical framework, a search for a new set of analytical instruments free of previous value judgments and thus able to open the way to the establishment of new values. Modern literary and cultural studies offer well-established avenues for the criticism of children's and young adult literature. Zohar Shavit has suggested, in her already-mentioned study, describing the relationship of children's and young adult literature to literature in general with the tools of the theory, developed by the Israeli semiotician Itamar Even-Zohar, of a literary polysystem. This theory describes literary reading as composed of different subsystems that are organized hierarchically according to their proximity to the center or, as the case may be, the peripheries. The hierarchy of the subsystems concretely manifests itself in their differing cultural status or cultural respect, where the latter is in turn decisive for the "radiating power" of a subsystem, or its guiding function, its normative influence on other subsystems. The literary polysystem is seen as being in constant movement or relayering, a process in which each individual subsystem has two possible directions of movement: one toward the center, the other toward the periphery. Zohar Shavit offers a convincing description of these books that are simultaneously addressed to adult and child readers: these books assume an "ambivalent status," that is, they belong at one and the same time to two different subsystems, in each of which they play a different role. The reason for the possibility of this double game is to be found, incidentally, in the ambivalence of the aesthetic sign itself, one of its essential characteristics.

Zohar Shavit disregards one feature that I consider decisive. Children's and young adult literature on the one hand, literature in general on the other are not merely two subsystems that are differently positioned in the literary polysystem and correspondingly different in their prestige and guiding function. Rather, we have two qualitatively different systems in which the production, transmission and reception, or use, of literary texts takes place according to different rules; these are two different ways of dealing with literature, two different modes of textual use. Criticism of children's and young adult literature certainly had this qualitative difference in mind when it devalued children's and young adult literature as purpose-oriented literature or literature for use, in contrast to "high" or autonomous literature, but these categories unmistakably contained obsolete, idealistic value judgments.

Here it seems helpful to me to take recourse to the structuralist folklore theory that goes back to Roman Jakobson and that is actually a theory of the opposition of "folklore" and "literature." These terms are used here in a very specific sense: "folklore" and "literature" designate two differently functioning cultural transmission types in the framework of this structuralist theory, two specific modes of text mediation and use. Both modes of textual use received their differing form through the medium in which they first found their expression: "folklore" designates the method of transmission of oral cultures, "literature" that of written cultures. The assignment of functional type and medium is not fixed and unequivocal,  however. Recent folklore theory has been able to reveal that folkloric ways of dealing with poetic transmission sometimes not only reach into written cultures from time to time, but permanently fill and shape a not insignificant part of literary life in these cultures. Aleida Assmann calls this permanent literary sector of written cultures "written folklore."

With the discovery of the textual genre called "written folklore," in my view a decisive step has been taken for children's and young adult literature theory. With this term, the transmission forms and methods of use of children's and young adult literary texts are named. This becomes evident already on the historic level: since the late Middle Ages, written folklore has developed in two narrow realms of written culture. On the one hand, there are didactic religious literature, homiletic collections, and instructional literature. Later we also had the moral and didactic literature of courtesy and conduct books. On the other hand, we have burlesque tale collections, popular literature, and so forth, in the realm of frivolous and entertaining literature. Taken together, this is a sort of literature of compilations, in which the author's name counts for little or nothing. Precisely in these regions, children's and young adult literature emerged in the course of the centuries. It took over, in the process, so I would like to claim, the reigning methods of textual use and has reproduced them up to the present.

I would like to indicate some of these functioning mechanisms of children's and young adult literature that demonstrate their status as written folklore:

• Children's and young adult literature is often copied from other sources, and this more or less openly. New works are "compiled" from previous ones through selective excerpting and recombination.
• Literature that survives over longer periods of time is by no means sacrosanct in its wording. Rather, its wording is continually adjusted to topical requirements through so-called "adaptations" (variability of phrasing or wording).
• A theme or a story is endowed with durability by being taken up anew repeatedly and presented in novel form. In this case, the new form replaces the old one. (One exception is the relatively small number of children's and young adult classics.)
• Children's and young adult literature is user- and reader-oriented. Practical usefulness for living, entertainment value, and suspense or such effects are what matters.

I by no means condemn the things I have just recounted about children's and young adult literature. On the contrary. All of these are functional mechanisms of an entirely predictable and rule-bound variety. They conform in any case to the mode of textual use "written folklore," to which I believe a large part of children's and young adult literature belongs, though never completely, and to a noticeably lesser degree in recent times. Increasingly, children's and adult literature functions according to other mechanisms and practices other forms of interaction with texts.

These are the forms of interaction of the functional type we call "literature." This transition from parts of children's and young adult literature to another functional type we call "literature" is what I have in mind when I talk about the "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult literature. Let us inquire into the rules that regulate the functional type called "literature," keeping in mind that these are only brief suggestions:

• Excerpting is no longer an appropriate means of dealing with the text. The text is a complete and closed whole: it possesses the character of a "work." It is to be received as a "work," and not as a quarry for compilers.
• The actual wording is sacred; so-called "versions" or "editions" are taboo.
• The author now appears as the originator of the work. The text is considered to be his or her individual statement.
• The text survives as a unique product. The story of Werther's Sufferings is not retold anew; whoever wishes to read it will reach for the one original text, which is Goethe's.
• Literature is separated from practical living. It no longer has a "place in life." The reader, to express it metaphorically, moves toward literature. Literature orients itself by literature instead of by the reader.

It is necessary at this point to remind ourselves of the platonic nature of such structural oppositions. In reality, there are countless gradations between these extremes. It must also be realized that this set of opposites does not comprise the entire field of children's and young adult literature. As in literature in general, since the eighteenth century and more extensively in the nineteenth century, trivial forms of literature have been spreading in this area as well. This third mode of textual use in literary [culture combines qualities of "written folklore," such as the principle of sequences of self-supplanting forms and the same themes and motifs, with those of "literature," as for example the separation from daily life. This last aspect is the reason why the consumption of trivial literature is linked to a more advanced age of the young recipient.

What is required, more or less, is the ability to treat the world of ordinary life and fictional worlds as two different dimensions of being. This ability, developmental psychology teaches us, is acquired relatively late. Thus, one can say that the opposition of "written folklore"-"literature" is supplanted with advancing age by that of "trivial literature"-"literature." The beginners' literature, by contrast, displays predominantly folkloristic ways of functioning. It is bound up with play and remains intertwined with the social life, family life, daily life: "literature for the many." It is very suitable for reading aloud and is theatrically interpretable.

These considerations of modes of textual use now have to be integrated into the theory of the literary polysystem. It is self-evident that the three "textual practices" described here enjoy differing cultural status. For the literary subsystems this means that their status also substantially depends on which of the modes of use happen to dominate in any particular case. Gains in status are to be achieved only through "increasing literariness," or through an approach to the mode of textual use we call "literature." For the center of the literary polysystem consists, perhaps more strongly in the German-speaking realm than elsewhere, of a purely literary sector of literature for adults, a sector that constitutes itself through the exclusion of trivial (or what American critics would call popular) literature. The low status of children's and young adult literature has thus, among other reasons, always been conditioned by the fact that folkloristic and popular literary textual practices have dominated within it.

What are the results of all this for criticism? Literary criticism is not merely intertwined with the cultural hierarchies of its day, it is itself essentially the medium for the realization of such status assignments. It is also not surprising that criticism tends to orient its standards of judgment according to the rules of the most highly valued textual practice. This means that texts that are conceived for a less-respected employment can hardly expect critical acceptance to begin with. Such texts appear inferior in value as a bloc, so to speak. Literary criticism that is firmly based in the center of the system can hardly discern that there are successful and unsuccessful works to be found in all textual practices. Criticism here displays itself as denigration of everything nonliterary and thus as an effort to secure the position of the "literature" occupying the center of the ] literary polysystem. Literary criticism can only make reference to works that have been produced for or integrated into that mode of textual use. To accuse a compiler of merely culling and copying is absurd; he or she will respond that just this is his or her real business. Literary criticism in the limited sense referred to here asks about the place of a work in literature. It inquires into the relationship of the work to prior works in the same genre. Does the work adhere to traditions of form or does it violate them? Is it aesthetically innovative, perhaps even revolutionary, or is it conventional? Does it open up new possibilities of analysis of reality for literature? Does it create new linguistic or stylistic procedures? Where does it reveal originality? Where does it take its life from extraneous ideas? Where does it prove itself to be unmistakable and unique? The rules of the game of literary criticism become sufficiently clear in this sequence of questions. It also becomes evident what is excluded in this game. No question here aims at the recipient and his or her needs or at the utility value of the text, of whatever kind that utility might be. These considerations simply don't belong to the game called "literary criticism."

Literary criticism thus defined can only play a limited role in the criticism of children's and young adult literature. It can make meaningful reference only to children's and young adult books that somehow reveal their literary claims or that convey that a conscious or perhaps only subliminal concern with an achieved literary aesthetic standard has entered into its creation. This is by no means thinkable only with multilayered children's books. Even books with only one official addressee can demonstrate a literary character in the sense defined here. In the case of such books, the concern of criticism relates exclusively to the established standards of children's and young adult literature, which may deviate from those of literature in general. This involves children's and young adult books that strive for aesthetic originality within the limited horizon of children's and young adult literature. In terms of literature in general, they are, as a rule, conventional. Multilayered children's and young adult books that aim at adults as well, namely as readers, as second official addressees, have, on the other hand, also to measure themselves by the general literary niveau and its customary standards. They thus also participate in the general cultural literary game, not only the limited one.

When a children's or young adult book does not display literary claims, literary criticism reaches into the void: it simply appears misguided. Literary criticism does not have the instruments with which popular literature and written folklore should be assessed. I will limit myself in the following remarks to the textual practice of folklore that has continued to a significant, if not even unique, extent in the field of children's literature  and which is to be defended against any denigration by a forced "literary" criticism, even more than the textual practice of popular literature. The issue is to command a halt to the universalizing urge of the "literary" and to mount a determined defense of children's literature as folkloric textual practice. I am consciously not saying "utilitarian literature" because this phrase contains the entire idealistic contempt for this literature. Yet folklore, for many, means nothing other than a kind of literature for use. More than the latter, however, the concept of folklore keeps the memory of the diversity and colorfulness of a user's literature that has only too often been reduced to the stubbornly didactic, an educational drumming, which has justly garnered a bad reputation for this stupidity. I would like at this stage to advocate emphatically children's literature as folkloristic practice. By this I mean children's and young adult books that are diversely useful, rich in ideas, practical, and reader-proximate. That such books should in addition have literary claims is of secondary importance to begin with. If they reveal claims to literary quality, they are not by any means elevated to a higher status by this, and most certainly they do not become better children's and young adult books because of it. Often, the reverse is the case. They merely participate additionally then in a second cultural game, namely that of "literature." My plea for a children's literature employed folkloristically by no means excludes the defense of a literary criticism of children's and young adult literature. It is in fact necessary, if only because the number of children's and young adult books with literary claims has risen considerably in the last few decades. Children's and young adult literature has thus undergone a notable "increasing literariness." Children's and young adult books with literary claims, even more than the multilayered ones, enjoy greater cultural respect. This has consequences for children's and young adult literature as a whole: it gains cultural prestige. As desirable as this may be, it is worth reminding ourselves that the ruling cultural hierarchies within the literary polysystem are one-sidedly "literary."

Literary criticism of children's and young adult books in particular needs to remind itself again and again that "folklore" and "literature" constitute two separate cultural practices with texts, each with its own advantages and attractive features. Neither is to be regarded as inferior to the other. To remain fair, literary criticism of children's and young adult books must remain especially aware of its limits.

We must finally also be clear about the fact that, of all the branches of criticism, criticism of children's and young adult literature is the most distant from actual practice. This is so to the degree that its judgments are only of minimal relevance to an assessment of the appropriateness and [ usefulness of particular works as children's or young adults' reading. Criticism is of little immediate practical use to the mediators of children's and young adult literature. This gives me the opportunity, finally, to point to a problematic aspect of the "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult literature. Other literary subsystems such as women's literature or minority literatures generally display a comparable subdivision into folkloristic or use-oriented, trivial and "literary" sectors. These sectors can be weighted quite differently in individual cases. This division corresponds to the reading practices of the addressees. There are groups that incorporate the texts into their daily lives and make use of them, others that consume the texts in series, and others who pursue reading with literary ambitions. In the realm of children's and young adult literature the situation of the "official" reading audience is different. The increase of literariness that has taken place here to a not inconsiderable degree has, according to my thesis, no corresponding echo among children and young adults as readers. Readers with literary aspirations, readers, to put it differently, who enter into the rules of the cultural game called "literature," tend to remain the exception here. As receptive as they are to the poetic experience from their earliest years onward, child recipients remain cognitively incapable of access to the cultural game called "literature" for a long time, and for young people it possesses almost no attraction. As much as its rules are inculcated in literary education in school, extracurricular reading behavior is hardly determined by it. The "increasing literariness" of children's and young adult books thus passes by its official addressees, so to speak, which is why it is simply rejected as a misguided development by many critics and mediators.

One truly has to ask oneself what the significance of this increasing literariness of children's and young adult literature is. The most obvious answer is that it provides children's and young adult literature with cultural respect that it would never achieve as purely useful and popular literature. The status of particular realms of literary culture is measured, as it happens, not by their usefulness to the users but by the degree of their literariness. And cultural image is a factor of cultural politics that is not to be underestimated, not even by children's and young adult literature. Whoever is uncomfortable with this implication of "literariness" can consider a further one. The "growing literariness" of children's and young adult literature can be meaningful in view of its "unofficial" addressee, namely adults taking part in its production, distribution, and mediation--adults for whom the cultural game called "literature" is, at least in part, more intriguing. This may be an egotistical reflection, but let us be honest: it is easier for us as adult critics of children's literature to devote ourselves to those books that have literary ambitions, that delight in change, and that are continually interesting in new ways. For children and young adults as recipients this is not so decisive, because after all they--unlike us!--only remain in this region for a relatively short while. We, on the other hand, have to worry about not getting stuck in routines. To the child, almost every children's book is new and fresh, but not for the mediator; yet both ought to find equal cause for enthusiasm. The "growing literariness" of children's and young adult literature seems to me to offer a solution to this contradiction. Let us cease representing this "process" as being primarily or exclusively in the interest of the child or the young adult recipient. It is not, or only in very small measure, in the interest of the official addressee, but it is still meaningful. For criticism this means that literary claims and child- or young-adult-suited usefulness do not amount to the same thing. The one does not automatically imply the other. Both, rather, belong to different cultural games, and wherever they fortunately meet in one work, we have, not a higher unity, but simply a happy coincidence.

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Look at connective on this website for "Instructor's notes - Ewers" this will help you clarify the aesthetic issues in children's literature.