Material Variations, Form and Content Maintenances: Dystopias to Children and Young People

Abstract

This study aims to legitimize dystopias as a discursive genre that puts creators and auditory in a deep dialogue about the social conditions in which they live. It starts from dystopias as a literary genre projected in contemporary artistic production aimed at children and young people, connecting aesthetic objects produced in different materials, such as cinema, romance and comics. To better compare the different objects, we compiled as corpus dystopia for children and adolescents with an environmental theme. Dystopia, then, is a narrative told with a certain structure and organization of events: at its beginning, there is a description of a catastrophic but possible future; in its course, there are indications of how things went from the reader’s present to the future proposed by dystopia, blaming humanity for that; a soothing ending; and, permeating everything, a hero whose identification with the reader is immediate. The formal stability perceived in these statements led us to Bakhtinian theory, especially to the text The problem of content, material and form in verbal art (1924). Since Bakhtin does not perceive the aesthetic object closed in its materiality, he values ​​the content as indispensable, which manifests itself in a form that is putted in a materiality. As the dystopian form described above enunciates a content that is uniquely related to the exterior of the utterance, we also discuss the problem of materiality and why it takes the lead in critical analysis of art objects today. We conclude that dystopia, as a discursive genre, makes the aesthetic object reverberate in the ethical and cognitive spheres of its reality.