The beautiful and ugly space of childhood – can it be tamed in the language? The attempts to capture the child’s world existence in contemporary literature for the youngest

Abstract

The paper analyses the language of child protagonists of contemporary literary works to investigate the probable ways and the extent to which it most likely attempts to get closer to the truth about the being in the world of a young person. Is it possible to define the framework of the linguistic cognitive function in search of a comprehensive as well as a holistic picture of the world and its sense-making interpretation? Is the need to establish the language of children protagonists’ identity with the language that describes unprecedented, unusual, difficult, or even extreme situations from the perspective of an adult literary “Me” self-justifiable enough, and if so – to what extent? This hermeneutic reflection is inseparably inspired by the thought and – at the same time – the concern for truth in the literary vision of the world offered to children, which escapes the infantilising model of early childhood education pedagogy.