Carsten Gansel, Hermann Korte (Ed.)
Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und Narratologie
1. Edition 2009
241 pages
ISBN 978-3-89971-726-6
V&R unipress
Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur und Medien -
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Book
For a long time, even scholars have assumed children’s and youth literature to be self-explanatory without any need for analytic methods of the study of literature or interpretation. Therefore, one has concentrated on the understanding of content, topics, pedagogical strategies and so-called “messages”. This opinion has partly be maintained up to the present and it has been reactivated in the last years, respectively. However, this volume has a different approach: Literature – even children’s and youth literature – is a system of literary symbols which uses techniques of linguistic encodation in its forms and structures. Novels for children and adolescents are based on narrative conceptions which build the basis for reading comprehension: The questions of the “what” in a narrative depicted and the “how” are an essential part of scholarly studies on childrens’ and youth literature – when it is read as literature. This is the understanding of all contributors in this volume who research the relation of story and discourse. In this respect more recent points of view on narratology are transferred to the analysis of children’s and youth literature. This volume is concluded by two interviews with Jutta Richter and Benno Pludra. The talks give an insight into the complicated process of writing and show how intensively authors think about the story and discourse of their literary works.
