By Dr Xiaoyu Hou
Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Xiaoyu Hou
CIRCL PhD student Xiaoyu Hou passed her viva on 22-07-2024 with her PhD thesis on ‘‘It Can Point to the World’: A Close Analysis of Representation in (Children’s) Literary Criticism, Psychology and Pedagogy’. Supervisor: Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, External Examiner Professor Dr Stefan Neubert of the University of Cologne (Germany), Internal Examiner Dr Neil Cocks. Many congratulations, Xiaoyu!
Abstract of thesis
In line with theoretical approaches proposed by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology and ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (1976; 2002), Jacqueline Rose in The Case of Peter Pan (1984), Dana Erin Phillips in ‘Ecocriticism, Literary Theory and the Truth of Ecology’ (1999) and Donna Jeanne Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), my thesis analyses and critiques the claims of ‘representation’ made in the discourses of (children’s) literature and its criticism, psychology and pedagogy in interdisciplinary research. The engagement with the question of what it means to ‘represent’ derives from seeing that the child and the animal are discussed differently but that they are all claimed to be able to be retrieved self-evidently as such, thus leading me to think further about what are the investments and implications of knowing the child and the animal on the grounds of, for example, experience, memory, observation, and testing. This includes considering questions of whether a child can comprehend irony concerning ‘extinct’ birds in the picture book Aviary Wonders Inc. by Kate Samworth (2014), how the child is positioned in A Guide to Eco-Anxiety by Anouchka Grose (2020), in what way literature should be read and taught in the context of ‘climate change’ in Roman Bartosch’s Literature, Pedagogy and Climate Change (2019), the implications of constituting ‘a psychological individual’ in Julian Henriques and others’ Changing the Subject (1984) and ideas of gender and childhood in Rhiannon Grant and Ruth Wainman’s ‘Representation in Plastic and Marketing’ (2017). The thesis does not aim to provide answers to how to judge and recognize ‘true’ representations, as that would align it with what it is trying to question. Instead, the thesis reads in what perspectives the represented or the representer are constructed as the ‘represented’ or the ‘representer’ and what is at stake in such claims.