Literariness in criticism of cuban literature for children and young people

Abstract

This text is intended for characterizing the manifestations of literariness in Cuba’s criticism about literature for children and young people. It makes possible to determine the continuities and ruptures of such corpus as compared to Cuban criticism of literature for adults, which has a longer tradition in the country and has shown an inclination to literariness. It also makes possible to observe if literariness in such criticism assimilates characteristics of literature in general or, specifically, those that are more frequent in literature for adults. A corpus of 554 texts is analyzed, taking into account the hierarchical disposition of both social and aesthetic functions, paying special attention to the emergence of complementary levels of linguistic organization (especially through tropes and figures), fictionality, and detachment from the communicative situation. It is found that generally speaking criticism of literature for children in Cuba doesn’t have a strong systematic literariness, as opposed to criticism on literature for adults. However, in those pieces of criticism with literariness, it was seen that the use of tropes and figures makes some texts similar to poetry for adults, while others are fictionalized according to some models of narrative for children, even when they were not conceived for those readers. Having found no previous research on literariness in criticism of literature for children, these findings, as independent from local issues, may suggest some devices, logics and procedures for corpora other than the Cuban case.