Communications Question

586984research-article2015
NMS0010.1177/1461444815586984New Media & SocietyBallatore and Natale
Article
E-readers and the death of
the book: Or, new media and
the myth of the disappearing
medium
new media & society
1 –16
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444815586984
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Andrea Ballatore
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Simone Natale
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Abstract
The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the
death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we
analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print
books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of technofundamentalist progress. We argue that in order to comprehend such narratives, we
need to inscribe them in the broader history of media. The emergence of new media,
in fact, has often been accompanied by narratives about the possible disappearance
of older media: the introduction of television, for instance, inspired claims about the
forthcoming death of film and radio. As a recurrent narrative shaping the reception of
media innovation, the myth of the disappearing medium helps us to make sense of the
transformations that media change provokes in our everyday life.
Keywords
Biographies of media, digital turn, e-book, end of books, e-reader, media history,
media imaginary, new media, old media, print media
Corresponding author:
Andrea Ballatore, Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA
93106, USA.
Email: aballatore@spatial.ucsb.edu
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Introduction
In The Future of Book, a collection of essays published in 1996, editor Geoffrey Nunberg
noted that prophecies of a future where printed books had been superseded by electronic
media often dominated the public discussion on the future of this medium. Despite his
scepticism about the accuracy of these predictions, Nunberg (1996) could not resist the
temptation of formulating another prophecy himself: ‘by the end of the decade’, he
wrote, ‘all our current talk of the “end of the book” will sound as dated and quaint as
most of the other forecasts of this type’ (p. 13).
More than 15 years later, prophecies about the end of the book are far from disappearing. Although it is now a given that people can read effectively on the screen as well as
on paper (Stoop et al., 2013), the recent commercial success of e-readers gave new credit
to the idea that books were going to ‘die’ in debates about the role and the influence of
digital media. When e-reading devices from different companies started to flood consumer markets in the 2000s, the end of the print book became again a common trope in
journalistic commentaries that reflected on the impact of new technologies on the act of
reading. Also in the academic field, while most authors tend to argue that electronic
books (e-books) will likely coexist with print books rather than substitute them, many
continue to refer to predictions about the end of the book as a rhetorical starting point to
introduce their counterargument (e.g. Sica, 2011).
This article aims to discuss these predictions and to frame them in the broader context
of the history and theory of media. If we look more broadly at the history of media, in
fact, we discover that even before the advent of digital media, prophecies about the possible disappearance of an old medium as a consequence of the introduction of a new one
have often shaped debates about technology, innovation and their impact on society and
culture. We will therefore address the following question: what does the recurrence of
this prophecy tell us about media and, most of all, about how they are perceived, experienced and imagined? The reason of the persistence of this myth, we argue, lies in its
narrative structure: it is a striking tale about the transformative power of technology, easy
to remember and to spread. Particularly in the case of media such as books, which are
omnipresent as material objects in everyday life, media change may be perceived as
something that calls into question established habits and patterns of interaction with the
environment. One of the strategies we employ in order to make sense of such changes is
the use of narrative patterns that are available and familiar, such as narratives of death
and ending. The myth of the disappearing medium has been so influential in this context
because it provides a familiar narrative to domesticate the transformations stimulated by
the emergence of new media. It reminds us of the extent to which media change is perceived as the harbinger of innovation as well as loss, as a creative but at the same time
destructive process. More broadly, it serves as an encouragement to media historians to
reflect on the close links between the ways media histories are constructed and the inner
dynamics of narration and storytelling.
Erkki Huhtamo (1997) proposes that the aim of media archaeology, a branch of media
history of which he is one of the leading figures, should be to study ‘recurring cyclical
phenomena that (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history, somehow seeming to transcend specific historical contexts’ (p. 222). Huhtamo
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called these recurring phenomena topoi, borrowing a term that goes back to the classical
rhetorical tradition, where they referred to prefabricated formulae, which could be
employed in the composition of orations. Our examination of the myth of the death of the
book and, more generally, of the disappearing medium relies on a similar approach. The
recurrence of these prophecies allows us to employ media history as a means to better
comprehend present configurations and, conversely, to use the case of digital media to
learn something about how media change is perceived and represented (see Park et al.,
2011). As Kermode (2000) points out, the invocations of such apocalyptic discontinuities
can be regarded as expressions of a fictional paradigm deployed to find coherent patterns
in the flow of change.
This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will examine how the idea
that the book is dying has shaped the debate on the introduction of digital technologies,
particularly of e-books and e-readers. In the second part, we will discuss the myth of the
disappearing medium, according to which a new medium is perceived as a menace for
older ones, as a topos that often characterizes the reception of new media in the public
sphere. As we will show, this myth conceals a particular vision of media change.
E-readers and the death of the book
The emergence of e-books and e-readers did not follow a trajectory of incremental success, but rather a series of faltering starts and uneasy acceptances. The development of
the actual idea of the e-book is principally attributed to Andries van Dam, who coined the
term working on a hypertext system in 1967, and Michael Hart, who founded Project
Gutenberg in 1971. Despite the promise of a new age of virtual libraries, for two decades
e-books were constrained to large, desktop-based machines, which substantially limited
their adoption and appeal. The development of e-readers, therefore, responded to the
need for portable devices that could facilitate the reading of e-books. Unlike tablet PCs,
which are presented as general-purpose devices, e-readers use technical innovations such
as the e-ink screen to mimic the appearance and features of print books, enabling new
forms of distribution and consumption of long texts.
The first wave of the commercialization of e-readers started in the late 1990s, to end
abruptly in the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. During this period, e-readers did not succeed
in finding broad commercial applications and were generally dismissed as a failed technology or, as a human–computer interaction expert simply put it, as ‘a bad idea’ (Nielsen,
1998). This state of affairs was subject to a radical transformation in the late 2000s, when
a second wave of e-readers was launched. In a phase of rapid commercial expansion,
these enhanced e-readers, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, gained
prominence in the consumer market. As a result of these changes in production and consumption patterns, the print book is seen at the crossroad between declining revenues for
publishers, disaggregation of content across online platforms, shortening attention span,
explosion of fragmented reading habits, disappearance of physical bookstores and loss of
committed readers. Although it is not possible to quantify the predicaments of the book
purely in economic terms, it is uncontroversial that print-based business models and
practices are experiencing a radical and at times painful re-configuration (Murray and
Squires, 2013).
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In the 1990s, in a digital media landscape dominated by the growing World Wide Web
and bulky desktop computers, the debate on the mortality of print books revolved around
the alleged superiority of the hypertext and its non-linearity, rather than directly on the
physical properties of paper. The resolution of computer screens was deemed too low to
be even comparable to paper, and e-ink was considered only as a promising but yet unrealized possibility (Nunberg, 1996). In contrast, the commercial success of e-reader technologies in the late 2000s moved the discussion from the textual organization of the text
to a focus on the delivery technology. If the codex is not going to die, the print book
might be the next sacrificial victim of digital media.
Well in the 2010s, it is apparent that paper has not disappeared and that hypertext is
far from having killed the codex as a cultural form. In what York (2006) calls the
‘Paperless Office Paradox’, digital media have occasionally raised demand for paper,
rather than leading to its disappearance. Web-based hypertexts have proven very successful in specific contexts, such as general reference (e.g. Wikipedia), journalism
(newspaper websites tend to host highly interlinked short texts) and technical manuals.
However, the linearity of the codex has not been abandoned and has been only marginally enriched by hypertextuality. E-books can contain hyperlinks, but they are used primarily in footnotes or references, not in the body of the text. Furthermore, the codex and
its linearity have showed considerable resilience in the face of the cluttered, overloaded
realm of the Web, offering a reassuring refuge. Long, linear texts are not only still produced, but digital media have enabled a boom of self-publishing and low-cost distribution of novels in the United States (Bowker, 2012). The disintermediation of the
publishing process enables a plethora of new modes of publications, such as fan fiction
and collaborative authorship (Soules, 2009).
While paper and the codex are usually not perceived to be in peril in their individual
forms, concerns have frequently focused on the health of their combination, the printed
book. Prophecies about the end of the book are mainly articulated around two narratives:
print books are endangered and their death could have catastrophic consequences (section ‘The death of the book as the end of humanism’); print books will be inexorably
killed by digital media, and this event will have liberating effects (section ‘Liberating the
book from its mortal coil’). A third narrative, according to which print books will not die
and will coexist with digital media, with mixed and unclear effects (section ‘Coexistence
of e-books and print books’), has emerged, countering prophecies on the end of the book
(see Table 1). As a closer examination of each of them shows, the anxiety surrounding
the possible death of book was deployed as a metaphorical device to frame discussions
on the impact of digital media on cultural, social and economic practices.
The death of the book as the end of humanism
Because education in the humanities traditionally relies on print books, neo-luddites
associate the virtues of critical appraisal of classics with the medium on which such
activity is generally performed, the print book. As digital computers displace print books
from their pedestal, essayist Sven Birkerts (1994) wrote in his nostalgic elegy that ‘literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; … the bound book is
the ideal vehicle for the written word’ (p. 6). In this technologically deterministic
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Table 1. Narratives about the future of the book.
Print book,
codex, paper
PC, hypertext,
screen
(1980s–1990s)
E-reader,
e-book, e-ink
(2000s, 2010s)
Narrative 1 (end of
humanism)
Narrative 2 (digital
utopia)
Narrative 3
(coexistence)
Repository of civic
and humanist values.
Deep reading, sensorial
experience. Superseded
by digital media (and
should not be)
Loss of humanist values,
superficial reading
habits. Dominance
of hypertext. Loss of
sensorial dimension
Loss of senses, damage
to publishing industry.
Status of the print book
diminished
Outdated medium to
store and retrieve text.
Superseded by digital
media (and should be)
Resilient medium
that is not likely to
be superseded by the
other two media
Revolution of
communications,
hypertext as intrinsically
superior to codex,
liberation of information
Increased access to long
texts, long tail economy
for books
Coexistence with print
books. Hypertext
not suitable in many
contexts
Coexistence with print
books. Suitable for
linear reading of fiction,
less so for study/work
on long texts
narrative, the emergence of digital media, in particular in their hypertextual form, causes
a loss of values and, ultimately, humanity. Philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann
(1984) advanced carefully pessimistic arguments on the societal effects of digital technologies. From a complementary perspective, Dreyfus (2008) critiqued the promise of
the Web for education, stressing the embodied nature of reading and learning. In this
respect, Thierer (2011) provides a comprehensive review of ‘techno-pessimists’ who
lament negative cultural effects of the Web, including Neil Postman, Todd Gitlin, Mark
Helprin, Maggie Jackson and Andrew Keen.
In recent years, concerns about the apparent impossibility of ‘deep reading’ on computers have been discussed, suggesting a McLuhanesque anthropological change,
induced by the interaction with short texts online versus long texts on paper (Carr, 2010).
J.P. de Tonnac describes the loss of printed pages as something affecting a ‘certain sense
of sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilization that has made it our holy of
holies’ (Carrière and Eco, 2011: vii). The elegy of dying books evokes sensorial properties that are perceived as being central to the medium, and physical features of the print
book have gained an unprecedented centrality in the social and cultural space (MacFadyen,
2011). As e-readers manage to effectively imitate the visual properties of paper, readers
are giving more importance to touch and smell when handling print books, with detectably nostalgic undertones. Nostalgia for print books is inscribed in a general sense of, as
Turner (1987) put it, ‘a historical decline and loss, involving a departure from some
golden age of “homefulness”’ (p. 150). Often considered a ‘lower sense’, smell is a fundamental trigger to nostalgic phenomena (Hirsch, 2006).
The naturalization of books underpins this narrative. Although print books are technological artefacts produced within a complex socio-technical apparatus, they are perceived
as more ‘natural’ and permanent than e-readers (e.g. Basbanes, 2003). Even if both print
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books and e-readers are obviously machines – ‘machines to think with’, as Richards
(2001) defined books – the ‘naturality’ of print books is reinforced by the properties of
paper (p. vii). Unlike the plastic and silicon of electronic devices, paper is an organic
matter, decays, developing unique smells – often very unpleasant, as noted by artist
Rachael Morrison (2011). Different types of paper develop different smells and trigger
different tactile responses. Moreover, print books, especially cheap ones, ‘remember’ the
reader’s passage by altering their physical structure, while e-readers are seen as impersonal, static and doomed to obsolescence in unstable technological markets.
Although e-readers mimic them in many respects, books still attract praise for their
versatility. As late as 2009, Eco re-stated as an argument in favour of print books that
computers ‘cannot be read in a bath, or even lying on your side in bed’ (Carrière and Eco,
2011: 4). Annie Proulx stated that ‘nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a
twitchy little screen. Ever’ (quoted in O’Donnell, 1996: 37). Ray Bradbury, who actively
tried to prevent the publication of his works as e-books, stated that e-readers ‘aren’t
books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not
smell’ (Weller, 2010). What he perceived as the future death of print books was something that Bradbury actively fought, until his death in 2012.
Liberating the book from its mortal coil
The second narrative hinges on the death of print books from an opposite perspective:
instead of being praised as sacred repositories of wisdom, print books are seen as an
obsolete medium that will be inexorably replaced by a more efficient digital device, with
predominantly positive consequences. In this narrative, it is possible to find echoes of
more radical critiques of the print book and its structure, particularly in relation to its
perceived authority. In 1909, the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (2006)
invited his followers to burn down libraries (p. 14). Also, as part of the Student-Writer
Action committee in 1968, Maurice Blanchot envisaged the overthrow of the book,
which ‘held knowledge prisoner’ (Carrière and Eco, 2011: 261). More recently, Gomez
(2008) stated that ‘pages are cages, trapping the words within boundaries’ (p. 14), seemingly oblivious of the dominance that the page exerts on digital media.
These provocations can be seen as rooted in the hypertextual imagination inaugurated
by Bush (1945: 57) and his early vision of the Memex. The liberating potential of the
hypertext has been celebrated by a diverse array of technologists and thinkers, starting
from Ted Nelson’s (1992) claim that ‘[o]pen hypertext publishing is the manifest destiny
of free society’ (p. 57). This strand of what Turner (2006) dubbed ‘digital utopianism’
was championed by Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Nicholas Negroponte – who stated in
2010 that print books will be ‘dead in five years’ (Siegler, 2010). From a complementary
viewpoint, the decentralized information sharing enabled by the web attracted praise
from scholars Yochai Benkler (2006) and Clay Shirky (2008) – writing from a libertarian
perspective, Thierer (2011) surveyed such notable ‘techno-optimists’ systematically. In
media forecasts, Duguid (1996) identified two recurring themes. On the one hand, new
media aim at the supersession of existing media, in post-modern radical breaks with the
‘burden of the past’. On the other, liberationism interprets the development of digital
media as a triumphant march of a free-market-oriented idea of progress. Starting from
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the often-quoted idea that ‘information wants to be free’ (Brand quoted in Turner, 2006:
136), liberationists praise the increased access to texts and the virtues of the immateriality of virtual text.
Technologists of such ideological leanings forecast the death of the book as a hope
rather than a fear, revealing the influence of two main claims about the passage from predigital to digital technologies. First, the success of a new medium can be assessed by its
power of displacement and disruption in the media landscape. A highly successful
medium kills old media in a logic of supersession (Duguid, 1996), and the inevitable and
positive nature of this disruption is the core belief of digital utopianism. Second, the
death of old media should not be mourned as a loss of cultural values and sedimented
social meanings, but should be embraced precisely as evidence of technological progress. Whoever clings to old media should be disposed of along with the medium – notably, Mitchell (1995) referred to bibliophiles as people ‘addicted to the look and feel of
tree-flakes encased in dead cow’ (p. 56). A medium that causes only a slight repositioning in the media landscape is not truly innovative. A new medium creates a new culture
and unleashes latent market forces in a process of Schumpeterian creative destruction.
Bold predictions about the death of books might well be, as O’Donnell (1996) put it,
a ‘mug’s game’, but they constitute a crucial communication device, deployed very often
in mainstream media. Technologists of this inclination tend to fall in what has been
called ‘techno-fundamentalism’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), the optimistic belief that problems are best solved through technological solutions. Digital utopianists also tend to
overlook limitations of e-readers that make the supersession of print books unlikely.
Since the 1980s, a growing body of research in psychology, human–computer interaction and library and information science has studied the differences between reading on
paper and on screen (Holt, 2011; MacFadyen, 2011). According to Jabr (2013), this
growing multi-disciplinary literature does not show a clear consensus, but rather depicts
a complex, rapidly evolving picture. The printed medium shows specific cognitive
advantages for deep reading and active learning, mainly for its physical–spatial organization that facilitates exploration and reinforces retention, although the actual difference in
outcomes is often small or negligible (e.g. Rockinson-Szapkiw et al., 2013). Like volumina, e-readers favour an extremely linear mode of reading, making non-linear access to
long texts clumsy and slow. While they are generally perceived as suitable for linear,
leisure reading, they are often regarded as less adequate for the deep, non-linear reading
practised by students and scholars in an academic setting.
Coexistence of e-books and print books
As the previous two narratives of the death of the book are rightly deemed to be untenable, a third option emerges. This narrative firmly rejects the possibility of the death of
books, emphasizing the patterns of coexistence that are likely to arise. As e-readers
become ubiquitous and their presence has proved to accompany rather than to substitute
paper books, numerous academic and journalistic writers have increasingly followed this
approach. This has resulted in shifting the debate towards a more nuanced consideration
of what the ‘end’ of the book may really mean. Recent academic discussions tend to
abandon the idea that the print book will completely disappear, to focus on issues such as
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the rise of new forms of interaction with texts (MacWilliam, 2013), shortening attention
spans (Hassoun, 2014), changes in the publishing industry and the distribution chain
(Murray and Squires, 2013) or the unrestrained dominance of new private actors such as
Google (Darnton, 2009). In parallel, evidence shows that students still prefer to study on
print books (e.g. Stoop et al., 2013), although the rising adoption of tablets and e-readers,
coupled with the increased availability of digital textbooks, might impact this trend.
In the current context, a new understanding of the book as a social and cultural form
is emerging, stressing the book’s function as a means of communication over its material
form (Weedon et al., 2014). The print or electronic quality of the book is regarded as
secondary to its role as a vehicle of information and as a cultural form. The debate on the
future of the book has been increasingly shifting from the logic of supersession towards
a more nuanced approach that interrogates how writers, readers and the publishing industry react to the ongoing transformations, and how these agents are contributing to reshape
both print and digital forms of publications. In his passionate advocacy for libraries,
book historian Robert Darnton (2009) firmly positions himself in the coexistence strand,
arguing that, unlike the fragile and rapidly changing digital tools, print books are still the
most effective medium to store and share information long-term. The history of media
shows substantial continuities, and Darnton believes that digital media will not entirely
displace paper books. Similarly, ‘manuscript publishing flourished long after Gutenberg’s
invention’ (p. xiv).
Despite its cogency, however, the narrative of coexistence has not yet resulted in a
complete dismissal of the prophecies about the end of the book.1 For example, the
Institute for the Future of the Book alludes to this anxiety in its very name. As the thinktank’s mission states, ‘the printed page is giving way to the networked screen. The
Institute for the Future of the Book seeks to chronicle this shift, and impact its development in a positive direction’ (n.p.).2 Similarly, over the past 5 years, an impressive number of popular publications have mentioned the death of the book in their title.3
Disappearing medium: interrogating a recurrent myth
As we have shown, forecasts of the possible disappearance of books have strongly shaped
public discourse following the recent commercial success of e-readers. Such predictions,
however, are not an isolated case in the history of media technologies. The emergence of
a new medium, in fact, often stimulates prophecies and forecasts about the disappearance
of older media. The introduction of television, for instance, aroused claims about the possible end of cinema and radio; today, the development of digital media inspires predictions about the end of television (Natale and Ballatore, 2014). In order to fully comprehend
contemporary preoccupations about the death of book and to understand how these inform
the perception and use of the new technology of e-readers, it is thus necessary to frame it
in media history and theory. This may also mean interrogating how such preoccupations
are embedded in particular visions of how media change throughout time and how they
influence our societies and our relationship to technology.
Despite the recurrence of prophecies about the possible disappearance of media, the
existence of a pattern that connects the emergence of a new medium with the disappearance of an older one does is not confirmed by historical insight. As scholars such as De
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Sola Pool et al. (1977) and Nye (2004) have shown, technological prophecies have
often been wrong, especially when they were conceived by commentators and not by
inventors or early developers of the technologies to which they referred. Predictions
about the disappearance of media are not an exception: old media frequently do not
disappear but react in complex ways to the introduction of new ones, modifying their
commercial applications and institutional frames or targeting different audiences or
publics (Balbi, 2015). Cinema, for instance, did not die following the introduction of
television, although this was widely perceived as a menace and resulted in strong
changes in the film industry. Nor did television ‘kill’ radio or newspapers, as was feared
by many (Stephens, 1998).
Why does the introduction of a new medium so frequently suggest that older media
should die? One of the reasons is, as Patrice Flichy (1995) notes, that ‘all too often the
inventors of new communication systems reason in terms of substitution, when they
would do better thinking along the lines of shifts of uses and technologies’ (p. 173).
While it might often seem intuitive that a new medium will substitute an older one,
usages might differentiate much more than is expected, opening new fields of application
for ‘old’ media. In this sense, the idea that a medium would die often reveals a narrowly
technical vision of media: ‘specific delivery technologies (the eight-track cassette, say,
or the wax cylinder) may become moribund, but the medium of recorded sound survives’
(Thorburn and Jenkins, 2003: 2).
The tendency to underestimate the flexibility of usages, however, only partially
explains the recurrence of the myth of the disappearing medium in media history. In what
follows, we propose that what made this myth so persistent and influential lies is its narrative nature and the way it converts cultural discourses on the power of technology into
a tale that is easily remembered and can be told again and again. Employing the notion
of ‘biographies of media’ to describe how media change is the subject of narration and
storytelling, we argue that the myth of the disappearing medium helps us to make sense
of the transformations of our everyday life kindled by media change.
Narratives of media change: unveiling the biographies of media
As Alan Liu perceptively notes, the introduction of new media is channelled symbolically through the emergence and diffusion of particular narratives, which he calls ‘narratives of media encounter’. These tales, he points out, are instrumental in shaping the
sociocultural reception of the ongoing change, making it more easily understood and
transmitted (Liu, 2007). In this regard, literary theories on storytelling and biographical
writing are useful to comprehend how such narratives proliferate and become meaningful in the history of media. James Olney famously equated biographical writings to ‘metaphors of the self’, stressing how they provide ways to understand new experiences by
creating a connection with an experience already incorporated in our mindset. Likewise,
narratives of new media encounters are metaphors providing ‘something known and of
our making, or at least at our choosing, that we put stand for, and so to help us understand, something unknown and not of our making’ (Olney, 1972: 30).
It is important to stress that our aim is not to argue that the history of a medium is
similar to the lifetime of an individual. We would like, instead, to point out that the way
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media histories are related and recounted follows narrative patterns that are similar to
those used to relate the story of a person’s life. Indeed, as proposed elsewhere (Natale,
2015), media, like people, are the subject of biographical writing: their biographies, or in
other words the ways their history is the subject of narration and storytelling, contribute
to shape their identities and to carry particular representations of their roles in our society
and everyday life. As Reeves and Nass (1996) have aptly shown, when people interact
with computers, televisions and new media, they often follow some of the same social
rules that lead their interaction with humans. A similar ‘media equation’ – to employ the
term proposed by Reeves and Nass – characterizes in many cases the use of narratives to
describe media change throughout time, too. Similar to how in the biographies of notable
people anecdotes and narrative tropes enforce claims about their personality and broader
notions related to their profession and agency (Kris and Kurz, 1979; Ortoleva, 1996),
‘biographies of media’ play a paramount role in determining how media are represented
and imagined within the public sphere. Unveiling recurring narratives that emerge
repeatedly and in different moments of media history helps therefore to gain new insights
into how media change is represented and imagined. It helps to make sense of how media
are entangled in particular narratives and how these narratives influence their presence
and reception in the public sphere.
Not only with regard to the history of media but also in other contexts scholars have
noted that recurring narrative patterns often reveal the presence of particular cultural
assumptions. To return to the comparison with biographical writings, such patterns often
carry specific assumptions of the character and agency of notable individuals. In biographies of artists, for instance, recurring narrative patterns bring about certain claims about
the nature of artistic creation or the existence of an ‘artistic’ temperament (Kris and Kurz,
1979); in biographies of inventors, they shape the cultural imagination about the act of
invention and the process of innovation (Ortoleva, 1996). In a similar way, narrative patterns such as the disappearance of old media participate in the construction of ‘biographic accounts’ of media, shaping how new and old technologies are represented and
imagined within the public sphere. As Helen Fulton (2005: 7) rightly observes, it is by
employing existing narrative patterns that one structures and makes sense of new experiences and events. The myth of the disappearing medium, in this sense, employs a fictional trope that is deeply engrained in Western culture: the idea that each epoch is
characterized by the end of what came before, and the beginning of something new
(Kermode, 2000). Providing a familiar narrative to domesticate the transformations stimulated by the emergence of new media, it helps ‘to make sense, give comfort’ (p. 44) in
ages of media change.
Innovation, loss, and everyday life
But why has this specific narrative recurred so often in the history of media? What does
the narrative of the disappearing medium tell us about the ways we imagine and make
sense of media change? As Mark Weiser (1991) put it, ‘the most profound technologies
are those that disappear’, those that ‘weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life
until they are indistinguishable from it’ (p. 94). As a result, when a new medium is perceived as the potential substitution for an old one, reactions of emotional affection and
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nostalgia emerge. In media history, many examples of similar reactions can be found.
The shift from silent to sound movie, for instance, stimulated nostalgia for the older
form. The same happened in the shift from analogue to digital photography and film
(Marks, 1997) or from black and white to colour television (Barnouw, 1990).
The feeling of nostalgia is particularly strong in cases such as the book, in which the
old medium is also a material object (Appadurai, 1986; Attfield, 2000) that can be conserved, collected and be the subject of emotional attachment (Miller, 2008). This
explains, also, why the narrative of the disappearing medium has been particularly relevant in the reception of innovations in fields such as sound recording: since the origins
of this technology, in fact, the act of listening has always been accompanied by the desire
to collect and by a sometimes fetishistic attachment to records as material objects
(Gitelman, 2006: 25–57). In periods of technological transition, this might result in the
feeling, perceived by many, that new formats, like digital compact discs, are less ‘authentic’ than older ones, such as the vinyl record (Davis, 2007).
Discussing contemporary reactions to the introduction of e-books and e-readers, Ted
Striphas notes how these innovations have put into question habits and expectations that
characterize our everyday life. He observes that the everyday is what can be counted on,
something that provides the necessary stability to manage our experience and our social
life; books, in this context, are perceived as ‘everyday entitlements’ (Striphas, 2009: 11),
that is, objects that help manage such stability and shape expectations in everyday life. It
is also because they jeopardize our perception of everyday life, he speculates, that
e-books ‘appear to some as harbinger of loss of knowledge, authority, history, artistry,
and meaning’ (p. 22).
In order to theoretically frame similar reactions, it is useful to refer to the concept of
the aura in Walter Benjamin. Benjamin (1968) developed the concept of the aura particularly in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he
argued that film and other technologies of technical reproduction diminished the aura
that belonged to earlier, irreproducible works of arts. Recently, Jay David Bolter and his
collaborators have proposed a particular interpretation of Benjamin’s notion, arguing for
the possibility of employing it in reference to digital technologies. According to their
view, the aura should be regarded as a changing concept, which does not only concern
the shift from uniqueness to reproducibility following the introduction of photography
and film but also the reception of other new media forms in different times. The introduction of reproducible media such as photography and film should therefore be regarded as
one episode in a more general crisis of the aura, which is replicated today in the reactions
stimulated in the public by the digital turn. This crisis is connected to the capacity of
media technologies to generate an aura, convincing the user ‘that she is in the presence
of the authentic’ (Bolter et al., 2006: 29). In this sense, the notion of the aura could be
employed to explain reactions of nostalgia kindled by the experience of loss of everyday
certainties or ‘entitlements’ (Striphas, 2009: 11) such as books. Contemporary reactions
to the introduction of digital technologies, which point to their diminished authenticity
and to nostalgia for older media, can thus be read as the revived emergence of worries
about a loss of the aura and authenticity in novel media forms. Indeed, as Vivian Sobchack
(1999) has shown, feelings of nostalgia are evoked by virtually all technological turns –
even when these are limited to changes in computer software.
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new media & society
The idea that the experience of reading on a digital device lacks authenticity/aura is
also corroborated by some recent surveys on the reception of e-readers (Shin, 2011: 266).
It is important, moreover, to note that issues such as the smell of the binding and the feel
of paper started to play a more significant role when e-reader and e-book technologies
began to be perceived as a menace to the old paper book. Before that, neither the mainstream literary culture nor the academic culture of the 19th and 20th centuries showed
much interest in these material qualities (Rindisbacher, 1992). Paradoxically, the smell
of paper becomes meaningful only to the extent that this is perceived as something that
might disappear. A similar dynamic can be observed also in other cases in the history of
media: with the passage from vinyl to digital music recording, for instance, the former
has increasingly been regarded as a cult object and an item for collecting (Davis, 2007).
This might suggest that elements connected to the materiality of old media gain additional relevance in moments of crisis of the aura. As a consequence, something that could
well be understood as a minor change in the media form of the book, such as the material
shift from printed books to e-books, acquires particular emphasis in a moment of technological change. After all, as Striphas (2009) recalls, the everyday is
kind of like trusted friends, who are there for us day in and day out. It’s as though they’ve
always been a part of our lives, and the meaningfulness and stability they provide may not fully
register until they’re gone. (p. 10)
The interpretation of the idea of the aura as connected to a perceived loss of authenticity
in new media is particularly relevant to our discourse if we recall Flichy’s (1995) call to
consider the social use of a given technology – and with it, its insertion into everyday life
– as being not less meaningful than issues of technique and standard (p. 173). In order to
explain predictions about disappearing media, it is of crucial importance to understand
how media enter into the existence of people, how they build emotional bonds and how
they are treated as an integral part of one’s life (Appadurai, 1986). The sense that new
media such as e-readers bring with them a deficit of authenticity or ‘aura’ in Bolter
et al.’s terms, in this sense, is revealing of a perception of media change as a process in
which innovation is inseparable from loss. As we have attempted to show, this perception
is deeply engrained in the narrative of the end of the book and in recurring narratives
about the disappearance of other media.
Conclusion
Addressing the complex spectrum of imaginary constructions connected to hype about
digital media, Vincent Mosco (2004) used the word myth to label those stories ‘that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of
the banality of everyday life’ (p. 3). Such stories do not necessarily need to be false: what
is relevant, instead, is their capacity to resonate in the culture of their age. As Mosco
(2004) observes, in fact, myths ‘are not true or false, but living or dead’ (p. 3).
Predictions about the disappearance of books are, in this regard, myths in Mosco’s
sense. In order to understand their significance for the reception and the acceptance of
new reading technologies, we need to go beyond the question whether they are false or
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Ballatore and Natale
true. It is, after all, difficult if not impossible to predict how e-readers and e-books will
evolve in the future and whether the book will blend with other, non-linear media towards
new forms of digital storytelling. Books might eventually disappear in the future: in fact,
the very nature of predictions as hypothetical claims makes it impossible – or forcefully
speculative – to consider them either true or false (Natale, 2014). Such prophecies, however, are revealing of the way societies regard media as vehicles for change – precisely
because they are embedded in the idea of the future. The debate on the death of the book
we have examined, therefore, can tell us much about how media change and the digital
turn are perceived and represented within the public sphere. As we have argued, this
debate should be seen as the manifestation of a particular vision of the effects on our
society and on our lives brought about by new digital media.
Excavating the roots of this media myth provides us with a better understanding of
how new media are perceived as elements of innovation, but also as the carriers, to a
certain extent, of loss and deprivation. Such a representation of media change is paramount in discussions between those who see the e-reader as a threat for the book and
those who deny this might ever occur. Either one might be wrong, but both are revealing
of some of the deepest concerns aroused by the emergence of digital media, as well as by
other new media in history. The ‘death’ of the book, as a medium and an object that has
become such an important part of our life and of the world as we know it, might in fact
be quite easily mistaken for a sign of the inescapability of our own end.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
A quantitative hint on the surge of public interest in the death of the book from the 1970s can
be observed in the Google N-Gram Viewer: http://goo.gl/4eJOxk (accessed 7 May 2015).
http://futureofthebook.org/mission.html (accessed 7 May 2015).
Other examples of titles include ‘Caterwauling over death of books is premature’, ‘How
eBooks will lead to the disappearance of books’ and ‘The death of the book, again’.
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Author biographies
Andrea Ballatore is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Spatial Studies, University of
California, Santa Barbara (spatial.ucsb.edu). His interdisciplinary research focuses on the digital
representations of place, crowdsourcing and the technological imaginary at the intersection
between computer science, media studies and geography. In 2013, Andrea received a PhD in
Geographic Information Science from University College Dublin. He has worked as a lecturer at
the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and as a
software engineer in Italy and Ireland.
Simone Natale is a research associate at the Institute for Cultural Theory and History, Humboldt
University Berlin. He is the author of The Spectacular Supernatural: Spiritualism and the Rise of
the Media Entertainment Industry (forthcoming in 2016 with Pennsylvania State University Press)
and of articles published in peer-reviewed journals such as Media, Culture & Society; Media
History; the Canadian Journal of Communication; Early Popular Visual Culture; and History of
Photography.
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Article
Emotional Justice as an
antidote to loneliness:
children’s books, listening and
connection
Feminist Theory
2022, Vol. 23(1) 125–139
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14647001211062746
journals.sagepub.com/home/fty
Shoshana Magnet
Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa,
Canada
Catherine-Laura Dunnington
Department of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
Loneliness is intimately related to the ongoing epidemics of systemic forms of oppression, including white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism.
The epidemic of loneliness has only intensiﬁed and grown during the isolation engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we aim to think about how children’s
picturebooks wrestle with explaining loneliness and its antidotes (connection, community) and how these picturebooks are themselves manifestations of ongoing conversations related to Emotional Justice. We conclude by reviewing a number of children’s
books in order to think about how the picturebook might itself be an artifact that
helps to ﬁght feelings of loneliness as well as teaching children and adults alike about
the importance of connection.
Keywords
Affect theory, children’s picturebooks, critical race theory, Emotional Justice, loneliness
studies
Corresponding author:
Shoshana Magnet, Professor, Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa, 120 Universite,
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: smagnet@uottawa.ca
126
Feminist Theory 23(1)
Our movements themselves have to be healing, or there’s no point to them. (Cara Page,
Kindred: Southern Healing Justice Collective, https://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-sobrief-personal-history-healing-justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016)
Introduction
Discussions abound on the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to and intensiﬁcation of an ongoing public health epidemic of loneliness. From immigrants and refugees
who lack connections in their new homes (Said, 1990), to millennials who are working
hours that make it difﬁcult for them to connect with others (Fekete et al., 2018), to the
elderly and people with disabilities who may have health challenges that inhibit them
from maintaining connections, a signiﬁcant rise in loneliness was well documented
even before the start of the pandemic (Bruce et al., 2019; Mund et al., 2019).
Loneliness invites many deﬁnitions from such disparate ﬁelds as health economics
(Macdonald et al., 2018), urban planning (Okkels et al., 2017), nursing (Pitkala, 2016),
social work (Hagan, 2020), psychology (Cacioppo et al., 2015), sociology (Bauman,
2007; Illouz, 2007; Yang, 2019), literature (Bentley, 2019) and memoir (Laing, 2016;
Nagata, 2016). These include feelings of aloneness or apartness from others or a desire
for the company of others that goes unmet – including an ‘unwelcome feeling of lack
of companionship’ (Bekhet et al., 2008: 207). The challenging effects of loneliness are
documented everywhere – from its signiﬁcant role in depression and anxiety, to its contribution to a decrease in life expectancy, to its role in the rise of totalitarianism (Arendt,
1985) and premature death (Gilmore, 2007). From the unprecedented pandemic lockdown, to sped-up and longer workdays, to the upheaval caused by neoliberal policies
and climate change, to the impact of ongoing forms of ‘white supremacist capitalist
(hetero)patriarchy’ (hooks, 2000: 90), to the prison industrial complex or the impact of
placing romantic love and the nuclear family at the centre of governmental laws and policies (Strömquist, 2018), the structural challenges to our abilities to come together in community are monumental. With shaming and blaming culture on the rise, a cultural trend
only facilitated by new media and information technologies (Huffman, 2016), our ability
to form communities and live across difference needs strengthening. In this article, we
posit that children’s books – books speciﬁcally focused on teaching children how to identify and make space for their emotions including their feelings of loneliness and their need
for connection – are central for learning both to identify and tolerate loneliness and to
come together. As children’s books are a form of reading practice that can be both collective and community-oriented (reading out loud with a child, reading to a group), they
also may be understood as a helpful tool for combatting loneliness while they provide the
possibility of learning about one’s emotional landscape.
Children’s books are uniquely skilled at clearly distilling complex teachings about
how to tolerate one’s difﬁcult emotions, as they explain to children (and adults) how
to identify and sit with one’s feelings of discomfort (Garner and Parker, 2018;
LaForge et al., 2018). As Rich (1979) reminds us in her foundational essay ‘On Lies,
Magnet and Dunnington
127
Secrets, and Silence’, we must learn to sit with uncomfortable truths, or else we risk shutting ourselves down to the point where we no longer know how we truly feel. This is a
form of lying to oneself, one that Rich argues engenders the ‘greatest loneliness of all’
(Popova, 2014: para. 4), in which we lose contact with our inner voices. Learning to
both name and tolerate our feelings enables us to connect with one another as well as
to respond to one another in ways that are not simply reactive. In this way, books
aimed at teaching emotional skills can facilitate the possibility of connection. In doing
so, they can serve as a profound antidote to loneliness, one of the core teachings
behind bibliotherapy (Sevinç, 2019). By encouraging us to sit with and unpack what it
means to feel ‘bad’ (whether angry, anxious, sad, bewildered, overwhelmed or lonely,
etc.), books that help us to connect to our feelings of sadness, rage or despair also help
us to know when we are feeling moments of quiet joy, elation or contentment, since it
is not possible to shut down our negative feelings without shutting down our positive
feelings (Johnson and Wood, 2017). That is, knowing and allowing ourselves to feel
sad and lonely is what allows us to also feel joy and happiness – because if you shut
out the shadows you also shut out the light (Brown, 2008).
Learning the emotional skills that enable us to come together in community has a longstanding history in movements centred around Emotional Justice. Emotional Justice itself
is rooted in queer of colour, disability and Indigenous thought, and centres the importance
of listening to one another across difference if we are to build collective movements. In
his brilliant novel Starlight (2018), Richard Wagamese examines coming together in
community across difference as a way to heal from the trauma of settler colonialism.
Wagamese highlights the potential of getting in touch with feelings as allowing us to
build community that fosters a sense of interconnectedness – both to one another and
to the natural world. As Wagamese writes:
everything is alive. So everything is movin’. We just think things are still. But if we learn to
sit with things we can get so we can feel them movin’ even if it’s just in a small way at ﬁrst. If
we learn to be real still an’ quiet we can feel like we’re parta all that movin’ and it’s a part of
us (2018: 161).
Following Chela Sandoval, queer of colour theorists Aimee Carillo Rowe and Francesca
T. Royster argue that part of our ongoing political task is to mobilise ‘affect for social
action’ as a critical praxis (2016: 245). In doing so, these thinkers remind us that thinking
about loneliness critically is a social justice project.
Drawing on queer of colour and disability theory about the possibilities of Emotional
Justice strategies aimed at enhancing our emotional skills as well as our tolerance for discomfort, we think about the possibilities of children’s books for building these skills. We
understand these books as part of a larger social justice project aimed at giving us the
expertise that we need to connect with one another. That is, how might children’s
books teach us to frame our universal desires for love and acceptance more broadly
within calls to note our differences, remain present to them and be attentive to the
changes in our ways of living that they require? Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy
and settler colonialism are loneliness-making projects that are destroying communities
128
Feminist Theory 23(1)
and the planet (Tallbear, 2019). How might children’s books teach us to know and understand when we are feeling lonely and to tolerate those feelings, as well as giving us the
skills to engage with one another? How are children’s books a medium organised around
listening, as well as a form of collective reading practice that helps to teach the skills that
are so essential to growing healthy, emotionally just communities?
‘Feminist Loneliness Studies’ and Emotional Justice
A feminist commitment to prioritising connection over individual achievement can be a
path that feels deeply countercultural at times. Political forms of disconnection are found
everywhere. From everyday systemic microaggressions to busy modern lives in which
we run frantically from one event to another with too little time to connect – all can
leave behind feelings of existential aloneness. In the poetic words of memoirist Olivia
Laing, loneliness is that feeling that makes it ‘possible – easy, even – to feel desolate
and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others’, as loneliness
doesn’t require ‘physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection’
(2016: 3). As Robert Weiss notes in his ground-breaking study of loneliness, it is in
fact a state:
hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot
be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connection. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness
arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as
well as long for the society of others (Weiss, 1975, cited in Laing, 2016: 41–42).
In words, loneliness is intimately connected to systemic forms of oppression. Loneliness
is well studied in other particular communities – among the elderly (Nicolaisen and
Thorsen, 2012), among people with Alzheimer’s (Balouch et al., 2019), among people
living with HIV/AIDS (Nokes and Kendrew, 1990; Fekete et al., 2017). Under patriarchy, loneliness is engendered by a system that encourages boys and men not to know
what they feel, a state of not-knowing that leads to disconnection and/or to the dissolution
of relationships. For example, in his work on Emotional Justice, emotions educator and
activist Yolo Akili Robinson (2012) describes a man he saw in his practice:
I can recall speciﬁcally one scenario working with a young man, let’s call him ‘Marlon’, who
kept going on and on about how his wife was ‘too emotional’ and ‘too sensitive’ and how he
and all other men were not like that.
Upon hearing this, I invited him to revisit the scenario that led him to work on his anger. He
then recanted how he threw a chair, screamed at his wife, broke two mirrors and pushed his
wife up against the wall.
After he ﬁnished his story I asked him, ‘Now tell me Richard, was that … emotional?’
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His response: ‘I was angry, that’s … different.’
Here we see clearly how many men are taught to not see their hurt and rage as an emotion.
Instead the women in their lives are the embodiment of emotion, and they themselves perceive to be completely rational. In this case, the emotional disconnection of patriarchy has
performed its function, which is not to remove emotionality from male embodied people, but
to disconnect and push them into deep denial about their emotional complexity, and project/
unload that onto women.
Emotional Justice holds that it is a form of feminist activism to begin to learn what we are
feeling, in part so that we might learn how to stay in connection and community with one
another. As we will show below, children’s books are uniquely skilled at allowing us to
do so. Without an understanding of our emotions, people do not even know that they feel
lonely and nor do they know how to connect. And of course, loneliness is intersectionally
meted out and received. From the loneliness of a person of colour trying to name racism
whose white friends or colleagues refuse to recognise their reality (I don’t know / can’t
see your world) to the above example in which patriarchy teaches us the false dichotomy
of reason versus emotion such that our relationships become marred by violence rather
than connection, systemic forms of discrimination produce the conditions of possibility
for widescale loneliness. As Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) writes in her ground-breaking
book Care Work, ableism, disability and loneliness are woven together under neoliberal
capitalism in ways that mean that people with disabilities can’t get the care they need. In
her words, ‘crip emotional intelligence is understanding isolation. Deeply. We know
what it’s like to be really, really alone. To be forgotten about, in that way where
people just don’t remember you’ve ever been out, at meetings and parties, in the social
life of the world’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018: 98). Systemic ableism can mean that loneliness becomes a killing system in which people are deprived of the care they need to
survive.
Of course, loneliness can also be generative – experienced as a relief. From the lonely
child who takes an interest in bugs and then grows up to be an entomologist (Barry, 2002)
to the pleasures of an ongoing quiet in which being alone ‘does not have to be killing: it
can also be an oasis of calm, quiet, low stimulation, and rest’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha,
2018: 98), loneliness is a complex emotion, which theorists from Charania (2011) to
Gordon (2008) remind us is a fact of great analytic importance. In particular, the relationship between loneliness and the production of art is signiﬁcant: from playwright Lorraine
Hansberry (1969) to musician Woods (Song Exploder, 2019) to writer Olivia Laing
(2016), all cite the importance of feeling lonely to the creation of art. Artists are also
at the forefront in exploring the systemic reasons why we are so lonely. Woods (Song
Exploder, 2019) cites James Baldwin’s essay ‘Letter to My Nephew’ as allowing her
not to feel so alone in the pain of the ongoing struggle of trying to explain anti-Black
racism to disinterested and/or hostile white people. In Laing’s (2016) study of art and isolation, The Lonely City, she examines how – as a mid-thirties single woman – her very
being engendered a particular kind of misogynistic ageist response. This response to
Laing’s aloneness made her feel alien in a way that intensiﬁed her existing feelings of
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loneliness. In her memoir of anorexia, Appetites: Why Women Want, Knapp (2003) (made
famous by her memoir Drinking: A Love Story, and who died precipitously from cancer at
age forty-two) provides one of the most desolate descriptions of the political reasons for
women’s loneliness that we have read – one at which we could feel our eyes well up at the
magical experience of having our lives suddenly witnessed by the words we were
reading. Engaging with a description by Germaine Greer of the frequency with which
we see women weeping – the woman quietly weeping at the cinema or emerging with
red-rimmed eyes alone from a bathroom – Knapp writes that:
Women weep […] because they feel powerless, and because they are exhausted and overworked and lonely. Women weep because their own needs are unsatisﬁed, continually
swept into the background as they tend to the needs of others. They weep because the
men in their lives so often seem incapable of speaking the language of intimacy, and
because their children grow up and become distant, and because they are expected to acquiesce to this distance, and because they live lives of chronically lowered expectations and
chronic adjustment to the world of men, the power and strength of women’s emotions considered pathological or hysterical or sloppy, her interest in connection considered trivial, her
core never quite seen or known or fully appreciated, her true self out of alignment with so
much that is valued and recognized and worshipped in the world around her, her love, in
a word, unrequited. (2003: 177)
The particular skill of all of these writers is in the ways they seamlessly chart a new
terrain for what might be called a ‘Feminist Loneliness Studies’ that shows how
gender, race, class, sexuality and disability have a shaping inﬂuence as to how loneliness
develops.
Emotional Justice
As Emotional Justice activists note, we tend to prioritise thinking over feeling in our
movements. We too often do not know what we are feeling, nor what messages our feelings are giving us. How can one work to combat the loneliness we are feeling if we don’t
even know we feel lonely, angry or sad? Emotional Justice, which has arisen out of queer
of colour, Indigenous and disability organising, is a movement aimed at teaching emotional literacy (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Emotional Justice also offers an intense
focus on the importance of listening, including an emphasis on teaching people how to
listen to our emotions (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). For children’s literature, which is
a medium centred on listening, Emotional Justice holds many possibilities. A knowledge
of what one is feeling is so essential to collectively coming together, and acknowledging
how we are feeling helps to teach us how to connect through conﬂict, rather than breaking
apart. Without the development of a tolerance for discomfort, it is difﬁcult to come
together in the communities that are so essential to warding of loneliness. Emotional
Justice movements, rather than shutting down our emotions in order to do the ‘real’
work of activism, understand charting our emotions as activist work. One example
might be found in the work of Russo (2017), on brokenheartedness. As Russo notes,
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there exists an anaesthetic aesthetic that ‘avoids, minimizes, distances, and evades pain
and suffering in order to maintain its domination and entitlement’ (2017: 290). As
Aimee Carillo Rowe adds, an ‘avoidance of feeling works as a tool to realign even progressive activism with white heteronormative power systems’ (2016: 249). A manifesto
of feeling as activist praxis and feeling, Russo suggests an embrace of ‘brokenheartedness’, a position that combines emotional vulnerability and the willingness to be
changed as a critical tool against privilege:
Resisting the gravitational pull (Chris Crass) of the hegemonic mandate toward glossing over
differences between, turning away from harm, evading deeply considering what is in front of
me—and on my own oppression and innocence in relation to the ways it is connected to the
harm against others (Razack), a praxis of accountability and brokenheartedness asks for a
deep recognition of how we are actively related to the ongoing production of power differences between myself and women and trans/queer people of color (2017: 291).
It is precisely an anaesthetic aesthetic of whiteness which privileges keeping our distance
from our own pain and the pain of others that the children’s books we review below
refuse. Taking up Russo’s challenge, rather than distancing oneself from pain, these
books are aimed at exploring pain and sitting with it. Because children’s books are an
art form uniquely skilled at investigating how to feel, the books we review below are
explicitly aimed at teaching us both to recognise our emotions and to listen, two skills
essential to connection. Echoing the words of Jessica Whitelaw (2017), it is the artistic
style of words and images that allows voyages, including ﬂights of fanciful emotions –
from grief and disquiet to hilarity and joy. Part of the reason that children’s books
provide an antidote to loneliness is that, like other forms of bibliotherapy (Sevinç,
2019), they provide the opportunity for emotional learning and catharsis of a wide
range of emotions (LaForge et al., 2018) and they are also meant to be read aloud
with another person. Unlike many other forms of reading that are about being solitary,
children’s books are meant to be read to someone else. They are a collective form of
reading practice; one that is deliberately intended to bring people together: ‘Few other
book forms, if any, have the socially interactive intention of the picturebook. As a
medium intended to be shared, the picturebook offers a generative site for meaningmaking to be negotiated relationally among children and adults’ (Name, xxxx: 36). They
bring people together into the potential of a shared emotional space in which we can
begin to develop and extend our zones of tolerance for travelling alongside characters
into big feelings.
Children’s books provide a number of learning possibilities. Books for children can
help produce new forms of critical thinking in part because of their ability to generate
a wide range of emotional responses, from embracing ambiguity, to opening up to
hurt, to pausing for interruption, to witnessing resistance, to hearing silences
(Whitelaw, 2017). As Whitelaw argues, children’s books have a ‘generative potential
for cultivating critical inquiry’ (2017: 36). With the term ‘critical inquiry’, she follows
Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) in signalling ‘not just the asking of questions but
rather a stance, a critical habit of mind, a dynamic and ﬂuid way of knowing and
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being in the world’ (Whitelaw, 2017: 36). Not least is the potential for an affect of hopefulness that children’s picturebooks facilitate. As Whitelaw notes:
Hopefulness in the face of loneliness: the same way through either words or images alone.
Because of these affordances, the picturebook has a unique potential to leverage the critical
and the aesthetic when social issues are represented and explored through visual art and
words in a genre widely characterized by a sense of hopefulness. This potential for experiencing the simultaneity of both struggle and hopefulness may be especially promising in the
word/image juxtapositions found in the picturebook (2017: 36).
We now turn to a number of books that help to develop emotional vocabularies – ones
that facilitate connection – in order to think about how children’s books function as an
antidote to loneliness.
Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress
In Baldacchino and Malenfant’s (2014) picture book Morris Micklewhite and the
Tangerine Dress (illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant), we get a gentle, yet radical, look
at young Morris Micklewhite who loves his mother, his cat, pancakes and the colour
orange. While this simple list of likes might be relatable to any child, the manifestation
of Morris’ love of orange provides the reader with a powerful ﬂashlight into loneliness,
ostracisation and radical self-love.
When Morris, who is identiﬁed in the text with he/him pronouns, falls in love with a
tangerine-coloured dress that lives in his classroom’s dressing-up centre, he is perhaps
unprepared for his classmates’ reaction. His love of the dress is described with pure,
spare text and a sensory attention to detail that anyone who has ever loved an object
can understand: ‘Morris likes the color of the dress. It reminds him of tigers, the sun
and his mother’s hair’ (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014). The page that features this
beautiful text has swirling citrus-coloured paint, with Morris central to the ﬂame-coloured
representation of his mother and his own sense of self. Indeed, what is so radical about
Morris’ love of the orange dress is his awareness of what it represents for him as a person
and how this reafﬁrms the love and safety he has at home. The afﬁrmation that Morris
ﬁnds in the dress is pure and simple: ‘He likes the noises the dress makes – swish,
swish, swish when he walks’ (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014).
Predictably (sigh), yet heartbreakingly, his classmates do not react well to Morris
loving and wearing a dress. Neither Baldacchino’s text nor Malenfant’s illustrative interpretation need to pin down whether Morris is genderqueer, trans or just loves to wear a
dress, allowing for multiple reader interpretations and connections. As readers, we sense
that Morris’ tangerine-coloured dress might be seen as an object of anti-loneliness, an
object that reasserts self-worth. Nevertheless, his classmates respond on gendered
terms, largely claiming that a boy cannot appropriately love or wear a dress. Though
this reaction is initially quite painful to Morris, a pain illustrated with sparser and
darker colours so contrary to the warm engulﬁng image of the dress he loves, ultimately
the text resolves with Morris afﬁrming his love for the dress and pushing his classmates
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towards acceptance. While the story remains important for its overarching message of
acceptance towards all expressions of gender identity, it is the object of the dress and
how it functions for Morris that is so important to a discussion on loneliness. As the
dress swish-swish-swishes, we might imagine that it engulfs him with knowledge of
his mother’s love. Indeed, when the end of the book comes not every classmate has
been swayed, yet when a young girl reafﬁrms her belief that boys cannot wear dresses,
Morris – who has had time to sit and listen to himself in his loneliness and his desires
– simply asserts that ‘this boy does’ and moves on with his day. In the silent object of
the tangerine-coloured dress, we see how a personal narrative of acceptance (which
Morris had prior to his classmates’ responses) is interrupted; Morris pauses and
remains with his own moments of pain, and ultimately chooses self-worth and selfacceptance (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014). Without a reframing in relationship to
Emotional Justice, this beautiful book might stay categorised as a simple exploration
of gender identity and resistance, when it ultimately offers the reader an ever richer
and deeper template for sitting with and moving through loneliness.
Wild
Another salient example of Emotional Justice explored deeply by a work of children’s
literature is Emily Hughes’ (2015) picture book Wild. The book begins with the words
‘No one remembered how she came to the woods, but all knew it was right’ (Hughes,
2015). Facing this assertion is an illustration of a tiny naked child, with a green curlicue
of hair, surrounded by wild landscape and wild animals all featuring happy smiling faces
(yet somehow still deliciously wild). Hughes’ scratchy line work and green-tinted palette
imbue the book with the pulse of nature on each page. The young girl in the book, never
given a name, grows to ﬁsh with bears, speak with birds and play with foxes. It is worth
noting that when the young girl does play with foxes, she takes on a delightfully vulpine
quality, going so far as to gnaw on the tail of another fox cub. One day the young girl is
faced with ‘new animals in the forest’ and is ultimately brought to the home of human
caretakers (Hughes, 2015). Here Hughes’ brilliant work as a storyteller shines, as each
page shows the young girl struggling and disliking what her caregivers ask of her (for
example, to eat with silverware or to speak their language), while the text claims
‘They did everything wrong!’ (Hughes, 2015). This simple reversal leaves a clear path
for those looking to identify and tolerate feelings of loneliness. The book also hints at
the pain and loneliness that grow from any colonial project of removing a person’s language and forcing them to speak another. It is difﬁcult to imagine just how lonely the little
girl, ﬁlled with a wild love of nature and her bear/fox/bird kin, would be in a human-made
box designed for decorum and separation. What a disjoint from the visceral life she lived
before!
The book closes with a celebratory cry as the young girl leaves her clothes and captors
and rides off on the back of the family dog, ‘Because you cannot tame something so
happily wild’ (Hughes, 2015). What reads as a beautiful story can easily be read as an
allegory for breaking through structural misogyny to live free and wild. Certainly this
is a simpliﬁcation, yet what ultimately saves the young girl is her refusal to see the
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boxes and barriers her captors have inﬂicted upon her as anything wrong with
her. Though the girl likely feels lonely, angry and afraid, the writing clearly tells the
reader that it was ‘the strangers’ who were wrong (Hughes, 2015). The young
girl never seems to believe in what they are trying to sell to her, choosing to defy
them in every illustration and ultimately ﬂeeing their conﬁnes to remain peaceful with
herself. Her tolerance of loneliness is limited in that she refuses to accept the systems
that inﬂicts it on her (here, ‘the strangers’). With reasons for systemic loneliness as
varied and deeply rooted as the same systems inﬂicted on the young girl (for example,
society’s need for appropriate dress, hygiene, speech or competencies), the book practically yells from the shelf to be read by those seeking emotional justice and, really,
wildness.
Rocket Says Look Up!
In Nathan Bryon’s beautiful book celebrating Black feminist brilliance, Rocket
(so-named by her mother because ‘a famous rocket blasted off into space the day I
was born’) looks dreamily and scientiﬁcally to the sky (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 4).
Rocket is in sharp contrast to the people around her, all pictured staring at their newspapers or talking on or looking at their phones, including Rocket’s brother Jamal.
Undeterred by their lack of interest, Rocket continues to educate the people around
her. She tells her family, other children and any grownup who will listen all of the
space facts circulating in her head: ‘Did you know . . . most meteors are smaller
than a grain of sand? Did you know . . . the best time to see a meteor shower is
when it’s dark, with no clouds?’ (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 10). Rocket goes so far
as to seize the mic in her local grocery store and use it to tell all shoppers that there
will be a meteor shower that very night. Jamal remains equally unimpressed and embarrassed by her enthusiasm (his sister Rocket is a child; he is an adolescent). Although
initially undeterred, the indifference of those around her wears Rocket down. When
the meteor shower doesn’t appear as planned, Rocket exempliﬁes the deep loneliness
that anyone with a passion for a subject, a passion that others do not to share or refuse to
understand, can experience. As Rocket states: ‘Maybe the Phoenix Meteor Shower was
a myth, after all. Maybe that’s why Jamal didn’t want to come along. Maybe everyone
is upset with me for wasting their time. I’ve never, ever felt this sad before’ (Bryon and
Adeola, 2019: 23–24).
But then in a dramatisation of the miracle that happens when loneliness comes face to
face with connection, Rocket’s brother Jamal looks up from his phone at his sister and
really sees her in her distress: ‘Jamal looks at me for the ﬁrst time today. It feels like
the ﬁrst time ever. “I’ve turned my phone off, sis,” he says’ (Bryon and Adeola, 2019:
24). In a happy circumstance, the meteor shower is visible after all. In showing how loneliness can be alleviated and transformed through the power of being truly seen by another,
perhaps even for ‘the ﬁrst time ever’, Rocket Says Look Up! is a book that both explains
and dramatises loneliness and how we can heal it through loving connection and the act of
being seen.
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Cannonball
In a water-soaked take on confronting the challenges of hegemonic masculinity, Cannonball
(Cotter and Morgan, 2020) is the story of a young boy who wants to be able to do a cannonball
just like the other people in his Maori community. (‘Do an amazing cannonball around here,
and you’ll be something all right. SomeONE’; Cotter and Morgan, 2020). Our protagonist endlessly receives advice from other swimmers, and yet he remains fearful of doing a full cannonball; he is catcalled when he hesitates before jumping and told to get out of the way. Lightly,
this book celebrates the role of grandmother-caregivers, as it is his Nan who teaches him all
about different jumps (‘What you wanna know, sunshine?’; Cotter and Morgan, 2020).
Nan helps him to practise jumping off the diving board by trying it at home onto a cushion,
but our young hero remains scared up on the board. In a heart-breaking narrative that suggests
that he is not capable, the protagonist has to choke back tears when other older boys tell him
that ‘Kid, it’s time to accept what is TRUE! Cannonballs aren’t for someone like YOU!’
(Cotter and Morgan, 2020). The author-illustrator team of Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola
also gently suggest that it is our protagonist’s vulnerable, queer take on masculinity that
also contributes to him standing out from the rest in ways that make it difﬁcult for him to
ﬁt in, engendering the deep loneliness of childhood difference. On the lonely walk up from
the beach after he is told that diving is not for him, Nan reminds him that he can jump his
own way, by connecting to who he is inside: ‘Listen to your heart, to your mind, to the pull
that’s inside’ (Cotter and Morgan, 2020). Pictured jumping off a diving board helped by his
rainbow bathing suit and peacock blue feather boa, the protagonist’s Nan helps him to
undo the loneliness of failing to ﬁt in by encouraging him to jump in his very own way.
Nan teaches him to listen ﬁercely to the ‘voice that comes from me’ (Cotter and Morgan,
2020). In a long tradition of grandmothers who help their grandsons to grow into just who
they need to be, dealing with some of the loneliness that comes with being different and
afraid, Cannonball dramatises feminist thinking that refuses that there is one way of being,
and embraces alternative futures for children outside of hegemonic masculinity.
The Rough Patch
In any world, but certainly in this post-COVID world, we are sadly in need of books to help
children deal with the tidal wave of loneliness that follows in the wake of loss. The Rough
Patch is a beautiful meditation on the terrible life disruption brought on by death (Lies,
2018). As the book begins, Evan (a fox) and his dog ‘did everything together’ (Lies,
2018). They work in the garden, they play ball, they eat ice cream and share ‘music and
adventure’ (Lies, 2018). That is, until the ‘unthinkable happened’ and his dog dies
(Lies, 2018). With a page that looks like a black explosion with a hole at the centre, we
are told ‘and nothing was the same’ (Lies, 2018). Evan puts his heart in a bottle, to use
Oliver Jeffers’ metaphor, and without his beloved friend, his garden, previously his
refuge, becomes a ‘bitter and lonely place’ (Lies, 2018). Allowing weeds to grow into
monstrous shapes in his grief, Evan shuts himself away. He allows only one pumpkin
plant to grow, as its crooked and monstrous-looking tendrils appeal to his spirit full of
sadness and rage. He cares for the pumpkin plant, and it responds to his care, ﬂourishing
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and growing a huge pumpkin, at which point Evan decides to take it in and enter it in his
local fair. Although now unaccustomed to the company of others, he manages to attend the
fair and to talk with old pals. When his pumpkin wins third prize, he is offered either US$10
or a puppy. In a scene that so beautifully captures how loneliness actually makes us experience the possibility of connection as a threat (Nagoski and Nagoski, 2020), Evan at ﬁrst
recoils, and plans to take the money. But when he hears the puppies in a box, he thinks
it can’t hurt to just take a look. In the ﬁnal celebratory page of the book, Evan is driving
home with his new puppy by his side, turning towards connection (and of course, with
it, the possibility of more loneliness and loss).
Conclusion
In a beautiful book titled What Color Is Night?, author/illustrator Grant Snider (2019)
reminds us that there are so many shades of darkness. Night is not only black, but is also
the yellow of a rising moon, or the ‘silver streak of a train rolling by’ (Snider, 2019: 12–
13). So too does loneliness have many shades. The books we review above wrestle with
the shades of loneliness. All of these books are outside those marketed as based on presence
and attentiveness, and yet we feel ﬁrmly that they are deserving of this type of attention. More
importantly, they frame connection within a social justice framework, asking: What does it
mean to be attentive to our own desires and selves? And while we might note others’ discomfort with or desire to change us, how can we continue to resist their longings for us?
This so carefully captures and reminds us of both the emotional toll and the systemic
nature of being forced onto the outside. It is the loneliness of the child who listens in
from the doorway of the lunchroom while the other children talk and laugh; it is the loneliness resulting from being left out of the important conversations as a result of sexist racism.
And it is also the loneliness resulting from having a political, scientiﬁc or artistic vision, and
that vision – and your creativity – going unseen. As we continue to work for change, alone
and together, to sweep back the tide of toxic culture with our brooms, to have our priorities
reshifted around community and connection rather than individual achievement, to produce
a world in which goods and services are shared rather than hoarded, we need these writers
and illustrators to help us to chart our journey. Reading wise and politically conscious investigations of loneliness and exclusion can have almost an alchemical impact, transforming our
feelings of loneliness the deeper we delve into them.
Funding
The author(s) received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Shoshana Magnet
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6830-6776
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