Figuring the child : the politics of the child subject in contemporary literary fiction

This thesis explores the ethics and representational politics of the child in four contemporary literary texts: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (2008); Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). At the heart of the thesis is an interest in the ways that dominant discourses of childhood produce and construct an abstract and universalised figure of the child, which is rehearsed and repeated across myriad social spaces. Apparitions of this child subject – and resistances to it – are explored across the four novels under investigation. Given its interest in the social and cultural dimensions of the child subject, this thesis is necessarily interdisciplinary. It draws on theoretical and analytical perspectives from cultural studies, literature, education, childhood studies, critical psychology, and sociology to make sense of the ways in which discourses of childhood circulate powerfully in the construction of childhood subjectivities. In particular, the thesis makes use of feminist poststructuralist understandings of the subject as constituted through discourse, and looks to issues of representation and narration, voice and testimony, violence and power, and sexuality and gender to explore the ways in which children are constituted as ethical and agentic subjects. Further, it draws on postcolonial theories of whiteness to examine how the positioning of the non-white child as Other to the universal or normative child works to disempower and exclude diverse performances of childhood. The use of fiction as a site of analysis rests on an understanding of the reading of fiction as a political act of social and cultural critique. Narratives are read as spaces in which dominant discourses can be exposed, challenged, or upheld. Thus, the crux of the thesis’ exploration of the child subject across the four texts is the idea that narrative, as a generative space, has the potential to engender new epistemologies and ontologies