Intergenerational solidarity in children's literature - Clémentine Beauvais

While this post magically appears on ABBA, I will be at this nice-sounding event in Cambridge:

Intergenerational solidarity: what a beautiful prospect. Older and younger, adult and child, teenager and elderly, baby, toddler and the middle-aged, all holding hands and helping each other achieve existential peace and absolute happiness.

Of course, that's not what often happens in children's literature, where adults tend to be repressive and didactic (or dead), teenagers are moody and hate their elders, babies stink and bite and are detested by toddlers, and old people are alternatively murderous or so devoted to their darling grandchildren that apparently nothing else in life interests them.

Vanessa Joosen, who is a keynote at the event, talks of the 'seesaw effect' of intergenerational relationships in children's literature: often, she says, positive representations of relationships between children and older people tend to occur at the detriment of representations of adults, who, squeezed in-between, are the nasty ones.

Can there ever be peace and mutual help across generations in children's literature?

Of course, you know there can be (perhaps you've written books in which those relationships are central!) and I'd be curious to hear your examples. As for myself, I'll be presenting a paper on what happens specifically when children's literature protagonists are allowed to grow old in children's literature. How do their relationships to other generations vary across the life course?

I'll give you a summary of the event next time!

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Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press. Her next novel, In Paris with You, will be out with Faber in June.

Reading Proofs - Clémentine Beauvais

I've just finished proofreading The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, which I'm coediting with Maria Nikolajeva. It's coming out later this year, and it's a pretty thick volume with 29 contributions by some of the best people in the field (including one who may be lurking around on this blog and wrote a brilliant chapter on counterfactual historical fiction. Guess who?)

our baby's cute little face 

Proofreading the mahoosive thing really took over my life in the past week. Proofs in French are called épreuves, which can also mean a chore, trial or ordeal, and it's really what they are. A lot of chocolate is required.

chocolate, coffee and red ink

Reading proofs is one of those activities that are associated to writing, but that are not really writing, and that are absolutely incompressible - you just can't speed them up, you have to go through them. Others include reading contracts, answering emails to plan school visits, all kinds of admin, etc. However, reading proofs has that particular texture, frustrating, mind-numbing and also, as Dianne Hofmeyr says, perversely satisfying, that sets it apart in my mind from everything else.

You have to adjust everything in your life in order to read proofs. Carve out three hours at a time, no distraction, no music, no phone winking at you from the corner of the desk. It will take however much time it needs to take, no less. That's weirdly stabilising. Somewhere in the world, a big pack of pages awaits, and it's got its own internal duration that doesn't care at all about your own clock-bound imperatives. In a world where you don't really take the time for anything, you suddenly have something forcibly taking your time.

You have to adjust your mind to read proofs. Reading line by line, with a ruler blocking the rest of the paragraph, you let your eyes drift robotically across each word, letter by letter, fighting the urge to process everything whole-word as you might usually do. Only then can you spot the mipslaced lteter, the verb ending that doesn't works, the the repeated particle, the sneaky apostrophes', the weird change of font for no reason, the word that missing.

Because of this insane amount of concentration on tiny units of language - the word, the letter, the punctuation mark - there's, episodically, moments of complete brainfreeze. Not sure anymore how 'children's literature' is spelled. Is it childrens literature. Childrens' literature. Chlidrens laterutiure. Can I even speak English anymore ? And you are taken back to childhood, when you would repeat your own name fifty times in front of the mirror and both name and face would gradually disappear into absolute nothingness.

At that stage, profound anxiety strikes. What am I doing with my life? How many people are actually going to read this? What would my 15-year-old self think?

You have to radically adjust what you consider to be existentially meaningful. It's impossible to proofread such a massive academic book without thinking often that these are hours of your life that you'll never get back.  To be clear, the chapters are brilliant, I promise. But for the proofreader there is no newness. You've already read the contributions many times, edited them at least twice on screen. You know that in the grand scheme of things, it absolutely doesn't matter if someone misspelled the name of Valdimir Propp. Yet when you catch that Valdimir, there's this strange endorphin rush, and even though it's such a minute, inconsequential thing, it gives meaning to the whole chase.

Your reward system gets completely mixed up. A week ago, for true joy to occur, you would have needed an email telling you gushingly about how wonderful they found such or such thing you did. Today, a missing comma in a reference list is all you need. What you are doing suddenly has meaning: you spotted that one of the entries in the bibliography isn't in correct alphabetical order.

You have just made the world a tiny bit more orderly.

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Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press.

School visits here and there - Clémentine Beauvais

I took part last week in a semi-academic, semi-professional conference, organised by the University of Lyon, on author visits in schools, and I thought I'd sum up my paper here.

The school visit by children's authors has never really been (as far as I know) theorised, even though there are plenty of practical texts on the matter, as well as many testimonies by authors, children and practitioners. One interesting thing about school visits from a theoretical perspective is what the norms and expectations surrounding the 'usual' author visit can tell us about perceptions of reading, book-consumption, the status of the author, or the space of the school in a given context.

My talk was about the 'typical' British school visit - a very weird format from a French perspective, just as the French format is very weird from a British perspective.

Here are the main differences between school visits normally in Britain and in France (I insist on 'normally': there are, of course, many exceptions in both countries, but there are norms in both countries, and they more or less coherently construct and frame the 'genre' of the school visit). So, normally:




I'm sure you can already see what each configuration tells us about the radically different ways in which author, reader, book and school are positioned in those two national and cultural contexts.

The author in Britain is placed in the position of an actor and a promoter: s/he generates most of the content of the visit and is in the centre of a spectacular situation in the etymological sense of the word:




Meanwhile, the author is France is very much in the position of an authority, whose secret knowledge has to be 'unlocked', for the whole hour, by the children's questions:


The reader is placed in a different situation, too, in each context.

In the British context, the reader is always also addressed as a consumer, or potential consumer, of the book, which is ready in the room somewhere to be bought; spatially as well as temporally, the school visit is oriented at least to some degree towards the book sale.

In France, conversely, the reader is always also addressed as a student of the book. Since selling anything in the school, or doing any kind of advertising is strictly forbidden in France, there is no space or time for the act of buying the book during the visit. Instead, the child reader must show that they have read and studied the book well, and the teachers' preparation in this respect is crucial.

This means, too, very different implications as to why the book is good, or what it is good for. The British school visit sets up the book as a product to be acquired for the pleasure of the child, should the child's choice be to acquire it after being convinced by the author visit.

In France, there's no such emphasis on either the child's choice, or indeed pleasure; it's the teacher whose choice it is to make the class study this book rather than another, with pedagogical considerations at stake (which doesn't mean that it's not pleasurable).

While this may seem a 'good' thing for the British school visit - and indeed, reading for pleasure is hugely valued in Britain in a way that it isn't in France - it also means that in Britain the book is very much positioned by the event of the school visit as a commercial product. And the pressure to buy it is strong for parents, which isn't unproblematic from a sociological perspective.

Finally, the space of the school is invested differently by the two types of author visit. In the British context, the author visit can be understood as partaking in the use of the school space as, on the one hand, a place of discovery, pleasure, fulfillment, creativity - values much more developed on this side of the Channel than in France. But, on the other hand, the author visit also partakes in the use of the school as a place where the values of consumerism are transmitted, in a more or less tangible manner, and cultural goods are treated as products almost like any others.

In France, the author visit is inscribed within the rather unitary use of the school as a space for learning, pedagogy and the glorification of a certain type of culture, chosen by established wardens of that culture: teachers.

I'll stop here (I'll probably write it up as an academic paper soon). It's worth mentioning that there are yet other models of school visits in the world; as another paper by French academic and author Bernard Friot showed, the German author visit generally consists of a long reading, followed by a Q&A, for instance - not a norm for either the Brits or the French.