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Part of
Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 5] 2015
► pp. 267–284

Chapter 11. Surrealism for children

Paradoxes and possibilities

 | Kansas State University
This chapter addresses what an avant-garde for children might look like, and what it might do. It is called “Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities” because the very notion of an avant-garde for children strikes the author as both paradoxical and not, and as both possible and impossible. In making this claim, the author argues with – and revises – his own analysis in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (2002), which took for granted that an avant-garde for children was both possible and critically viable. What he once accepted as a certainty, he now thinks of as an intriguing question. The answer resides among the three main (and overlapping) areas around which the paradoxes and possibilities of a Surrealist children’s literature circulate: knowledge, experience, and audience.
Published online: 29 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.5.12nel
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