I'm more ambivalent about this. I've very seldom read the books that are being argued about, but I can't agree with Debbie when it turns out (as it did in the latest bust-up) that she hasn't either. That tends to undermine any other argument she makes about authenticity.

On the more general issue - well, I talked about all this at some length in Four British Fantasists and won't go over that ground again here, but one thing I only got to touch on in that book is that these arguments are often at cross purposes. Debbie's attitude towards story, culture, and indeed subjectivity is far more communally grounded than the dominant western model. She comes from a tradition where authenticity is in the gift of the community rather than an existential stance taken by an individual. Hence, presumably (to take a fairly peripheral example), the fact that she puts (Nambe Pueblo) after her signature. Were I to sign myself Steepholm (Anglo-Celtic) it would look like an affectation, but in her case I take it to be indicative of where her sense of self begins and ends. My suspicion is that this difference is where a lot of the child_lit disagreements stem from, and that when they and Debbie argue about autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, individuals, etc, they actually mean rather different things.