Il valore pedagogico della morte nella narrativa di Ulf Stark

Abstract

English article title: The educational value of death in Ulf Stark’s fiction

In Swedish children’s literature death is a recurrent topic and frequently has clear pedagogic intents, namely, to prepare young readers to an inevitable painful experience and to accompany them in the elaboration of mourning. Fiction aims to form a ‘competent’ reader, capable of independently handling even emotionally complex situations. In the works of Ulf Stark (1944-2017), however, the theme of loss sometimes deviates from the usual pedagogical goals of Swedish children’s literature and can be read in Freudian terms. The purpose of this article is to highlight how the theme of death is developed in Stark’s fiction and to question his texts’ pedagogical effectiveness.