The panel discussion was staged Wednesday, May 12 in a marquee assigned to children and youngsters' affairs in the 23^rd edition of Tehran International Book Fair, according to pres office of House of Authors, the association in charge of panel discussions.

 

The panel discussion was joined by Ali Reza Kermani, researcher and graduate in sociology who said children and youngsters' literature could be examined from different perspectives, adding that from a sociological point of view, there are two major approaches to study the literature, namely text world and meta-text world.

 

According to Kermani, in the former, a sociologist looks for hidden patterns in a text. Lukaj and Roman, he said, have been two distinguished researchers in the field who sough to understand the social world of text as well as what it signifies. "Based on the approach, novel in modern literature is nostalgia for classic novels, elegy for traditional world and criticism of the complex and likely impure modern world," Kermani observed.

 

According to the expert, sociology of meta-text seeks to study how the outside world might affect produced texts as literature. "The approach seeks to set up a contrastive study of content and adult values. Here the main enquiry is what sort of sociology is transferred to children through such publications," the researcher opined.

 

The researcher then observed that from the meta-text viewpoint, children's literature is a vehicle for transience to adulthood, adding that the goal of the literature is to transfer adult-specific values and norms to children.

 

Kermani noted however that modern sociology is critical of the approach as it considers children as a target and childhood as a value per se. "The sociological approach considers rights of citizenship for children as it holds that children add to social culture and that children both affect and take effect from social culture," the panelist elaborated.

 

An implication of the view, according to the researcher, is that the current practice of supervision or censorship has proved detrimental to children's literature. "The least damage is that it denies a society or a target audience of many views in the field by arguing that they fail to comply with rules and regulations," the panelist criticized.

 

Kermani believed that state supervision would not prove useful whereas a supervision steered by non-state associations or establishments might let for fewer wrong decisions.