On Wednesday, October
30th, The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at SDSU had
the honor of hosting Dr. Mary Galbraith for her talk, “The Deictic Imaginary:
Literature as Creation.”
Our director, Dr. Joseph
Thomas, began by thanking all who have made the event possible: the library
(especially Linda Salem and Markel Tumlin), the graduate assistants (Sofia and
Ashley), and Dr. Mary Galbraith herself. He then introduced our guest, saying
she is a woman who works to “respect the child” in her research. The full text
of his introduction is included below:
Dr. Mary Galbraith has always struck me as the prototypical SoCal woman. A salient exemplar, really. You see, Mary grew up in Los Angeles, shuttling between her Southern California home and a home across the sea, in London. After finishing high school, Mary headed a little south to UC Irvine, attending that legendary school during its first year. Afterwards, she left her SoCal home for Berkeley, where her worldly, cosmopolitan, SoCal grooviness was enriched and complicated by the student protests going on during 1969, the high-water mark of the 60’s youthful, utopian hopefulness. I’m put in mind of the famous passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . .
But on that cresting wave came, as Mary explains
in an interview, “tanks on campus; helicopters flying over dropping tear gas.”
She got out, had a kid, lived her life, returning to school in the 80s,
eventually settling at SUNY Buffalo, a spot that couldn’t be more different
than SoCal.
But Mary flourished there, working as a graduate
assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. She worked on her doctorate
in English while taking courses in philosophy, psychology, computer science,
child language acquisition. The searching intelligence that came of age
traveling back and forth between London and Los Angeles, primed for difference,
for unexpected confluences and concatenations began developing the
interdisciplinary approach we’d come to call “Childhood Studies,” a theoretical
and practical academic approach that puts into conversation the resonant
insights of literature, psychology, history, anthropology, and neurobiology as
a means of better understanding childhood, a time in which the child’s varied
experiences of the world has yet to calcify into rigid categories. Although I
wouldn’t call her a Romantic (not to her face), she does respect the child and
its novel experience of the still-new world, Wordsworth’s “Mighty
Prophet! Seer blest! […] “whose exterior semblance” (if you’ll forgive my
shift into second person)
[…] doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet
dost keep
dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the
blind,
blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the
eternal deep,
eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal
mind[.]
mind[.]
Mary’s ranging, complex, and groundbreaking
scholarly work serves the interests of – as she puts it – “feeling from the
other side,” of understanding as best we’re able, the child’s existential
situation from the child’s perspective, a critical paradigm suggestive
of what Peter Hunt would come to call “childist” criticism. Mary’s work is
marked by a desire to articulate the child's experience as rigorously as
possible using all the theoretical and scientific and literary critical tools
available to us. Today, we’ll get a taste of that project.
But first, knowing how important students are to
Mary’s work (she exemplifies the scholar/teacher model) I’d like to invite one
of her students, Ashley, to the front of the room, to give Mary the kind of
introduction I’m unable to give.
Graduate Assistant
Ashley Nguyen then took the stage to describe her work under Dr. Mary
Galbraith:
It was my honor to be Dr. Galbraith’s student last fall in her English
501: Literature for Children course. Professor Galbraith’s class was my first
encounter with the study of children’s literature. The theme was “fantasy and a
touch of the real,” which highlighted the authorial background that underlies
the fantastical aspects of familiar texts such as Hans Christian Andersen’s
“The Little Mermaid” and Rudyard Kipling’s The
Jungle Book. She showed us how children’s literature provides a place for
authors to work through childhood traumas, reimagine difficult relationships,
and create alternative narratives in which the child character has
unprecedented agency. This course was also my first scholarly encounter with
Asian art and critique; we utilized Japanese aesthetics to analyze picture
books and Hayao Miyazaki’s movies.
Dr. Galbraith is stunningly dedicated to her
scholarship. As a student just barely entering the children’s literature field,
I was shocked at the complexity of her research and how much time and effort
she gave it – on top of all of the courses she was teaching! Even so, she
always gave her students her full attention, meeting us where we were and yet
challenging us to push ourselves further, to think critically about even our
most cherished childhood stories and movies. Furthermore, she taught that while
academic critique is valuable, we can still appreciate texts for the affective
responses they evoke. These insights affirmed my interest in studying
children’s literature at the graduate level, and now I focus my research on
Asian American children’s literature that reflects the lived experience of its
authors and readers. I owe much of my growth as a scholar to my experience in
her classroom, and it is a huge honor and privilege to introduce Dr. Mary
Galbraith!
Dr.
Galbraith's lecture clearly communicated her stunning dedication to research as
well as teaching. Her passionate discussion of the deictic imaginary eschewed
the markers of a conventional academic lecture, more closely resembling her
work in the classroom. As rigorous as she was clear and convivial, Dr.
Galbraith began by explaining that deixis precedes language while language
allows people to create transportable or translatable deixis.
In
the deictic imaginary, Dr. Galbraith reminded, a storyteller invents and the
listener (or reader) collaborates in that invention. She explains this concept
further: “It is important to note, fiction is not untrue at all, since
fictional narration is a creation, not a statement. Only statements can have
truth or untruth.” Dr. Galbaith emphasizes
that fictional language creates imaginary presence. When we read, we create
these stories, and often children are much better at making an imaginary world
than adults are. Dr. Galbraith feels that “imagination is, in my mind, the most
precious thing the human race has made”. She praised readers for the ability to
mentally envision entire worlds, following an author’s “very long
conversational turn that ends whenever you decide to stop reading.”
Come Away From the Water, Shirley by John Burningham
Dr. Galbraith used an
image from Come Away From the Water, Shirley to emphasize the bifurcation
between adults focused on settling on the beach and sipping their coffee, and
the child who views the ocean with limitless possibility. She noted that the
child is constantly forced to repress her curiosity. Dr. Galbraith went on to
describe poetic narrative theory and quoted that “a fictive reality ‘is’ only
by virtue of its being narrated” (Hamburger 136).
Dr. Galbraith had
prepared her 1989 dissertation abstract to share with us, but was unable to due
to time constraints. She explained that much of what she had written about then
was relevant to what she is doing now. She looks forward to meeting up with the
“twenty other people in the world who are really focused on [deixis]” at an
international conference in the coming year.
According to Dr.
Galbraith, mimesis is the flip of deixis. She gestured to a chair, indicating
that while an author captures presence in words, the reader imagines by turning
words into presence. Deixis is the author’s performance of presence in words, and
mimesis is the reader’s following of “the outstretched finger” through
imagination.
Dr. Galbraith explored The
Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen creates a compelling
and heart-wrenching story of this “Little Match Girl” who after suffering from
abuse by her father is sent out into the cold world with nothing but the
clothes on her back and a few matches. Set in the time of many children dying,
the young girl’s experience outweighs the narrator’s comments on the text. Dr.
Galbraith emphatically takes the side of children in stories such as this. She
notes that the only other person with any real personality is the boy who
steals the girl’s slippers.
Illustration
from Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
Andersen’s book is vital
for background in a study of children’s literature, as he is considered the
first author actually writing for children and representing the voices of
children. Dr. Galbraith argues that “The Little Match Girl” is not didactically
aimed towards children, but rather condemns adults, who in the tale do
nothing to help the dying girl.
The event concluded with
a Q&A session during which students asked about the pedagogical
repercussions of this topic, about further resources, and how to better assist
students with learning disabilities.
Dr.
Phillip Serrato and Dr. Joseph Thomas pose with Dr. Galbraith.
The NCSCL is grateful to
all who helped make this wonderful event possible. We especially thank Dr. Mary
Galbraith! For an audio recording of the full talk with images and presentation
slides, please see the link below:
-(SS) and (AN)
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