Children's Literature as an Avant-Garde

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines a remarkable season of Italian children's literature (1960-1980), focusing on its radically experimental character and its engagement with the legacy of the historical avant-gardes. The authors under study were often directly involved in movements such as Futurism and Surrealism, and they translated these movements' aesthetic theories into works created for young readers. As a result, beneath the genre's apparent simplicity and naiveté, we encounter a high degree of formal sophistication: linguistic play that subverts established orders of meaning, investigations into spatial dynamism, and sustained experiments with nonlinear narrative.