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• W2065085675 abstract "When Criticism Comes Alive:я Toys Us? Mitzi Myers (bio) When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development, by Lois Rostow Kuznets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Literature is a teddy bear. Murray M. Schwartz Expressing eighteenth-century notions of sociality, both Jonathan Swift and David Hume memorably describe their pleasure in embodied books, texts that come alive and speak personally to them or, if the subject is curious and interesting enough, carry the reader also into company, thus uniting the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and society. Because most academic critics sound like other academic critics, rather than possessing an idiosyncratic or authentically human speaking voice, they seldom deliver the sociable pleasures the Enlightenment valued, however much freight of learning or theory they carry. We may learn, but we're seldom pleased or enlivened. As readers of Lois Kuznets's other work might expect, this study is different. No doubt her style has been tempered to some degree, but one of the reasons that these tales of toys come alive are enjoyable is that they sound like a real person taking an individual stance on matters that she cares about, admitting freely that her choices are personal, not comprehensive. And the topic is surely curious and interesting. The preface begins with the author's early childhood discovery of the secret lives of toys, and as this opening suggests, the book deals with this particular aspect of toys, although as it turns out, that secret [End Page 181] life is much more varied than a reader might predict. One value of good criticism is that it not only explores a field using a particular approach but also opens out other and different ways of thinking about the topic. Individual authors have elicited much attention, a great deal has been written on dolls and what used to be called baby houses, and a flood of recent work on the current commodification of child culture, especially the hyping of toys as TV tie-ins, seems unceasing (and ever more disheartening). But toys and the narratives they generate, like many other areas in children's literature, have not been comprehensively explored. I'm sure that many readers will think of critical stories about toys they want to tell, and no doubt many teachers will also think of additions they might make to their syllabi. I can imagine, for example, some delicious seminars composed around toy stories, and this seems to be one area where students are wonderfully imaginative (or so I judge from those students I've had who tried the genre). The first chapter, An Introduction to My World of Literary Toys, offers a brief, personal overview of what the book covers and how the material will be approached. Animated toys as characters, we can expect, will transcend the real-world uses of toylike objects to become bearers of, and surrogates for, human subjectivity. First, when toys become real, they embody our own anxiety about what being real means. I feel that current work on the construction of subjectivity might complexify this issue even further: an independent subject or self as opposed to an object polarizes the possibilities, when (as the book's own later discussions vividly show) toys and dolls may be constructed as subjects, just like people, in all kinds of disjunctive and sometimes contradictory ways. Second, toy characters are especially night beings, associated with sex, secrets, and the Freudian uncanny (itself a much richer concept than the original psychoanalytical explication of The Sandman allows—it's recently proved helpful in postcolonial political analysis, for example). Third, and most resonant for me, is the toy's embodiment of all the temptations and responsibilities of power. Finally, especially for male creators, toys replicate divine creation. (There's rather more in the book about the divine than I expected, probably because I think of toy-origin stories mostly in relation to the exponential increase of playthings in late eighteenth-century England, when, as J. H. Plumb pointed out twenty years ago, the enormous number and variety of toys signaled a new world for children, a precursor to our own commercialization of the [End Page 182] juvenile..." @default.
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• W2065085675 title "When Criticism Comes Alive: я Toys Us?" @default.
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