Obcość jako kategoria interpretacyjna w badaniach nad dzieciństwem i literaturą dziecięco-młodzieżową

Abstract

The notions of otherness and alienation are among the privileged topics of the 20th and 21st centuries. Philosophers, analysts of social phenomena and psychologists use these terms when diagnosing the situation of contemporary man (T. Todorov, B. Waldenfels, Z. Bauman). Also in modern children and adolescent literature there is a tendency to expose various types of characters’ strangeness, alienation and marginalization, as well as to show negative stereotypes and condemn prejudices against ethnical, religious or social minorities. The author of the paper attempts to define alienation as an anthropological category. According to her, this category, which combines phenomena placed against various contexts, can be implemented not only in studies on childhood (children studies), but also when analysing literary texts dedicated to young readers. The article deals with some chosen variations of the alienation motif (social, ethnical, psychological, traumatic) in the Polish prose from the years 2011–2012. The author claims that the trend towards stories, whose characters have complex biographies and ambiguous identities, seems significant in contemporary young readers literature.