Varför läser barn gärna fantasy?
"The Real Reason Children Love Fantasy" är rubriken under vilken Alison Gopnik skriver en intressant artikel om vad som gör fantasy så lockande för barn. Hon förkastar både att den skulle fungera som eskapism med terapeutisk funktion och att barn inte skulle kunna skilja på verklighet och fantasi, och hävdar istället att det är just sökandet efter sanningen och barnens teoretiserande kring verkligheten som gör litteraturen så lockande.
This is why theories are so profoundly powerful and adaptive. A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world. From the perspective of my hunter-gatherer forebears in the Pleistocene Era, everything in the room I write in—the ceramic cup and the carpentered chair no less than the electric light and the computer—was as imaginary, as unreal, as fantastic as Narnia or Hogwarts. The uniquely human evolutionary gift is to combine imagination and logic to articulate possible worlds and then make them real.
Suppose we combine the idea that children are devoted intuitive scientists and the idea that play allows children to learn freely without the practical constraints of adulthood. We can start to see why there should be such a strong link between childhood and fantasy. It's not that children turn to the imaginary instead of the real—it's that a human being who learns about the real world is also simultaneously learning about all the possible worlds that stem from that world. And for human children those possibilities are unconstrained by the practical exigencies of adult survival.
Läs artikeln i sin helhet. Det är en av de mer intressanta texter jag har läst på senare tid.
Apropå fantasy, så slängde jag ihop en introduktionsartad krönika för Catahya om fantasynoveller på tåget till Stockholm för ett par veckor sedan. Den hittas här.
God jul, gott folk.
This is why theories are so profoundly powerful and adaptive. A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world. From the perspective of my hunter-gatherer forebears in the Pleistocene Era, everything in the room I write in—the ceramic cup and the carpentered chair no less than the electric light and the computer—was as imaginary, as unreal, as fantastic as Narnia or Hogwarts. The uniquely human evolutionary gift is to combine imagination and logic to articulate possible worlds and then make them real.
Suppose we combine the idea that children are devoted intuitive scientists and the idea that play allows children to learn freely without the practical constraints of adulthood. We can start to see why there should be such a strong link between childhood and fantasy. It's not that children turn to the imaginary instead of the real—it's that a human being who learns about the real world is also simultaneously learning about all the possible worlds that stem from that world. And for human children those possibilities are unconstrained by the practical exigencies of adult survival.
Läs artikeln i sin helhet. Det är en av de mer intressanta texter jag har läst på senare tid.
Apropå fantasy, så slängde jag ihop en introduktionsartad krönika för Catahya om fantasynoveller på tåget till Stockholm för ett par veckor sedan. Den hittas här.
God jul, gott folk.
posted by Johan | 00:44
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