Conference Program

The paper will examine the child body and the ambiguity of its representations in contemporary children's texts: child body is, beginning in the early twentieth century, essentially "other" body, because it is in connection with dimensions, such as animal and plant, that are considered distant from the human - among others, the "aquatic" children of certain literature would be a clear example - and therefore imperfect and "defective." A representation that cracks and fragments the image of the beautiful and healthy child, "all liveliness and health," which is often inherent in the "latent pedagogies" of the adult world, but, at the same time, opens the way for meaningful reflections. The hybrid child body recounted in literature reveals how child bodies are extraordinarily open and metamorphic and revealing, on closer inspection, of the profound connection between "us" and its opposite, between the human and the non-human, natural and plant, opening the way for a radical rethinking of human nature itself.