2013
HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Maud Gaultier, « Les entrelacs de la simplicité et de la complexité dans le langage de l’enfance : Horacio Quiroga, María Elena Walsh, José Sebastián Tallon », HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral, ID : 10670/1.345800...
Horacio Quiroga, a great writer of the Río de la Plata, devotes a significant part of his work to child audiences. In the prologue to Cartas de un Cazador he justifies the simplicity of his style by the need to be fully understood by “children of tender years”. If we consider that simplicity is a necessary adaptation to the children’s ability, it seems to be consubstantial to children’s literature. Nevertheless, our analysis of a corpus of Argentine children books will show how the strategies used to reach young audiences differ from one author to another. Some writers, in the early twentieth century, have fallen into the trap of oversimplification, dulling their work in the name of clarity. Yet in contemporary fiction, we can see two distinct attitudes. The first one consists in playing skilfully with language without sacrificing complexity : the style may be deliberately convoluted, ambiguous, difficult to understand. María Elena Walsh doesn’t hesitate to create many neologisms, to play on the multiple meanings of words. The second approach considers simplicity as a real aesthetic ideal, which introduces a different kind of relationship between the child audience and the texts.