Reading Year

So, under the advice of my committee chair, I have begun reading for comps before my List Meeting. She advised me that I need more time working with other critics in the field in which I wish to labor. I've narrowed my area of focus to fictionalized autobiographical accounts of childhood from the Victorian era. It might be just a titch too narrow, but the list is broadening the possibilities very well. Childhood is a big deal in Victorian studies, because it's the point where Romanticism and Romantic Naturalism meet Freudian psychoanalysis. Child psychology becomes a thing, and the political pressures of Empire bring extensive legislation to bear on the problem of education (Enter Horkheimer and Adorno). Unfortunately, most of the work being done now is historical, contextual, and material, rather than interpretational.

No one professor on my committee can quite seem to care enough to grasp about all the things I'm NOT interested in (children's literature, for one), which is great, because it means I get to spend a big chunk of Summer reading The Red Fairy Book. For the fifth or sixth time. I'm also not interested in American children's literature, but that's a matter of taste, and will clearly be overridden by somebody. What really interests me that I haven't yet been able to wrestle with is autobiographical theory. I want to know about why we write about ourselves AS FICTION. I'm talking about something that is more audience-oriented than narrativizing. I am familiar enough with post-Freudian psychoanalysis to understand processing trauma by telling stories, but why would we tell our story as fiction? What do we do to it?

The truly compelling reason to look at the violence we do to our own memories is that what we do to our own past we also inflict on the children around us, and children have no voice. They're not yet fully articulate. They don't/can't narrate their own stories. The stories are always translated by an articulate, adult self. Wordsworth's emotion recollected in tranquility passes through a future filter that contributes, among other things, meter and form. So in my reading, I watch carefully for moments where children act like children - where a grown-up owns her/his own childishness - where a storyteller confesses that once, they threw a terrible tantrum, as if grown-ups have stopped doing such things and not merely translated them into ranting blogs.