11 Re-memorying: A New Phenomenological Methodology in Children’s Literature Studies

Abstract

This chapter starts from the premise that the act of reading a children's book is not confined to childhood, but is a process embedded in time that can be active at different points across a lifespan. In light of this suggestion, it is possible to turn to adult memory as a viable source of knowledge about the lifelong reading acts that start with childhood books. In this chapter I will introduce an interpretative phenomenological method of enquiry that acknowledges the lived experience of childhood reading as a continuum, not ending with an initial textual encounter but enduring as the reader ages. Common aspects of this experience can be uncovered through what I call 're-memory work' with adult rememberers and rereaders. In the following, I shall explain this approach and demonstrate how it can add a new dimension to children's literature studies, enhancing insights already provided by researchers working directly with young readers (for example, Wolf and Heath 1992, Lowe 2006, Maynard et al 2007).The prevailing sense for many children's literature critics has been that, for grown-ups, childhood reading is an inaccessible realm of experience, located in the past, in the cultural unconscious, or in the adult imagination (Tucker 1981, Lesnik-Oberstein 2004, Nodelman 2008. The methodology laid out in this chapter acknowledges the reconstructive power of memories of the past, but aims to refine the idea that early reading is lost forever and instead offer a way of accessing early encounters with texts. I propose that 're-memorying'and the resulting dialogue between later and earlier reading selves that emerges from itaddresses important questions: what makes books read in childhood meaningful? Can the divide between child and adult reading selves be bridged? And how is the category of children's literature expanded and enriched by the on-going life of texts in memory? To establish this method I bring together two underpinning assumptions: the centrality of the lifespan and reading as diachronic process. From these foundations my discussion will turn to methodology and will outline the basis for re-memory work in interpretative phenomenology, which recognises that individuals understand the world around them through their subjective, sensed experiences. This approach takes as its philosophical grounding the work of Edmund Husserl and his student, Roman Ingarden, who argued that awareness is an intentional state -