Childhood, Death, Disease, and Disability
The idea of the child is imbued with futurity, as Lee Edelman argues in No Future (2004), and potentiality, as Clementine Beauvais argues in The Mighty Child (2015), which endows the death of a child and the loss of its futurity and potentiality with a profound impact. Indeed, child death often has been deployed in literature and culture across different regional contexts for strategic ends that exploit this impact and resonate with religious models, as well as political, ideological, and ethical critiques of society. This talk examines illustrative examples where the death of a child is employed for strategic ends in literature and culture from Slavic, American, and Scandinavian contexts, as well as other examples of death, disease, and disability in literature intended for an audience of children. Examining the function of death, disease, and disability in these works and in their broader cultural, historical, and societal contexts, it first will show how the death of a child is deployed in ways that may be sanctifying in accordance with religious models, galvanizing for political or ideological ends, or offer a call to conscience in confrontation with challenging historical moments that demand a response. It then will demonstrate how representations of death, disease, and disability in children’s literature have served to cultivate compassion, including in audiences of children, and build a better society or support social reform. Drawing on vivid examples of child death from films by Russian directors Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, literature by American writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison, and books by exiled Slavic writers Vladimir Nabokov and Svetlana Alexievich, as well as children’s literature by Swedish writers Martha Sandwall-Bergström and Astrid Lindgren, this talk will highlight the varied functions and uses for which the death of the child is deployed and show how childhood confrontations with death, disease, or disability serve to hold up a mirror to society and offer a scathing social critique, where society is held to account for the death of the child and/or where audiences are shown a better and more ethical alternative.