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Challenging the Textual Authority of Children's Literature: Reading Cinderella

When functional literacy is emphasized in reading a text, the relationship between the writer and reader can be understood in terms of power: readers, as powerless, are supposed to take the writer’s message in the text for granted. In a literary work, the writer implicitly reveals the message he or she intends to convey in the text by employing literary devices such as a title, an epigraph, a story introduction, illustrations, and book reviews. When we encourage students to follow those guideline on reading offered by the writer, the literacy training is likely to disempower rather than empower them. When students are engaged in critical literacy, they are likely to disrupt the typical power relationship between the writer and reader. They detect and challenge the writer’s messages in the text, investigating them from multiple perspectives. In such a process, the power of the writer ultimately can be challenged when his or her text turns out to be illogical or non-commonsensical. From a critical literacy stance, Cinderella can be understood as a text with many parts that are neither logical nor commonsensical. In the animated version of the story, most of those parts were reconstructed, and thus sound more logical and commonsensical. When we teach a literary work for children, we can encourage students to challenge the authority of the writer by finding illogical or non-commonsensical parts in the text. Also, when leading them to rewrite those parts, we need to empower them. When they become writers themselves, the typical power relationship between the writer and reader ultimately can be challenged.