[ecrea] CFP The Child’s Voice, the Child’s Gaze - Université Bordeaux Montaigne

The Child's Voice, the Child's Gaze



27-28 March 2015

Université Bordeaux Montaigne



Organizers : Stéphanie Benson, Sarah Dufaure, Stéphanie Durrans and 
Lhorine François

As part of the project entitled "Powers in Minor Mode", the research 
group CLIMAS is holding a two-day symposium on the place and the status 
of children in literature, cinema and the visual arts. The notion of 
minor is not here to be seen as a derogatory term indicating the lower 
rank in a binary hierarchical structure, but as a dynamic space of 
empowerment bringing new vitality to the notion of major. Although the 
very concept of major usually centres around the overbearing nature of 
an established model demanding conformity, or the enduring presence of a 
prescriptive power structure dictating norms and rules, we shall explore 
the ways in which the notion of minor may also contribute to the 
deconstruction of the prevailing system, to its collapse due to internal 
contradictions. In this respect the minor can be seen as a potentially 
permanent dynamic process that does not seek to access the field of the 
major and establish any kind of comfortable status therein, but on the 
contrary explores the active power concealed in margins, asides, retreats.


The Latin origins of the term (infantem / infans) indicate the inability 
to speak, give a name to those who are silenced, who have no say. The 
voice of the child has, however, taken over a whole field of literature 
bringing some critics to belittle the phenomenon as a passing fad. 
Actually, the phenomenon is much deeper than the commercial trend to 
which it is commonly associated, and often an ideological and aesthetic 
project is at work, projects that this symposium proposes to look into. 
Whether through Walt Whitman, who resorts to a child's voice at the 
beginning of Leaves of Grass in order to lay the groundwork for his 
philosophical and poetic reflexion, or Emerson who develops in his 
essays "Nature" and "The Poet" the idea that children are natural poets 
and that poets should seek the child dormant inside them, this 
perspective potentially undermines the major modes of perception that 
have frozen into rigidity and inflexibility through constantly needing 
to label, pigeon-hole and discriminate the world around them. On the 
contrary, the child creates his or her own rules, transcends prohibition 
and gazes on the world with a creative and refreshing innocence near to 
original creativity that has not been tainted by the disillusions of 
experience. The child, gifted with the almost god-like ability to create 
his own alternative world, becomes a source for propositions and 
revolutions in the poetic world. More recently, many writers have also 
used the voice and gaze of a child in order to express fear, anguish and 
pain in the face of death, for instance. For psychoanalysts, recovering 
one's infant ego may also prove necessary during therapy in order to 
understand and overcome fear and suffering or to counteract a 
pathological fear of death.

But how can the writer represent the world of childhood once it has been 
left behind, once experience has erased the innocence of the child's 
gaze? Is this gaze not always already mediated through that of the 
adult? A number of writers, aware of the challenge offered by the simple 
choice of a child as "center of consciousness," have tackled this 
aesthetic question (Henry James in What Maisie Knew). The world seen 
through a child's eyes is simplistic in a way that could appear 
incompatible with the conception of literature as a noble art. This 
symposium also addresses the tension between these high and low modes of 
writing: the ways in which the minor mode of children's stories informs 
the major art of writing. Papers should also examine the stylistic 
strategies employed by writers to represent the word and world of the 
child. Are specific figures of speech or literary devices more likely to 
convey the child's gaze (parataxis vs. hypotaxis, metaphor vs. metonymy, 
asyndeton vs. polysyndeton, etc.)? Are some writing strategies more 
appropriate for giving voice to a child's perception of the world 
(repetition indicating limited vocabulary revolving in circles, figures 
of transfer or displacement such as hypallage deriving from the child's 
encompassing approach to his or her environment)?


The symposium will also try to analyze the pitfalls of the minor mode. 
The notion of minor may sometimes appear as a convenient opportunity, an 
aesthetic or political niche in which to position oneself deliberately 
as a strategy to gain access to dominant modes of power and 
representation. By smoothing the child as a category to be opposed to 
the adult, the risk is that of simplifying a child's subversive powers 
and alternative gaze on life, of stifling the creativity and diversity 
of his vision. How can we avoid framing the child in the homogenous 
category of the minor?


15-20 line paper abstracts are to be sent to Stéphanie Durrans 
((stephanie.durrans /at/ u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr)) by September, 30 2014. A 
selection of peer-reviewed articles will be published in 2017 along with 
other papers from an additional symposium to be held in 2016 on the 
relationship between children's literature and "noble" literature.





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