ABSTRACT
It is habitual in teaching literature to young people to encourage them to “identify” themselves with one of the characters, normally with the protagonist. A schoolteacher may express this urge by asking: “Who would you like to be in this story?” Students of children’s literature warmly embrace texts that offer identifi cation objects. This perplexing phenomenon can be called identifi cation fallacy, in analogy with the famous intentional fallacy of New Criticism (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). Perhaps more than any other critical stance, identifi cation fallacy reveals a striking inconsistency between children’s literature research and literacy education. The conviction that young readers must adopt the subject position of a literary character is, however, ungrounded and prevents the development of mature reading.
