Dec 6, 2013


Kent University 'penitent' after belittling children's books

Kent University website
Offending site … Kent University's Creative Writing department, where slight was first published
Kent University's School of English has performed a screeching handbrake turn and professed itself "penitent" after Twitter erupted over a description of their creative writing programme which implied that children's fiction was a lower form of writing than adult fiction.
The Kent University website suggested that teachers at the Centre for Creative Writing "love great literature and don't see any reason why our students should not aspire to produce it … We love writing that is full of ideas, but that is also playful, funny and affecting. You won't write mass-market thrillers or children's fiction on our programmes."
This was enough for the children's writer SF Said to publicly challenge the department, tweeting: "@UniKentWriting You say here "great literature" is one thing; children's books etc another. Can you see the problem?"
The Centre for Creative Writing replied to the author of the award-winning children's book Varjak Paw at the end of last week, joking, "Sorry for the slow response. We were writing adult novels." Adding that unlike many creative writing courses that "claim to teach a bit of everything", the department doesn't teach YA or children's books, just "literary novels".
After a storm of criticism from children's writers, the department's attitude began to shift, tweeting: "We are penitent! The offending passage will be removed. As soon as we can work out how to do it," and promising "the author of the offending passage will be paraded through Canterbury in chains, pelted with copies of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games".
The climbdown received a cool reception from Said, who offered thanks for acknowledging the problem, as well as a little advice: "treating children's books like a joke again may not be the answer!" For the double Carnegie Medal-winner Patrick Ness (@Patrick_Ness) Kent's school of creative writing was still "Not quite getting the point". "My fav contemporary writers are also Mitchell, Smith, Barker. Guess what I write?" he added.
Kent's backdown continued apace this morning. It tweeted apologies: " …The text has been changed, humble pie eaten." The offending passage was still available on sections of the website at time of writing, but the department's "gracious" apology was enough for Said: "Thank you for taking children's literature seriously."

Children's fiction is not great literature

theguardian.com,  
 
Kent University was right – the best children's books are better written, but only adult literature confronts the range of human experience
A boy reads a copy of Harry Potter
'Roth does say something rather more challenging than Rowling - what's so wrong with that?' Photograph: Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images
Come on, University of Kent, why the grovelling retreat? Your creative writing website got it right first time. You know perfectly well that when you made a distinction between "great literature" and "mass-market thrillers or children's fiction", you were standing up for something. That Keats is different from Dylan, or, in this instance, that Philip Roth does say something rather more challenging than JK Rowling, that Jonathan Franzen does create storylines more ambiguous and questioning than Stephanie Meyer's. What's so wrong with that? I'll go forward carrying the banner even if you won't.
Like Kent, we at City University take on creative writing MA students specifically to write literary novels – so we are quite ready to define what's required to write for adults as opposed to children. It isn't about the quality of the prose: the best children's books are better structured and written than many adult works. Nor is it about imaginary worlds – among the Lit Gang, for instance, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Chabon have all created plenty of those. It's simpler than that: a novel written for children omits certain adult-world elements which you would expect to find in a novel aimed squarely at grown-up readers.
When I was a "young adult", YA fiction didn't exist and I filled my hours with Robert Louis Stevenson or Isaac Asimov. These novels held and excited us because they created scenarios where good and evil were clearly defined and rarely muddied.
I am so glad that first-rate children's literature was there for my own children. I would not have wanted them – at 11, 12 or 13 – to confront the complexity and banality of evil. It's quite right that they wanted to read about worlds where evil was uniformly evil and good people were constantly good. In contrast, adulthood means learning that SS officers or drone pilots do go home and kiss their wives, without a thought of belonging to the "dark side". Equally, while you come to know how to interpret Portnoy's self-loathing or Humbert Humbert's witty detachment, children wouldn't enjoy these characters or their dilemmas. The best young adult novels do bridge that sticky chasm between the undoubting days of childhood and the hedged decades of adulthood.
But there's no avoiding the real question. Are adult novels larger than children's novels largely because they seek to confront all these issues? Of course they are. Great adult literature aims to confront the full range of genuine human experience, a world where individuals do not wear the same black or white hat every day. Life is messy, life is surprising and, most of all, life is full of compromises. One of the great themes of literature – which therefore often makes for great literature – springs from the protagonist who rejects compromise and usually pays the price (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Pinkie Brown, Rabbit Angstrom). Would we really want our children to cope with the unwinnable dilemmas of JM Coetzee's Disgrace?
But does that make children's literature any easier to write? I imagine quite the reverse. It's harder – children are not so easily fooled. Not only that, but many great writers – even those who go on to write the dark stuff of adult fiction – are informed and inspired by their childhood reading. These books stay with you because they are important at that age.
Whether a work of fiction is literary is not defined by the poshness of its vocabulary or the obscurity of its references – it is simply a novel which leaves something out. In doing so, that novel makes demands of us – to doubt, to admit bafflement, and to wonder if we could have done any better in this real world – and far too few children's novels attempt that.

2 articles who claim the same - It’s not enough to write children’s emotions or experiences well because they are inherently unworthy of literary consideration. A Great book potentially contains anything (except silly kid stuff). 

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