'I thought maby you might help as you other Little Children': Rereading Depression-era Children
Title and/or Affiliation
Illinois State University
Presenter Bio
Maggie E. Morris Davis researches representations of children in poverty in American literature and culture and children's literature. Her work has been published in Canadian Review of American Studies, Middle West Review, and Stephen Crane Studies. She works in the Department of English at Illinois State University.
Session
Panel: Historical Perspectives
Location
Zoom
Start Date
8-7-2022 11:00 AM
End Date
8-7-2022 12:15 PM
Abstract
This paper explores what happens when cultural voices for the child in poverty (such as the 1938 Thimble Summer) make invisible the child's interior complexity by erasing the potential disorder within language. Unsolicited letters children wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt are a rich and underexplored archival trove of the language of American children in need. Though technically speaking the letters reveal errors of many kinds, they offer expressive talk attuned to a subjectivity emerging from distorting circumstances. Sociolinguistics considers this anti-language, language that disrupts discourses of power and privilege and defines its own parameters in ways that, at first, seem absurd. I argue that this anti-language prompts the reader to read differently. By forcing the reader to negotiate a new discourse, the voices of the Roosevelt letters teach us how to listen to that which we might otherwise reject, a call toward ethical understanding that elicits our engagement.
'I thought maby you might help as you other Little Children': Rereading Depression-era Children
Zoom
This paper explores what happens when cultural voices for the child in poverty (such as the 1938 Thimble Summer) make invisible the child's interior complexity by erasing the potential disorder within language. Unsolicited letters children wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt are a rich and underexplored archival trove of the language of American children in need. Though technically speaking the letters reveal errors of many kinds, they offer expressive talk attuned to a subjectivity emerging from distorting circumstances. Sociolinguistics considers this anti-language, language that disrupts discourses of power and privilege and defines its own parameters in ways that, at first, seem absurd. I argue that this anti-language prompts the reader to read differently. By forcing the reader to negotiate a new discourse, the voices of the Roosevelt letters teach us how to listen to that which we might otherwise reject, a call toward ethical understanding that elicits our engagement.
Comments
Moderated by Dhonielle Clayton