Sexuality in Children's Literature From a Post-Modemism Viewpoint

Todayama对日本《小黑三宝》接受史的研究表明，在儿童文学中，“文学价值”的观念一直与教育“善”的观念密切相关。因此，渡边根据Todayama的观点，认为儿童文学一般不需要强调原创性的重要性，也不需要独立于过去的习俗。此外，好的儿童文学往往在形式和标准上积极地继承了过去丰富的习俗。文学理论已经批评了(明显非政治性的)“审美价值”的政治含义和“原创”观念的虚构性，并引起了很大争议。本研究选择研究“儿童文学”，作为对最近的批评进行更清晰和彻底的质疑的场所。正如彼得·伯杰所说，艺术品的原始审美价值的概念是在20世纪初高现代主义试图使小说成为“高艺术”的时候构建的。另一方面，在新历史主义的性别研究中，如伊莱恩·肖瓦尔特的研究表明，高度现代主义的制度化导致了文学的“表达”，这总是或多或少的“性”表达，最重要的是，文学的审美从根本上是性别结构的形成。川端康成和三浦指出，儿童文学从来不是脱离性的自由，从认识性的扩展概念的后酷儿的观点来看，儿童文学也是性别/性动态的形成，当儿童文学积极地复杂化了标准化的、常规的性学纪律时，它忍不住讽刺地揭示了颠覆性性别/性行为动态的真相。

Todayama's study on the receptional history of Little Black Sambo in Japan has shown that in children's literature, the idea of being "literary valuable" has always been deeply interrelated with that of being pedagogically "good."Watanabe then, in relation of Todayama's view, argues that children's literature generically needs not to emphasize the importance of originality, or being independent of the past convention. Furthermore, good children's literature more often than not positively manifests its being inheritor of the past rich convention in terms of forms and standards.Literary theories have already criticized, with much controversy, the political implications of (apparently non-political) "aesthetic values" and the fictionality of the idea of "originality." This study chose to study "children's literature" as the site where those recent criticisms are more clearly and radically interrogated.As Peter Burger argues, the concept of original aesthetic value of artworks is constructed when in the beginning of the twentieth century, high modernism tried to make novels "high art." On the other hand, it is demonstrated in new-historical gender studies, like Elaine Showalter's, that the institutionalization of high modernism results in rendering literature "expression," which is always more or less "sexual" ex-pression, and that above all, the aesthetic of literature is fundamentally a formation of gender configuration.Kawabata and Miura indicate that children's literature is never free form sexuality, seen from the post-queer viewpoint that recognizes the expanded idea of sexuality, that children's literature is also a formation of gender/sexuality dynamics and that when children's literature positively complicates with the standardized, conventional discipline of sexuality, it cannot help ironically revealing the truth of subversive gender/sexuality dynamics.