Since its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon,
Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir
Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s
A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.
Table of Content
Introduction : Children’s Literature Otherwise | 1
1. Philosophy for Children | 25
2. Theory for Beginners | 58
3. Literature for Minors | 92
Acknowledgments | 135
Notes | 137
Works Cited | 163
Index | 185
About the author
Kenneth B. Kidd is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale and Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature. He is also co-editor (with Derritt Mason) of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (Fordham).
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