My one-year-old loves "Thomas and Friends," a toy model-based television series about living trains who strive to be useful for a rich capitalist on a British island. Something never sat quite right with me about the series, despite its narration by favorite comedian George Carlin. Imagine my surprise, or don't, when a Google search for "Thomas and Friends Marxist critique" came back with several hits: Slate's "Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine" from 2011, The Guardian's "Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere" from 2014, and the New Yorker's "The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of 'Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends'" for instance. Sir Topham Hat as robber baron teaches trains and children that they must be "really useful engines" to have any worth at all. Since the barrage of criticism, the show has apparently been "shunted down the left track," angering conservatives with its "Marxist undertones." This revelation dovetails with the rabbit hole into which I've recently dived concerning pure vs. applied literary criticism and young adult literature. There is a delicious irony in using Marxist criticism (an applied criticism) to point out the death of play in literary exploration. Play is the distinguishing element between the two approaches to literature, I think. Applied criticism seeks to establish that a work is "good for something," that it serves a purpose. Articles on how to use YA literature for this or that fall into this category: awakening empathy or fighting patriarchy as well as more traditional pedagogical concerns. Marxists don't decry the concept of being "really useful," after all. They only demand that one be useful (or at the very least, not harmful) to the right people: in this case, the workers. The other two critical theories Randy Ribay suggests we teach high school kids--feminism and postcolonialism--similarly demand that one be useful to women and indigenous peoples. There is nothing wrong with this: public education has multiple purposes--among them, to create good citizens, and good citizens care about equity and justice. What I am proposing in opposition to the notion of the "really useful engine" kind of literary criticism is sort of a Wildean aesthetism. Oscar Wilde says in the preface to Dorian Gray, "All art is quite useless." He explained himself thusly in a letter: Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression. Wilde's idea is, I fear, denigrated in these times when "everything is political" as dangerously self-indulgent twaddle. More than this shallow understanding of Wildean "art for art's sake," I want to propose the idea that useless literary criticism--an exercise out of pure curiosity, pleasure, and joy, for play--is like pure science as opposed to applied science. The distinction between literature as art and literature to fulfill a useful purpose is sometimes discussed as "pure literature vs. applied literature." Searching for a definitive account of the meaning of those terms, I ended up with George Howe's "An Applied Literature" in an October 1920 issue of Studies in Philology. Which is kind of hilariously out of date. But the concept is solid: is a work "a record of human experience ... the storehouse of the wisdom of the ages ... [a] teacher" (p. 424)? Or is it "a thing of beauty, [and] if we are truly touched by beauty so that we can yield ourselves to it completely, we care not whether it teach, whether it draw a moral, whether it point a lesson, whether it preserve a record, or not" (p. 425)? Although science in general is far better appreciated for its usefulness than literature, "pure science" generates controversy more often than "applied science" for wasting taxpayer funds and that sort of nonsense. After all, the purpose of pure science is to learn things, just as the purpose of pure literature is to make you think and feel stuff. Pretty nebulous. Still, examples abound of pure science resulting--quickly or slowly, directly or indirectly--in technological advances with practical benefits. Likewise, relating to a well-developed character, getting excited over a well-expressed idea, being moved by a turn of phrase, gaining insight from a particular metaphor: these are useful things, in that they enable us to think about ourselves, our world, and our relationships with more clarity and more depth. These may indeed be the keys that unlock a persistent human mystery or deepen an important relationship, which in turn may have any number of practical outcomes. Criticism, when done right, can be just as much an art as fiction or poetry. A work of criticism can aid in accessing all those "pure" benefits of literature, and it can stand on its own as an art object. Unlike explaining a joke, unraveling just why and how a work moves the reader can increase the pleasure of the work (provided the work is robust enough to stand up to a thorough critique) and generate its own pleasure. But it must be done without demands, without an agenda, except simply to play and satisfy curiosity. As Mark William Roche says in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, "[t]he best criticism approaches a work with complex categories but lets the work enrich those categories; it does not come to the work to prove a doctrine already developed" (2004, p. 60). I know I do this thing as a wannabe insider, phrasing a point with urgency as though no one is tackling the issue. Truth is, how would I know? I'm not privy to the academic conversation. I have neither credentials, nor position, nor publication history. It's mostly empty rhetoric and posturing when I do that. However, it cannot be denied that literary criticism in YA lit lags behind grownup lit crit, and that what YA lit crit there is tends to focus on what to do with the literature, or what the literature is doing to the kids. Pure criticism has the added benefit of legitimizing an artwork for itself, instead of as a means to an end, a tool. Think of it this way: Which question is more appreciated by a teenager, What do you want to be when you grow up? or What are you really into right now? Play, after all, is as essential (well, nearly) for adults as it is for children. I am definitely not saying that utilitarian critical and pedagogical theory is unimportant. I want scholars and critics who are so inclined to use those theories to their fullest capability. I want them to tell me which works promote equality and equity for everyone. I want them to tell me who is oppressed, and how, and what we do about it. I want them to tell me how to teach literature most effectively. These are incredibly useful and necessary things. All I'm asking is that those of us who are inclined to play aimlessly with YA literature be granted space and encouragement to do so. This approach occasionally yields useful things, too, although quite by accident. References & Links Donnelly, K. (2018, September 5). Thomas the Tank Engine gets shunted down the left track. Retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/opinion/thomas-the-tank-engine-gets-shunted-down-the-left-track/news-story/788d83ad220d73f9f4800cbcbd03f4b6
Ginsburg, K. R. (2007, January). The importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent-child bonds. Pediatrics 119(1) 182-191; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2006-2697 Howe, G. (1920, October). An applied literature. Studies in Philology17 (4), pp. 423-438. Ribay, R. (2019, November 26). Critical lit theory as preparation for the world (2019 ALAN workshop speech). Retrieved from https://randyribay.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/critical-lit-theory-as-preparation-for-the-world-2019-alan-workshop-speech/ Roake, J. (2011, July 26). Thomas the imperialist tank engine. Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2011/07/thomas-the-tank-engine-the-popular-children-s-show-is-sadly-nostalgic-for-british-imperialism.html Roche, M. W. (2004). Why literature matters in the 21st century. Yale University Press. Thomas & friends. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.thomasandfriends.com/en-ca Tolentino, J. (2017, September 28). The repressive, authoritarian soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends”. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-repressive-authoritarian-soul-of-thomas-the-tank-engine-and-friends Tridone, E. (2019, May 12). An intellectual review of “Thomas & Friends”. Retrieved from http://udreview.com/an-intellectual-review-of-thomas-friends/ Usher, S. (2010, January 4). Art is useless because.... Retrieved from https://lettersofnote.com/2010/01/04/art-is-useless-because/ Van Slyke, T. (2014, July 22). Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/thomas-the-tank-engine-children-parents Wilde, O. (2007). The Picture of Dorian Gray (Second Ed., M. P. Gillespie, Ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
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AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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