New Books in Critical Theory

Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)

Mar 22, 2025

Amanda M. Greenwell, an Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, explores the concept of the 'child gaze' in her work. She discusses how this narrative strategy critiques societal norms across American literature, from James Baldwin to Toni Morrison. The conversation dives into how children's perspectives can challenge power structures and reshape narratives around race, class, and identity. Greenwell also highlights the dynamic interplay of surveillance and resistance, illustrating the profound impact of a child's gaze on literature and society.

41:54

Episode guests

Amanda M. Greenwell

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

The child gaze serves as a crucial narrative strategy in literature, enabling critiques of societal norms through children's perspectives on power dynamics.

Greenwell's analysis highlights the importance of visual storytelling in comics, showcasing how it enhances reader engagement and understanding of complex social issues.

Deep dives

The Child Gaze as a Narrative Strategy

The concept of the child gaze is presented as a powerful narrative strategy for social critique in contemporary American literature, particularly focusing on how children's perspectives can reveal deeper societal issues. Dr. Greenwell emphasizes the lack of extensive studies on the idea of child observation in literature, particularly when considering the nuances of how children interpret and respond to their environments. She recalls a pivotal moment that inspired her research while analyzing a comic series that highlighted the agency of a young character against an oppressive figure. This realization underscored the potential of the child gaze to serve as an insightful lens through which complex social dynamics can be examined.

Intro

2min

The Child Gaze: Resistance and Agency

16min

Exploring Child Perspectives in Alternate Histories

5min

The Transactional Child Gaze

10min

Exploring the Child Gaze in Literature

8min

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms.

Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory