This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice.

Nous examinons les spécificités poétiques et éthiques de l'écriture contemporaine de l'enfance dans huit romans de Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro et Doris Lessing, mesurant son évolution depuis les origines romantiques de l'enfant littéraire. L'approche choisie combine la précision textuelle de la narratologie, le souci éthique des cultural studies, et l'apport conceptuel de la théorie critique (Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, et Levinas) sur le signe, l'éthique, et la représentation du corps, afin de mettre au jour l'aliénation poétique et sémiotique subie par l'enfant. En adaptant la méthodologie des études de genre, féministes et postcoloniales à la figure de l'enfant, on s'aperçoit que celui-ci a longtemps été construit comme un signe surdéterminé jusqu'au non-sens, les mécanismes du désir adulte mettant en péril sa constitution en sujet, et conditionnant la poétique des œuvres qui l'accueillent. La notion de trace (chez Derrida et Ricœur) est décisive pour conceptualiser ces formes de kidnapping poétique ; complétée par une analyse narratologique de la parole de l'enfant, des choix de focalisation et de genre de ces romans, elle souligne la nature toujours déjà faussée de l'écriture de l'enfant. Cette étude cartographie également le « sauvetage » paradoxal orchestré par le roman postmoderne à l'endroit de l'enfant-signe, souvent inversé en une visibilité ob-scène du corps, sôma paraissant seul pouvoir contrer sèma. La figure de l'enfant-poète rappelle quant à elle le poids pérenne des mythes romantiques : revisitée par les romanciers contemporains, elle leur permet de mieux poser la question (auto)critique d'une nouvelle éthique de la fiction. / This study examines the poetical and ethical aspects of writing childhood in eight contemporary British novels by Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Doris Lessing. It brings together the textual focus of narratology, the ethical concerns of cultural studies, and the conceptual work of French theory on signs, ethics, and the representation of the body (notably Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas) in order to identify the poetic and semiotic alienation undergone by the child figure. Adapting the tools of feminist, gender, and postcolonial studies to look at the figure of the child in the context of child-writing since its Romantic origins allows us to further stress the poet(h)ical difficulties of writing childhood. The child has indeed been repeatedly set up as a contradictory, self-cancelling sign, a repository of adult meaning and desire, which not only hinders character development but also affects the poetical structure of these works. The concept of trace as defined by Derrida and Ricœur is key to an understanding of this recurrent poetical kidnapping, as are narratological analyses of child-centred language, focalization, and genre, highlighting the often fallacious nature of representation. This study sets out to make sense of the paradoxical postmodern “rescue” of the child-turned-sign played out in contemporary fiction, which often amounts to an extreme foregrounding of its grotesque body, as sôma competes with sèma. The Romantic association of the child with the figure of the poet also comes into focus, as contemporary novelists revisit the myth to reflect (self)critically on a new ethics of fiction.

The "conflict thesis" that science and religious are inherently incompatible was by no means taken for granted by nineteenth-century scientists, religious thinkers, or cultural commentators. In fact, scientific exploration and religion happily coexisted for years, partially through the efforts of science writers who framed their potentially incendiary claims with narrative acknowledgements of a Great Creator. This paper examines the late-nineteenth century tension between scientific and religious epistemologies through the lens of children's religious education, claiming that children's Bible adaptations can be read as a lexicon of coping strategies through which religious adults attempted to gain control of the scientific threat to their faith. In short, by employing the techniques of fiction, writers of children's Bibles encouraged their child readers to engage with fiction in an imaginative register, diverting cosmological questions by encouraging children to see themselves and their relationship with God as porous, open, and accessible to a fantastical hyperreality. / text

In this dissertation, I considered five representative images of childhood that the Fifth Generation filmmakers created throughout a thirty-five year period of post-Maoist social transition in China since the beginning of the market reform and opening policy in 1978. To look at evolving childhood through their films is to position the construction of childhood under the prism of the most prominent and controversial cinematic transformation. On the one hand, the Fifth Generation’s shift towards incorporated production, theatrical narration, sentimental style, and generally conservative ideology, signals and constitutes their transition into the paradoxes of “market-socialism;” on the other hand, it maps out the fluctuation and signification of three discourses of capitalism, socialism and Confucianism through evolving images of the child and childhood. I expect this original work that bridges Chinese film studies with childhood studies to unfold a thorough and dynamic scroll, through which I can tap into China’s social transition toward authoritarian neoliberalism, and reveal the discursive mechanism where propaganda of communist regime and re-mobilized Confucian values negotiate and compete with global capitalist orders over the construction of childhood. This dissertation claims that the significance of childhood lies in its capability to fight against a homogenized and hostile environment as both a fundamental humanist domain, and a political, critical and imaginative weapon in commercialized Chinese society.

abstract: ABSTRACT In this study, I analyze the construction of childhood and nature in a number of Korean Theatre For Young Audience (TFY) works and family movies produced since 2000. Studying The Tale of Haruk, Gamoonjang Baby, Oseam and The Way Home, I explore the childhood memes that surface in the analysis and how they relate to dominant cultural understandings of Korean childhood. Both nature and childhood are metaphorical spaces reflecting the specificity of the cultural context in which they are situated. And in the works I explore, the two are paired in interesting and complex ways and for ideological reasons, the study of which produces a deeper understanding of the construction of Korean childhood. The “child" in Korean TFY has not been thoroughly explored in earlier scholarly work, nor do many preceding studies explore the performance texts of Korean TFY from an analytic stance. This is a serious gap in the literature, considering the significance of the discourse on childhood as a major conceptual framework bolstering TFY and the centrality of the performative aspect of the field. Thus, this study is meaningful as one of the first doctoral works to analyze the performance texts of Korean TFY and the first work to explore Korean TFY from a childhood studies framework. The findings of this interdisciplinary work will be of interest to the field of childhood studies and TFY, broadly defined. In studying the works, my main methodology has been detailed performance analysis. Through the analysis, interesting tropes of Korean childhood emerge, some of which have not been addressed explicitly before. My work reveals Korean childhood as a hybrid cultural assemblage reflecting the complexity of the Korean cultural context, where historical, current, native and foreign ideas about childhood mingle. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Theatre 2015

The inhabitants of Kinshasa, who call themselves Kinois, deal with insecurity and violence on a daily basis. Cheating and thefts are commonplace, and pillaging by street gangs and robberies by armed thieves are everyday occurrences. The state infrastructure is so poorly regulated that deaths by accident or medical negligence are also common. This, and much more, contributes to a challenging social milieu within which the Kinois’ best hope is simply to ‘make do’. This thesis, based on extensive fieldwork in Kinshasa, analyses different forms of violence which affect the Kinois on a daily basis. I argue that the Kinois’ concept of violence, mobulu, differs from Western definitions, which define violence as an intrinsically negative and destructive force. Mobulu is for the Kinois a potentially constructive phenomenon, which allows them to build relationships, coping strategies and new social phenomena. Violence is perceived as a transformative force, through which people build meaningful lives in the face of the hardship of everyday life. Broadly speaking, this thesis contributes to the Anthropology of violence which has too often focused on how violence is imposed upon a population, often from a structural level of a state and its institutions. Such an approach fails to account for the nuances of alternate perspectives of what ‘violence’ is, as evidenced in this thesis through the prism of the Kinois term mobulu. The concept of mobulu highlights the creativity of those forced to ‘make do’ on the streets of Kinshasa, to negotiate not only every day physical needs, for food and shelter, but also to navigate the mystical violence of witchcraft. By exploring the coping mechanisms across all sections of society, I analyse how the Kinois not only have built their lives in the wake of the violence of the state, but they have also found means of empowerment within it, using mobulu as a springboard for the development of some social phenomena. Whereas the anthropology of violence has focused mainly on physical and material violence, this thesis also argues that mobulu in Kinshasa is a total social fact that combines state violence with everyday violence, and physical violence with the invisible violence of witchcraft. This thesis seeks to enrich discussions on witchcraft in Kinshasa and in the African context in general, by analysing in depth how the cosmology of Kinshasa has differentiated itself as a result of the politico-economic events of recent decades. As witchcraft and material insecurity go hand in hand, a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of witchcraft is necessary, if we are to grasp the complexity of the concept of mobulu and how material and invisible violence inform each other.

As crianças são as verdadeiras anarquistas”? Que peso tem uma “verdade” sobre as crianças? Para ilustrar essa dissertação, questionamos uma “verdade” pichada em um muro. Porque as verdades sobre as crianças estão em todos os lugares, nós, adultos, as escrevemos, as pichamos, as pintamos em todos os lugares. Essas “verdades” estão em livros, em manuais de científicos, em enciclopédias pediátricas, nos currículos e até nas representações artísticas sobre as crianças e sobre as infâncias. Fundamentada nas concepções decolonialistas sobre a infância e as crianças, esta dissertação faz um resgate teórico do pós-colonialismo e da decolonialidade latino-americana, em especial, das produções acerca dos Estudos da Infância e educação das crianças pequenas. Problematizando também uma discussão metodológica a partir das contribuições anarquistas. Apresento possibilidades e limites para discutir (outras) infâncias pelo anarquismo, pela América Latina, pelos territórios (de)colonizados, pela desescolarização, em consonância com os estudos pós-coloniais e decoloniais. / “Are children the real anarchists?” What weight has a "truth" on children? To illustrate this dissertation, we question a "truth" graffitied in a wall. Because truths about children are everywhere, we, adults, write them, graffiti them, paint them everywhere. These "truths" are in books, in scientific manuals, in pediatric encyclopedias, in curriculum, and even in artistic representations about children and childhood. Based on decolonialist conceptions about childhood and children, this dissertation makes a theoretical rescue from postcolonialism and Latin American decoloniality, especially from the contributions on Childhood Studies and early childhood education. Also problematizing a methodological discussion from the anarchist contributions. I present possibilities and limits to discuss (other) childhoods through anarchism, Latin America, colonized territories, unschooling, in line with postcolonial and decolonial studies.

My doctoral research has explored how young children’s participation was put into practice—how it was ‘lived’ and negotiated—in the context of one early learning and childcare setting. The concept of children’s participation is rooted in large part in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which enshrines children’s right to express their views and have those views taken into account. However, young children’s participation rights are often overlooked. The more prominent discourse about young children has been one that focuses on early childhood as a preparatory period of life, in which adults must intervene and shape children’s development. My research has therefore focused on child-adult relationships within the early childhood setting, looking at how young children and early childhood practitioners ‘lived’ children’s participation and negotiated the tensions and challenges that arose for them. To carry out the research, I used an ethnographic methodology to study one fieldwork site in depth. ‘Castle Nursery’ was an early learning and childcare setting in Scotland, where practitioners professed to work in participatory ways with young children. The long-term nature of ethnography allowed me to observe how children’s participation was lived and negotiated at Castle Nursery over an eight-month period of fieldwork. The research found that practitioners challenged adult-led, ‘schoolified’ practices by foregrounding young children’s knowledge and contributions to the setting. Children’s participation was embedded into play-based pedagogy at Castle Nursery, with practitioners organising time and space to allow young children a great deal of influence over their daily experiences. Rather than planning adult-led learning activities, practitioners instead cultivated a rich learning environment for children to explore, through free-flow play. The thesis has also highlighted a variety of tensions and challenges that arose. Even at Castle Nursery, where practitioners were proud of the ways their work challenged conventional norms about young children, there were limits to how far practitioners would take a participatory approach. The thesis has particularly highlighted the importance of reflective practices about the ethical dimensions of early childhood practice. Uncertainty seemed to be an inevitable and enduring feature of living young children’s participation.

This report argues that through his lived experiences of growing up in his hometown of Lowell, MA, and the joys and traumas he accrued from early childhood and into early adulthood, Jack Kerouac began to rewrite, reimagine, and reconstruction Lowell in several different works and iterations to attempt to address and exorcise the ghosts of his past. For my argument, I study several of Kerouac’s works: Visions of Gerard (1963), Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), Visions of Cody (1972), and Book of Dreams (1960). Pulling from the fields of Beat studies, literary criticism, childhood studies, psychology, geocriticism, and American cultural history, I attempt to highlight the translation and transformation of Lowell in Kerouac’s texts into a psycho-literary space. / text

Drawing on everyday encounters from a three year collaborative research project with young children and early childhood educators in British Columbia, Canada, the manuscripts contained in this dissertation craft and put to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. This work critically engages with the question of what attention to Indigenous presences, to ongoing colonialisms, and to human/more-than-human entanglements, in everyday pedagogical encounters might do towards enacting anti-colonial early childhood pedagogies. My particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that I inhabit with children and educators. In the first manuscript, enacting figurations of witnessing, I map the complexities of my role as a pedagogista, early childhood educator, and researcher; situating myself as an embodied and implicated presence within the research and pedagogical practices from which this dissertation is assembled. In the second manuscript, I articulate refiguring presences as an anti-colonial methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings. In the third manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences through a series of interruptive stories that attend to Indigenous relationalities, human-non-human entanglements and the settler colonial tensions that come together in the making of a mountain forest that I regularly visit with children and educators. In the fourth manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences to pay attention to everyday encounters with a community garden. I experiment with orientations that bring attention to messy historical relations and that attend to the vitalities of specific plant and animal worlds. I discuss the interruptive effects of this noticing in generating politicized dialogues with this place, where more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) disrupt and subvert colonial impositions of control, belonging and order. / Graduate