Children’s Literature as an Avant-Garde

Crosslistings: FNDL 23205

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.
Throughout the course, children’s literature will serve as a lens through which to explore the avant-garde, while avant-garde aesthetics will, in turn, illuminate the distinctive possibilities of children’s literature. We will begin with the pioneering work of Iela Mari and Bruno Munari, both of whom challenged conventional definitions of the book by stripping it of its primary function as a vehicle for textual information and transforming it instead into a visual and tactile object. We will then turn to Toti Scialoja’s nonsense-inflected poetry and to Gianni Rodari’s Grammatica della fantasia, a foundational theoretical reflection on the uses of imagination. The course concludes with Leo Lionni’s fables of racial identity, composed through innovative materials and cutting-edge visual techniques.

Taught in Italian.