Children's literature and the avant-garde

This chapter addresses what an avant-garde for children might look like, and what it might do. It is called "Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities" because the very notion of an avant-garde for children strikes the author as both paradoxical and not, and as both possible and impossible. In making this claim, the author argues with - and revises - his own analysis in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (2002), which took for granted that an avant-garde for children was both possible and critically viable. What he once accepted as a certainty, he now