| Abstract |
In this master we investigate the reception of negative characters in children's literature, especially at the age of 8 and 9 years old, of both sexes. The texts on which our research is based are titled: The birthday of Infanta by Oscar Wilde and Sandra, The ugly witch, by Tonia Xatzidaki. As the title of the research also shows, the main issue of our study is how a child-reader recepts the negative characters. According to the theoreticians, Jauss, Iser, Fish and Bakhtin, the reception of meaning that a child reader can bestow on the text is not unaffected by social-historical environmental conventions, the subjective criterion and narrative agreements. In particular, in the world of children's literature studying reception, the critical view of the text can be influenced by many criteria such as focusing attention, reading preferences, intelligence, emotion, imagination, aesthetics and ethics child's. Each of these criteria may give different meaning to the text and let it be just a subject that processes it. However, our research question is more specific, concerning the reception of "evil", in a negative character. For this reason, the theoretical part was divided into two main parts, psychological and literary. In the psychological view of "evil," there is no "bad" character, but negative states, environments, and systems as witnessed by the theorists Bandura, Zimbardo and Durant. These Theoriticals, mainly rely on social causes of negative behavior and not biological factors.
On the other hand, literature has been more inclined to display signs of "bad" and "good" character in its writings, negativity being innate in character and cultivation of hatred and feelings of punishment by readers. However, in the course of the development of children's literature, we see that evil is beginning and presenting in an different way, more instructive, correlated with good characters, and generally attempts to promote literature also negative situations that lead to negative behaviors, through narrative techniques.
Having these as a basic theoretical base, we proceeded to the research foundation of the issue. This research was preceded for start with a creation of a research planning, like a strategy for organizing all the practical details to conduct the research. In order to investigate the recruitment of children's reading we used the methodology of a semi-structured interview. However, the most important part of our work was the results and their analysis in categories as presented with the method of content analysis. More generally, through the presentation of the categories we realized, that the children as a whole implement had some "stages" of reception in order to reach this "creative" level of reception, which would take into account most criteria in order to characterize the behavior of a character. Thus, initially, we see that children, in order to express their first opinions, were based on prejudices, as knowledge from other literary readings. Following the processing of questions we see that they still retained the element of prejudice because they could not easily accept that it was possible for a negative character to have a central place in the text, as usually "the good" had this position. As our questions moved into the factors and issues of the protagonists but also of other subordinate characters, the subjects gradually began to have a more holistic view and began to add more criteria to respond, such as feeling of injustice (morality), patterns of behavior, emotions. They observed, moves figures, etc. What we found was that our subjects were progressively correct, and the recruitment process was with a more distant and critical eye. However, as the subjects moved into character behaviors and studied their differences, they found both positive and negative behaviors. As a result, many of 80% present of subjects have concluded that they may not named them as absolute negative characters. Thus, the “absolute” in our research was broken and recruitment was directed and identified with the psychological view of the issue that claims that negative behaviors are the result of multifactorial mistakes in a system of social behaviors.
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Διαδικασίες πρόσληψης αρνητικών χαρακτήρων παιδικών αφηγημάτων από αγόρια και κορίτσια 8-9 ετών και οι ψυχολογικοί παράγοντες που τις διαμορφώνουν : η περίπτωση των γενεθλίων της Ινφάντα του Oscar Wilde και της Σάντρας της άσχημης μάγισσας της Τόνιας Χατζηδάκη
