Creativity and aesthetic experience in childhood

Marina Assis Pinheiro

pp. 115-132

in: Luca Tateo (ed), An old melody in a new song, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The present chapter discusses the challenges in conceiving the aesthetic experience at the core of the understanding of the creative process from a developmental perspective. For this reason, this text presents a theoretical problematization from a Bakhtinian ontology concerning aesthetics and human uniqueness in a dialogue with a psychoanalytic approach to corporeality, through a data analysis in which a pair of 13-year-olds were asked to create a comic strip about "a character who goes to a school where nothing is forbidden." We propose three possible discourse markers signaling the aesthetic–creative dynamics of children's activity: the body, as enunciated symbolically through characters in the story; dialogues, in the form of displacements and addressing of actions undertaken in the narrative to the otherness; and the ambience/scenario of the story, constructed as metaphors and marked by the ambiguity of meanings, conflicts, and experiences evoked in the course of action.

Cited authors

Bachtin Michajl