Cerebral Pleasures; Children's Literature and Philosophy

Cerebral Pleasures brings together two fields concerned with the edification of children’s minds: childhood studies as it occurs in the English department and a number of interdisciplinary programs; and a minor movement in academic philosophy whose proponents argue for the philosophical education of children. While childhood studies tends toward a bleak view of children’s literature and culture, often implying that it has a potentially deadening effect on young people’s powers of critical thinking, I contend that a category of children’s book, which presents philosophical material and introduces its readers to cerebral pleasures, has neglected educative value. Hence, I argue against stock cynicism about juvenile literature, and examine a number of disciplinary premises that have led to a stalemate in the field, including: the polarization of essentialist and constructivist approaches to childhood, an oversimplified understanding of the way texts manifest ideology, and the injunction to restrict criticism to matters of representation. I explore the diverse responses to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to illustrate some of trends in, and difficulties of, literary interpretation, noting that a great range of contradictory readings of the Alices are often simultaneously accurate, but proceed from different interpretive assumptions. At the same time, I am concerned with another critical commonplace in childhood studies: that children’s books are either instructive or entertaining, and that “pleasure” and “pedagogy” are opposites. To the contrary, philosophical children’s literature demonstrates that these faculties can not only occur simultaneously, but that they can be intimates: such that it is sometimes difficult (and invariably unnecessary) to differentiate learning and play. In my sampling of texts, I sacrifice breadth for depth, analyzing the Alices, L. Frank Baum’s portion of the Oz series, and Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round for their philosophical content, and exploring the ways in which the books attempt to entice readers to participate in what Lewis Carroll called “mental recreation.