CALL FOR PAPERS 2/2022
On the margins of creativity? Creators of adult culture – occasionally for children and young adults
In the upcoming issue of “Childhood: Literature and Culture,” we would like to take a closer look at the cultural texts of authors who usually targeted or target their works at adults, but occasionally addressed children and adolescent audiences. We are interested in various creative fields: literature, theater, visual arts, film, music, etc. Both in the history of culture and in recent years, there are many such cases. Literary works – prose and poetry – for young readers were created by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, Leszek Kołakowski, Agnieszka Osiecka, and Olga Tokarczuk. Agnieszka Holland, Martin Scorsese, Spike Jonze, and Guillermo del Toro, for years associated exclusively with productions for adult audiences, have directed films for children and young people. Czesław Mozil has released an album of songs for children, and Dorota Miśkiewicz together with the Kwadrofonik music group – a record featuring texts by Julian Tuwim to which Witold Lutosławski composed music. Krzysztof Penderecki created a radio opera for children (to a libretto by Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina), and the Polish Royal Opera undertook the project Let’s Make an Opera! by Benjamin Britten that involved children in creative activities. Piotr Ratajczak directed theater performances based on the novels of Adam Bahdaj, Piotr Cieplak – staging of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories for Children, Agnieszka Glińska – theatrical adaptations of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and The Witches by Roald Dahl. Mikołaj Mikołajczyk did the choreography for a dance performance for young viewers. Salvador Dali, Yayoi Kusama, and Ralph Steadman illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and painters and sculptors of the famous German art school Staatliches Bauhaus created toys... Examples of this sort could be multiplied.
What position do such works occupy in general culture? Do they reflect artistic tendencies and cultural phenomena characteristic of the culture of a particular period and place? How could they be considered in the context of the major work of individual writers, directors, composers...? Almost half a century ago, Marilyn Apseloff (1973) pointed out that the texts of children’s literature created by authors who write for adults on a daily basis are most often extremely personal works, created for children known to the writers; could this hypothesis also be applied to authors from other cultural fields? And would it be confirmed in the market reality of the 21st century?
Both scholarly discourse and academic customs very often, or perhaps even usually, make a sharp distinction between culture ‘for adults’ and that ‘for children and young people.’ This is evidenced by separate scholarly publications and conferences as well as university courses. Rarely are the two cultural systems considered together. It is not a coincidence that we use the concept of a system here; as Itamar Even-Zohar (1979) puts it, system is “very rarely a uni-system but is, necessarily, a polysystem – a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent.” This is how we understand the cultural systems within which we distinguish between the system of adult culture and the system of children’s culture. The systems described by Even-Zohar establish a hierarchy and they often compete with each other – and this is how children’s culture is usually perceived, that is, in relation to adult culture. However, the theory of polysystems allows us to look at the system of children’s culture and the system of adult culture as phenomena with an open structure bound by complex networks of relations. As Even-Zohar points out (although he devotes his research to other fields),“literature for children is not considered a phenomenon sui generis, but is related to literature for adults [...]”.
From this perspective, the position in the cultural polysystem of works addressed to children or young people, but created by authors associated with adult production, seems interesting. Firstly, because of their nature, these texts are located somewhere between the system of adult and that of children’s culture; they function alongside texts written originally for adults, but somehow appropriated by children’s literature, simplified versions of the classics, but also young adult novels – often read by adults too. Secondly, since the system of adult culture is usually placed higher in the hierarchy, adult creators aiming their works at young people potentially contribute to the migration of elements of children’s culture towards the center of the entire polysystem, also understood as the book market (and not only the one connected with books).
It is worth noting that these texts do not receive much attention and are rarely discussed in academic studies, which may indicate that they occupy a peripheral place in the cultural polysystem. The theory of polysystems raises questions, inter alia, about why such a transfer takes places between systems and between their center and periphery, and what forms it takes in individual cases. Therefore, we would like to reflect on these issues in the context of texts that belong to the children’s culture system, but are created by authors who undoubtedly belong to the adult culture system.
We are also interested in the impact processes derived from the discourse or ideology of official culture, such as content selection, distribution, canonization, manipulation, etc., have on the nature or causes of transfers between the systems of adult and children’s culture. It is difficult not to take these into consideration, especially when it comes to children’s cultural products that operate within a centralized educational system.
We also invite you to submit texts unrelated to the issue’s subject matter to our Varia and Review Articles sections.
Articles submission deadline: 30.06.2022 r.
Even Zohar, I. (1979). Polysystem theory. Poetics Today, 1, 1/2, pp. 287-310. https://doi.org/10.2307/1772051.
Apseloff, M. (1973). Children’s books by famous writers for adults. Children’s Literature, 2, 130–138. https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.0.0231.
