The University of Florida, Department of English
Associate Professor Kenneth Kidd received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He came to UF in 1998 after teaching for several years at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Kidd’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, gender studies/queer theory, and children’s literature and media.
In Distinction, his famous critique of "taste," the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu examines what he calls the "cultural goodwill" of French society, or its affirmation of serious culture, giving as a specific example attitudes toward books that have won literary prizes. "While the propensity and capacity to form opinions on book prizes vary with reading and with knowledge of the prizes," he writes, "a good number of those who do not read books (especially not prize-winning books), and who have no knowledge of literary prizes, nonetheless state an opinion about them, and on the whole a favourable one” (319). The people most likely to express admiration for book awards, he discovers through a survey, are actually the least likely to know much about those awards and/or to be directly involved in book prize culture and so-called serious literature. From such evidence, Bourdieu shows how which aspirations toward serious culture betray asymmetries in both economic and cultural status. The socially elite already possess what Bourdieu calls "cultural capital," defined not so much by particular content as by a particular, usually class-based relation to key objects and practices.
Bourdieu excludes children's books from his survey. His second survey question was this: “In the last year, have you bought any general books for adults, i.e. apart from textbooks or children’s books?” The equivalence of textbooks and children’s books as utilitarian sorts of texts with little if any literary value reflects a bias familiar to those of us who work on children's literature. Clearly the very hierarchies of taste under scrutiny influence the terms of his critique; Bourdieu likely has in mind the prestige of the Prix Goncourt, the Booker, the Nobel, and related prizes for "adult" literature.
Even if Bourdieu doesn't take children's literature seriously, his identification of book prizes as a form of both cultural goodwill and cultural capital raises some interesting questions about children's literature in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States. What do we make of children's book prizes and the prize industry? Are we to be suspicious of prizes, as Bourdieu suggests, or should we affirm their value? How especially are we to think about prizes in this moment of late capitalism, in which nearly every genre or kind of book is recognized through some contest or competition?
The U.S. was the first nation to establish a prize for children's literature, beginning with the Newbery Medal in 1922. The Medal is to the States what the Prix Goncourt and the Booker Prize are to France and the United Kingdom, respectively: an assertion of national heritage. It was, in a sense, the American Book Award before the American Book Award was officially created (in the early 1950s). Awarded by the American Library Association (ALA), the Newbery Medal helped realize a "public" culture of American children's literature, in and around the rise of children's bookstores, children's reading rooms in public libraries, and children's book departments in publishing houses. That culture evolved alongside and in the wake of American institutions such as the public school and the public library, both of which had close ties with publishing houses. "Publicity," as Jürgen Habermas notes, underwrites our sense of the public sphere, that uneasy space of civic, educational, and commercial energy articulated through a literary mode of "rational-critical debate" (160). The ALA became central to that sphere, and developed or took over other awards, among them the Caldecott Medal for picture book illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for "lifetime achievement," and the Coretta Scott King Award for excellence in books about African American life. These are but a few of the awards that now exist worldwide; according to the Children's Book Council, there are 296 awards for English language texts alone.
Walk into any children's section in a major bookstore and you're likely to see Newbery and Caldecott titles showcased in a separate area. Newbery and Caldecott Medal and Honor Books stay in print for decades, becoming "instant classics." To date, however, not a single essay, much less a book, has been published dealing with the history and ongoing significance of children's book awards, whether here or abroad. Many award-winning texts have been written about, but no one has examined the award category itself, or developed any kind of comparative or historical study. The ALA publishes an annotated guide every few years, but it offers only plot summary, and Irene Smith’s history of the Medal is pretty preliminary and ends in 1957. Several articles appearing in library science journals take up the professionalization of "youth services" librarians through the Newbery and the Caldecott (see Jenkins), but that's the extent of the scholarship. Analysis of this prize culture is long overdue, and should interest scholars in many disciplines, among them English, history, sociology, and education. Teachers, librarians, and even parents would likely take an interest as well.
Book awards more generally have been neglected by scholars. In one of the few articles addressing the subject, James F. English underscores as a partial explanation the widespread sense that the "cultural universe has become super-saturated with prizes, that there are more prizes than our collective cultural achievements can possible justify, is the great and recurring theme of prize punditry," he writes (109). Critics of children's book prizes complain along the same lines, sometimes from a more reactionary position. In an essay tellingly titled "Slippery Slopes and Proliferating Prizes," Marc Aronson points to the proliferation of children's book awards as evidence of the politicization of children's writing. Aronson holds that children's literature has yielded to special interest groups at the expense of imaginative writing. Appealing to "great literature" (but refusing to define such), Aronson urges readers to "honor content alone, not identity. Use the very best judges and set the very highest standards" (278). Others have defended particular prizes, the tempo of prize culture, and contemporary identity politics, but no one has offered any substantive analysis of these or other aspects of this complex phenomenon.
My new book project thus examines American children's book awards as a form of cultural capital/goodwill, and as an integral part of the evolving public sphere -- a sphere increasingly articulated via mass media rather than literature, as Habermas and other theorists foretold. We do not, however, live in a post-literary culture, as some insist; rather, we live in an electronic culture in which narrative has been transformed but thrives nonetheless. My project evolved from a more narrow focus on the Newbery Medal, from work I began two summers ago. I've since written four conference papers on the topic and am teaching two Newbery Medal courses this current semester. Recently the current Chair of the Newbery Committee, Eliza Dresang, visited my classes and spoke about the current competition. I've joined the American Library Association and plan to attend next summer's conference, which will be held in Orlando.
Next I plan to expand upon those conference papers and draft the first two chapters of the new book, which will focus on the rise of children's book awards and children's book culture through mid-century or so. I would also like to begin research on the post-1950s awards, concentrating on the Coretta Scott King Award and the Pura Belpré Award (established in 1996 for excellence in Latina/o children's literature). That research involves library work, much reading, and interviews with current and past ALA members. I also hope to begin work on the second part of the book, which will examine the shift from children's literature to children's mass media, in particular to public children's television and educational film. Many people know that educational programming for children, often underwritten by corporations, helped made possible public television, and there have been other public-commercial ventures that emphasize multimedia as well as literary narrative. The Weston Woods Company, for example, whose motto is "fidelity to the original," has been producing animated film versions of classic picture books since the early 1950s, and selling them to schools. Scholastic Press, now the publishers of the American Harry Potter line, survived for years through school-sponsored book fairs and subscription orders, emphasizing the "educational" merit of its merchandise. In short, my larger goal is to document the ways in which a distinctly modern culture of American children's literature, as aided and abetted by the ALA, in turn enabled and to some extent yielded to an electronic children's culture, in which the workings of cultural capital remain surprisingly the same.
Aronson, Marc. "Slippery Slopes and Proliferating Prizes." The Horn Book Magazine May/June 2001: 271-278.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
English, James F. "Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art." New Literary History 33 (2002): 109-135.
Garrison, Dee. Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920. New York: The Free Press, 1979.
Gillespie, John Thomas. The Newbery Companion: Booktalk and Related Materials for Newbery Medal and Honor Books. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1996.
Goldsmith, Sophie L. “Ten Years of the Newbery Medal.” The Bookman Nov. 1931: 308-316.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.
“How the Newbery Came to Be.” American Library Association website. http://www.ala.org/alsc/nmedal.html.
Jenkins, Christine A. "Women of ALA Youth Services and Professional Jurisdiction: Of Nightingales, Newberies, Realism, and the Right books, 1937-1945." Library Trends 44.4 (Spring 1996): 813-839.
Miller, Bonnie J. F. "What Color is Gold? Twenty-One Years of Same-Race Authors and Protagonists in the Newbery Medal." Joys Fall 1998: 34-39.
Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Smith, Irene. A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
Townsend, John Rowe. John Newbery and His Books: Trade and Plumb-Cake for Ever, Huzza! Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1994.
Warner, Michael. Public and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.