For a minor literature: literary production for the childhood

Abstract

The infantile literature has been related to a minor condition, that is, to a literary production of inferior quality, which is finished in a utilitarian, pedagogic project. The adjective infantile is associated to a foreseen reader - the child -, and this literary gender holds a strait bond with certain conceptions of childhood that consider the child as a being in development, who needs to be prepared to assume his/her future place in the society. The infantile literature absorbs, in this way, the minor condition of its addressee. The present work seeks to discuss the notion of minor literature starting from Deleuze and Guattari’s contributions, that is, not as a literature that has a reduced value anymore, but as a language of a minority facing a larger language, drawing escape lines for the language and making possible the invention of new forces. Thinking on the child in the way it is proposed here, therefore, means to understand him/her as the one who is below the word of order, being out of the images imposed by the majority, and challenging the formation of only one dogma, one truth. The infantile literature becomes, in this way, an alternity exercise, a literature that makes the language to vibrate, leading it to a land where inhabits a minority, preserving the new and renewing ways to live and think the world.