Interview with Dr. Mary Galbraith

The NCSCL is honored to present an interview with Dr. Mary Galbraith, lecturer in children's literature here at San Diego State University. The interview was conducted on October 9th, 2019 by Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen.

Dr. Galbraith with Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen

Can you share with us your educational background?

Let's see, starting with undergraduate – I started out at UC Irvine the first year that it opened, which was 1965, and then I transferred to Berkeley for my junior/senior year after spending my junior year abroad: six months in Greece – Athens and Delphi.

What was your major at the time?

English. It’s the one area where you can do whatever you want, and there isn’t one methodology that is the correct one. Whatever you’re interested in, literature will take you there.

After that, did you pursue a master’s degree?

No, I left school after that. That's 1969.  If you know your history, late ‘60s at Berkeley? You know, tanks on campus; helicopters flying over dropping tear gas. I had a child in 1971 and went on to other things and eventually came back to school in 1981. There was a big gap: ‘69 to ‘81. When I first came back to Berkeley, I got a credential in teaching English as a second language and then I went to China for two years. While I was there, I realized that I really wanted to be learning rather than teaching. I applied to a number of graduate schools and the one that gave me the best deal was SUNY Buffalo. I never paid a penny in tuition the whole seven years I was there. I was paid as a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. That was a great opportunity – studying for a doctorate in English, but in the process taking classes in philosophy, psychology, computer science, child language acquisition, all over campus. It was just a wonderful experience because I was pursuing a particular topic and all of these different disciplines had theories that were relevant. I would just follow the topic wherever it went. 

So it sounds like at the time, there wasn’t a children’s literature specialization?

No, there wasn't – I did take a graduate class in children's literature with Ann Haskell – good class – but there was no children's literature specialization. However, my dissertation was on childhood subjectivity and how it is represented in Victorian novels. My orals topic was the representation of childhood subjectivity in literature, which made for a pretty interesting reading list.  

Was that the time you entered the children’s literature field?

            They weren't hiring people for children's literature in those days. You got a job through Victorian literature or some other more traditional category. I got my doctorate in 1989 and had twins in 1991, so there was another mothering hiatus. When I applied to teach at San Diego State in 1996 (as a "cold call"), I asked if they needed anyone to teach children’s literature. It turned out they needed someone to teach Children's Literature that very semester– spring of 1996. Someone had unexpectedly withdrawn from teaching the class; “three weeks from now, we want you to teach English 501.” I was like whoa. Wrote a syllabus. Got to work.

Which texts did you teach that first semester?

I remember doing The Yearling which nobody teaches anymore but it’s a great book about a boy and a deer in Florida in the backwoods.  

How have you seen the field evolve?

SDSU had a large tenured faculty in children's literature back in the 80s and 90s--probably more than any university in the country at that time: Peter Neumeyer, Lois Kuznets, Jerry Griswold, Alida Allison, Jerry Farber, and Carole Scott, who were pioneers in the Children's Literature Association. June Cummins arrived in the late 90s and also became active in the development of the field. Children's literature as a whole evolved nationally and internationally into an accepted discipline, and it has broadened considerably; SDSU is a pioneer in this regard. Our current faculty have a Young Adult focus, especially queer studies, which is one emergent arena in the field.

Do you think the whole field is now trending towards Young Adult?

No, I don't think so. It just so happens that we have a group here that really focuses on that and that's great. The field as a whole has just exploded. I don't think people are apologizing for teaching children's literature the way they used to. In the past, you would have to explain yourself as to why you were "lowering" yourself.  “Oh, why are you teaching children's literature?”-- condescending like that.

How did you respond to comments like that?

Oh, I laugh ruefully, because anything to do with children is devalued, so I’m used to it.  If you’re a mother, you’re used to being asked, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I'm only working 24 hours a day on no sleep” (laughs). “But what else do you do?” That's why theorizing childhood studies is my preoccupation--while other scholars are looking at literature through other lenses, I primarily look at the way childhood is devalued and not seen for the huge thing that it is.

Can you tell us about how you’ve presented at conferences?

Early on, I was going to Children’s Literature Association conferences every year. I was in the center of some controversies – introducing the idea of childhood studies, for example – and fighting for a more radical view of childhood. I haven't had the resources to go every year, so at some point along the way I started going instead to the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL), which is every other year. Next year, I'm hoping to go to the Society for Novel Studies Conference, because I also work in theory of the novel, and I want to get together with the small circle of people in the world that are talking about a particular topic that fascinates me-- that would be the topic I will be talking about on October 30.

Does that take you all around the world?

Not quite all around the world – in the Western Hemisphere, mostly. The last Society for Novel Studies Conference was in Ithaca, New York. The next one's in Oxford, so hopefully I'll be going there – I’m just submitting my abstract. And the next IRSCL Congress is in Santiago, Chile, which is certainly exciting!

That leads to another question I had about publications.

At the moment, I’ve got two things under consideration. One is a chapter on the topic that I'm talking about [at SDSU on October 30th]. It's a theory of narrative that is an alternative to classical narratology, which sees a narrator as built into every work of fiction. The alternative theory is much more – I think – open to the possibilities of language in the novel; I think the older model limits our ideas of what novels do – and I think it's just conceptually wrong. As I will in my talk, I use "The Little Match Girl" as an example of what I'm talking about. It’s important to see the consequences of reading the story with one model as opposed to a different model. One model sees the narrator as above the work: the authoritative voice in the work. The other model, first of all, doesn't see that there's necessarily a narrator at all, and it abandons the idea of a unitary speaking voice. And even if where is a speaking voice, it needn't be a privileged position. Mikhail Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky’s main characters are of a higher consciousnes than his narrators. I always liked that. For me the child SELF character is privileged. Even if­­­­­­­­ there's a narrator "behind" a child character, the child character's embodied presence weighs more than adult voice – at least to the extent that the character has the "touch of the real."

That’s fascinating; I’m really excited to hear your talk now!

I hope I can do it justice! My involvement with the topic of deixis goes back to my undergraduate work in the 1980s, when I was part of a Graduate Group in Cognitive Science in Buffalo. Deixis is how language creates a here/now/self.  We're here, we're now, and we know who we are in this discussion [points to live situation in her office]. Well, fiction creates a different here/now self that you enter into as you read. You're able to track this--and perform this-- as a reader effortlessly because you're a good reader. The process is amazingly complex, and small children are able to do it.

The Graduate Group in Buffalo started in the computer science department; they were actually trying to write an algorithm, kind of like a GPS, for teaching a computer where we are and who we are and what's going on in a work of fiction. That's complicated, right? It's more complicated probably than telling you how to get downtown. But there was a geographer in the group who was working on the early GPS. He was talking about how people orient themselves in time and space and how different cultures and genders give directions. Presumably all this has been fed into the GPS so that when they tell you to turn left at the next corner, you know, they're following that sort of algorithm that he and other people were studying. Anyway, geography and computer science were part of the project. And of course, they need a very specific operationalization. You couldn't just say “I have a feeling this is happening.” Most of us in the humanities are not very operationally oriented. It was a good discipline to have to come up with specific cues for how language works in fiction.

I had a great relationship with a scholar in computer science, Jan Wiebe, who would press me about my "feeling" interpretations. She would say, “Well, how would I tell the computer to pick up that cue?” That's was a good challenge: “How do you do that?” So we worked out things like paragraph breaks. You often see a change of self, of person, in a paragraph break. So when it goes to a new paragraph break, you do a possible reset to see whether a new person is occupying the self. This particular cue was quite revealing for reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway--a novel that is a veritable soup of selves.

Jan and I also used a lot of children's texts as examples because even though they are simple syntactically, they use the same narrative techniques for entering the experience of the character. For example, in this brief excerpt from a story about a cat named Socks – “Socks looked up at Charles William and meowed. How was he going to get out with the door shut?" (Cleary 128) – the second sentence represents the cat's experience. These very sophisticated shifts of self were in syntactically simple children's books, which made them good as examples, while also showing that this deictic sophistication emerges very early in story understanding.

While I was a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Group in Buffalo, I worked on a prospectus for a book called Deixis in Narrative. It was to be a big fat book that was made up of twenty chapters by members of the group, coming from many different disciplinary perspectives. Erwin Siegel and I contributed theory chapters from a cognitive and literary point of view. He was in the psychology department and I was the literary spokesperson. The book, Deixis in Narrative, was ultimately published in 1995, five years after I left the group.

Fast forward to 2017: I received a request from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature to write the entry on deixis. My theory chapter, it turned out, had been influential in narrative theory and cognitive linguistics – I had dubbed the particular theory we were using the "deictic shift theory", and my chapter was used in seminars on the topic to give a strong and concise argument for this position. When I got the request from Oxford, my thought was I haven't read anything in this field for twenty years, so this is going to be a heckuva job, but there was no way I was going to turn down such a challenging opportunity. So I went to work reading, trying to get up to speed with current work and pulling in a lot of other older relevant literary theory. It has taken me two years to feel somewhat conversant with the territory – it's like a second dissertation, but more so.

I submitted my first draft last year; you usually get one of three responses when you submit something for publication: “publish it immediately; publish it soon, but here are some revisions we want you to do; don't publish it.” I got the second reaction: “recommended for publication, but with a few revisions.” My topic involves a vast territory of knowledge, so a simple little revision such as "say more about drama" is not going to be a simple revision. It’s going to have to go through a ridiculous amount of reading. And so when they said, “oh, yeah and send it in three weeks” (laughs)-- I'm still working on that revision a year later. I'm hoping that feedback I get from this talk and another one next month will help me finish these revisions.

My other project in the pipeline is a contribution to a collection of essays on "optional-narrator" theory. I was invited to contribute to this collection based again on my work from the 1980s and on a paper I gave at the Society for Novel Studies entitled: "Silent self and the deictic imaginary: Hamburger's radical insight." The manuscript was submitted in 2017 and I just learned this week that it has been accepted for publication in 2020 by the University of Nebraska.

My talk on October 30 draws from these two projects. 

The relationship between children's literature and this theory: they’re intimately connected in my mind, probably because the theory of narrative that I'm looking at is much less about that top-down (=adult-child?) way of looking at literature as an art form. The techniques for writing from a child's position are very controversial because many people in the field will say that adults can't write with authority from a child's position. The question is “Can you write from a child position and how do you argue for that?” Also, “how can you represent nonverbal mind?” Ironically, the computer science people are much more happy with talking about nonverbal mind because for them, words are way down the line from the basic unselfconscious processes. They're working with ones and zeros, and they're looking with neurological synapses. They even ask the question whether thought is primarily verbal. But in English departments, that's an oddly controversial thing to say, that you have nonverbal experience that has some independent reference from words. That brings up the evolution of language and that’s connected to language acquisition, the semiotics of the body, and childhood experience, so you see the whole thing wrapping together. I'm somebody who likes to flip things, so I enjoy asserting that, far from being the stepchild of statement, fiction comes before statement. Fiction is actually prior to statement, because the imagination comes prior to language in the theories that I’m looking at; it’s pretty exciting.

What is it like teaching children’s literature, especially to people who will become teachers in the future?

Well, the main thing is to blow their minds a little bit, because most adults think children's literature is about teaching life lessons to children, and that adults are a benign force in children's lives. That’s also the commonly held assumption by people who are going to be teachers. My radical position is: don't come between children and books! Don't be the mediator between the child and the book. It's like a sacred relationship to me, the reader and the book. The literary author is in some way opening themselves to their subconscious, in such a way that you can step into it. It's not like conventional communication. It’s more like a scaffolding for very radical one-sided dialogues, like a psychoanalyst and a patient. If a psychoanalyst is good, they are emptying themselves out and allowing that other person this huge conversational turn, and [the psychoanalyst] is just following, right? A reader is not a therapist, but they are a complete listener. They are implementing the language of that person and the emotional content that people are putting out and following into it (by the way, I have never put it quite this way before-- I'm improvising as I go along--but this is an issue I've been working on). People try to frame narrative as a message from speaker to listener, but I don't see it that way. Great literature comes from authors opening themselves in a very special way to a subconscious, metaphorical adventure. Most authors don't know where it's coming from and that's fine – it's a level of sedimented experience that normally does not get expressed. The work of writing is putting "what comes" into the right words. Authors have these experiences and they'll tell you, “I started out with this image and then it sort of started walking.” The writer who is an artist is not just working from here down (gestures from head to body). They’re working from here up (gestures from body to head). The communication act that is reading a book is a very special one that doesn't follow the conventional rules of conversation.

There's such a distance from this to the top-down idea of a book as a teacher, teaching you something, which is a transitive act: “I'm going to tell you something and I'm filling your head with all the proper things.” That's so far away from what literature does. Literature is revelation. It’s opening parts of yourself that you don't know about. John Stuart Mill who says, “Art starts with talking to yourself.” Allowing something to happen in yourself. And if you pay any attention to anybody watching, you're going to lose it. So it is like performing. It’s like they say, “dance like nobody's watching.” That you have to be absolutely true to what's in here before you have something valuable. Then you might begin to say, “Now gee I don't think anybody will understand this unless I translate it into something they can understand.” That's where you must make sure to keep the treasures alive-- when you adapt to your audience.

In that case, do you give advice to teachers about which books to present in the classroom?

No, I am totally unqualified to do that, and I think the term "teaching literature" is a minefield. First of all, how many people have said, “that book was ruined by a teacher for me because they were picking it apart”? I'm not saying you don't need to know something about the background of the literature. Right now I'm talking about history and literature. Those are two topics that elementary school teachers have to do. I used to teach The Little House on the Prairie a lot. Well, that is still a great book, but it's written from the point of view of a white settler kid. Put it that way. The actual opinions of the white settlers are all over the book. Now the child in the book questions that but she doesn't really know anything about being a Native American. A book written recently by Louise Erdrich called The Birchbark House has been offered as a companion book in a way to work off of each other. This book was written recently so it wasn't written from the historical time of Little House. But it is a very good book. This semester for the first time, I said, “forget Little House this semester. We're just doing The Birchbark House. Why not just go with the neglected voices for a while and give a rest to some of these older classics? I do love the classics, but they have this problem that they are seeing from a very partial perspective. I'm fine asking them to sit down for a while. Let's hear from some other people. What we've been talking about this week in my 306A (children’s literature course for future teachers) is “How do you teach history in primary school if the idea is to talk honestly about things that are unbearable? To learn about slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans?” When I was in school, there was this tendency to want to be cheerful about everything and I'm not saying that is completely wrong. But at the same time, it’s no good teaching history if it's white-washed (excuse the expression). What do you do? It's a real question. I'm not going to be teaching history to primary school students, but my students are! And I would say that’s a real dilemma. I don't know how much control people have over what books they use. I hope they have lots of control (as opposed to a set curriculum), but I’m not familiar. So no, I’m not qualified to tell them what to do with literature in the classroom, except to say, “don't stand in the space between the reader and the book," and "be honest." And I hope I practice what I preach in this regard.

Do you have any teaching moments in your career that were particularly memorable?

Every day, you go home and you're either saying “wow that worked” or “that didn't work.” We've had a lot of really wonderful moments in the classroom where everybody's together and we can feel it in the room.  Here's one example: students have an optional assignment to create their own picture book and talk about the process. A couple of semesters ago, there were a lot of good student-created picture books and we had to devote a couple of class hours to people reading and talking about them. Several were quite personal. One of these was a picture book about colors. After the person was finished reading the book she had made, she talked about her process: “This book comes from my depression; everything was grey. Then one day I looked up and there was green.” A student responded by bursting into tears and saying how the book had moved her; we all felt the lyrical resonance even without the explanation. It's not so much that I'm looking for people to reveal anything personal--I would never ask for that. That day in that class we felt safe going there without being pressured in any way. A simple picture book went deep. That was pretty special.

That’s a really tangible example of all of the things you’ve been talking about with authors putting themselves into books.

Yeah, I felt “that was great” and “see?”And that, by the way, is another thing that all this leads to: pedagogy that enacts itself. It should follow the logic that you're using. Just look at one paragraph from a work of literature for half an hour: “what’s that doing and what's this doing?” That’s my favorite question. “What does it do?” not “what does it mean?” Just looking at the language of “what does it do?” You don’t need to talk about the author’s intention, because that's beyond our grasp and probably beyond the author's grasp. But you can talk about what the author did. That is a more answerable question.

The last question I have is about deixis, which you will be speaking about. I remember when I was in your course and you were working on the final revision to submit for the first time. You were reading tons of books.

I’m the library’s best customer. They have this limit of 100 books and I would bump up against it. They would tell me “you can’t take any more books out until you put some back” and I said “Seriously? The books that I’m taking out, no one has taken them out in years! Let’s not hoard the books!” I joke to them that they should give me a prize for taking the most books out of the library instead of chastising me for not bringing them back.

How has it been to prepare a talk?

Well, I'm still working on it. I'm teaching four classes and trying to keep up. People do want their papers graded, and I've got some other life things going on. Here's what I do. I put my presentation deadlines into a special hopper inside of myself and then my body just makes sure I do it. That's it. As it gets closer to the deadline, you know, the ideas start popping. I really do believe in all this subconscious stuff because that's where everything comes from: bottom-up. I'm not going to say it's always super successful because considering the audience is also important when you're going to deliver a talk. It's not enough to have all this content that you yourself think “oh that's wonderful.” It has to be understandable to my audience, so I'm working on what's the best way to frame it when I'm not very sure what my audience knows.

One of the things I want to talk about is how many different fields are implicated in literary theory: the evolution of language, linguistics, philosophy of language, all of the 20th century arcane conversation on literary theory. Taking a trenchant quote from each of maybe five or ten chief people that I use, let's see, in these different fields, what this looks like, and then see how it's converging. My argument is that theory in a lot of different fields is converging on a kind of grand theory of what literature is, based on imagination as the evolutionary engine of humanity, an idea that began with Giambattista Vico in the 18th century. It is exciting, but most people in literature departments don't know about it. There's a lot of interdisciplinary work, but there's a lot to do to bring that up to the surface where you can display it as a unified theory of the humanities.

Thank you so much to Dr. Mary Galbraith for telling us about such an incredible career!

This is part three of a series of blog posts in preparation for Dr. Mary Galbraith’s talk, "The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation," to be held in LL430 on Wednesday, October 30th from 4:00-5:00PM. We hope to see you there next week!

 - (AN)

Note: this blog post has been updated to the most recent version. AN apologizes for her mistake in initially posting an earlier draft of the interview.