KONCEPTUALIZACIJA DETINjSTVA U DETINjSTVU – PEDESETOGODIŠNjA BAŠTINA

Abstract

Childhood – a children’s literature journal (Detinjstvo – časopis o književnosti za decu) has been published continuously since 1975 in Novi Sad in the Zmaj’s Children’s Games (Zmajeve dečje igre) edition. During its half a century of existence, six editors-in-chief and many more editorial teams have changed. On the pages of Childhood, texts of different nature were published, but all of them were dedicated to children’s literature and childhood, examining their various aspects. This text shows how criticism, evaluation of works of literature for children, actually evaluates the recipient itself, that is a child. It is also shown how the attitude towards the language of the literary work reflects the understanding of the child’s overall development, not only speech development. Insights into childhood and the child in older literature (for example, medieval) and oral tradition lead to a conclusion about the position of the child during the historical development of society. The image of childhood and children in different genres and in the works of different writers is most common on the pages of Childhood. It goes from the vision of an “ideal times” in which the “ornament of the world” flourishes, to the representation of a lonely child, left to itself and the terror of a consumer society in which it has the status of a “suppressed group”. The paper provides a broad framework that includes the concept of a child and childhood in a series of variations that are difficult to encompass. In such a widely covered synchronic and diachronic understanding of the child and childhood, in the Yugoslav, South Slavic and Serbian regions, but also in constant communication with general movements and knowledge, in the texts of different preoccupations (program texts, literary criticism and presentations, didactic texts), concepts of the child as an unfinished being and the child as an ideal and idealized projection of humanity are clearly observed, but also observed are the general value system of the culture, the national culture above all, and the culture of Western civilization with its essentially ambivalent attitude towards the child and childhood.