ABSTRACT
In this chapter, it is argued that although the work of Jacqueline Rose in her seminal book The Case of Peter Pan: or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) has been repeatedly referenced and discussed in the field of children’s literature, there is a different way of understanding the most profound implications of Rose’s arguments that has been very little addressed, namely, how a particular understanding of the implications of the psychoanalytic unconscious affects the ability to claim to be able to see and define the child (or any ‘real’, in fact) as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ at all. A parallel to children’s literature’s usual understandings of Rose and psychoanalysis is then drawn with both similar understandings of Shoshana Felman’s classic arguments in “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (1977) and with recent neuroscientific research on brain imaging, literature, education and (child) development, on which the English government has recently drawn in its guidelines on child support and child development policies. My interest in this chapter lies primarily in not just analysing the problematic nature of the science that this kind of work claims, but in analysing also what is at stake in such approaches. Specifically, I am puzzled by the popularity of these kinds of claims when both the scientific and the philosophical frameworks they rest on are, at best, questionable and not in any sense new or original, philosophically or scientifically speaking. Finally, the conclusion argues that the joint issues in children’s literature criticism, literary criticism more widely and the neuroscience of brain-imaging, child development and literature can all seem to be rooted in crony capitalism’s insistence on the self-constituted, autonomous, object of desire.
