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SUMMARY:The Case of Gulliver and Alice: the Impossibility of Children’s 
 Literature and the Posthuman. - Zoe Jaques\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20131121T170000Z
DTEND:20131121T183000Z
UID:TALK45821@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lucian Stephenson
DESCRIPTION:*Helene Hoyrup is no longer speaking at this event.*\n\nMy rec
 ent work has focused upon the potential of children’s literature to ask 
 us to reconsider the boundaries and definitions of humanity\, in a manner 
 that aligns with much posthuman theory. Children’s fiction animates and 
 gives voice to a host of imaginary\, impossible and real creatures\; by im
 agining “being” as operating beyond bodily or environmental constraint
 \, children’s fiction can thus intervene into debates about what it mean
 s to be human and offer ethical imaginings of a “posthuman” world. \n\
 nFor this paper\, however\, I will explore the difficulties of bringing th
 ese same concerns to young audience\, and in particular the ways by which 
 editors and critics have variously “reduced” the posthuman potential o
 f early children’s fantasy. I focus here on two “classic” texts that
  foreground\, address and challenge the emergence of posthuman concerns in
  fiction directed at young readers: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel
 s (1726) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (1865\, 1871). Although peppere
 d with a variety of extraordinary beings that continually challenge the au
 thority of their human protagonists\, both books have been adapted or crit
 ically read so as to limit the extent to which young readers are exposed t
 o blurred animal-human boundaries. This paper will argue that without the 
 respective editorial tinkering (in the case of Gulliver) or misguided crit
 ical focus on a moral-free “play” for child readers (in the case of Al
 ice - as if play is not radically subversive itself)\, the texts offer sop
 histicated interventions into debates about humanity’s relationship to o
 ther creatures and suggest that attempts to read or market them as “chil
 dren’s books” have either deliberately or subconsciously removed or ig
 nored their philosophical implications about being human. As such\, I read
  these texts to foreground the complex relationship between children’s f
 iction and posthuman philosophy that is central to my wider work. \n\n*Zoe
  Jaques* is a Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and a Bye-Fellow
  at Homerton College. She also teaches on the MPhil in Critical Approaches
  to Children’s Literature for the Faculty of Education at Cambridge. She
  recently complicated a co-authored book on Lewis Carroll’s Alice: A Pub
 lishing History (Ashgate\, 2013)\, and her monograph on Children’s Liter
 ature and the Posthuman will be published with Routledge next year. \n\n
LOCATION:Room Boulind 8 and 9\, Mary Allan Building\, Homerton College\, H
 ills Road\, Cambridge CB2 8PQ
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