‘read’ which have attracted most attention from analysts. Even when children have been
studied, it has typically not been children in some actual context of lived experience but
individual, displaced acts of perception and cognition which experimenters have probed.
Margaret Meek comments, on the basis of a lifetime’s interest in children’s literature and
reading development,
In all of the books I have read about reading and teaching reading there is scarcely
a mention about what is to be read. Books are, as the saying goes, taken as read in
the discussions about reading teaching. The reading experts, for all their
understanding about ‘the reading process’, treat all text as the neutral substance
on which the process works, as if the reader did the same thing with a poem, a
timetable, a warning notice.
Meek 1988:5Only in the last decade has a different formulation, ‘Texts construct children’s reading’,
entered discussions about how children learn to read, although understanding of the
agency of texts in the making of readers has now become an important aspect of the
children’s literature field. Scholars such as Meek and Nodelman (1988) cross the
established boundaries of academic disciplines to develop their accounts of the subtlety
and significances of literary texts written for children, often surprising readers by how
transdisciplinary the reach of such work is, and needs must be. Such studies draw on
research in semiotics, socio-cultural theories of children’s mental development, histories
of literacy and, increasingly, anthropological and sociological studies of cultural
differences in narrative practices.
Meek writes in particular of the ‘untaught lessons’ in reading, those which readers
experience only through deep involvement in what they read and through sharing
readings with others (1988:7). These accounts of untaught reading lessons rest on the
textuality of the literature children read, and they therefore require careful investigation
of how meanings are built up by the patterning of visual and linguistic elements of
individual texts. It is worth taking a few moments with the detail so that the specific
resources for these signifying practices are made visible.
Since Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak 1970) counts as an example of a text which
many children become deeply involved with, it is a useful ‘test case’ for the argument.
Some economy can be achieved by asking a specific question about children’s reading of
narrative: how does a child reader learn about the development of plot from the semiotic
patterning of this text? This is surely one crucial aspect of being able to read like a
‘model reader’, in Eco’s (1994) sense.
Perhaps the most obvious source of understanding of plot relations is the excitement
of the depicted events, from which comes the necessity to turn the page. But that is not
all there is to say about the resource of the text for this learning. How is the sense of
event and, perhaps more importantly, the significance of event, given by the patterning
of the resources of language and image?
Consider those images in which Max looks directly at the viewer/reader, in contrast
with those in which his gaze is directed ‘within’ the represented world. There are three
such images. The first occurs just after the bedroom begins to become a forest, and just
566 APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE