Pedagogical Commitment in Time of Self-doubting: G. Oster’s Bad Advice and Children’s Literature as Adults’ Carnival

• Authors: Balistreri Bonsaver Caterina
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Bad Advice by Grigorii Oster is a hugely popular children’s series offering playful, topsy-turvy advice, and was first published in Russia in 1990 – a time of enormous social and cultural change. At the core of my investigation is the way in which this series expresses a specific understanding of adults as bearers of pedagogical and intellectual agency in post-perestroika Russia. Between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, through debates on journals and newspapers, novels and films, Russian culture exposed false values, violence and authoritarianism as features that were profoundly rooted in Soviet society. This, however, ended up in a blind alley for those who claimed a moral and intellectual leading role, because adults were described as representatives of that violent society and able to affect younger generations. Bad Advice managed to overcome that blind alley by staging a carnival in which the narrative voice is both a member of the intelligentsia endowed with moral authority, and the legitimate provider of a new, non-conformist pedagogy. It eventually reaffirmed the old theme of the ubiquitousness of violence, delegitimizing the narrative voice’s pedagogical claims and closing its carnival, before opening a new one, in a long series of collections of advice.

Keywords

EN

Adults’ self-representation; playfulness in children’s literature; post-perestroika Russia; underground humor; carnival theory; holy fool

• Publisher: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT – Wrocławskie Wydawnictwo Oświatowe
• Journal: Filoteknos
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 12
• Pages: 347-362

Dates

published

2023-01-26

Contributors

author

Balistreri Bonsaver Caterina

• Independent Researcher, UK

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Identifiers

DOI

10.23817/filotek.12-22