SOURCE: "The Objectionable Other, or Walter de la Mare Meets My Little Pony," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 58-60.

In the following essay, Nodelman addresses the ways in which the enjoyment of television negatively affects the enjoyment of literature among children.

The articles in the special section of this issue deal with aspects of the lives of children that experts in children's literature often feel superior to. For educated adults of good sense and good taste, the most obvious response to a book with wheels attached to it or a Walt Disney image of love's young dream is horror. "This," we say, "This is what the world has come to? This is what we feed the tender imaginations of our young with? This pap? This garbage? This insult to good sense and good taste?"

But despite our own smug invulnerability to such insultingly vulgar...