Narrating Death, Forming Life. Performativity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Figures of Citizenship

Abstract

This article rereads children’s and young adult literature beyond any merely functional or transmissive approach, grounding narrative in its performative and formative value. Through a theoretical path that brings together philosophy of language, hermeneutics, and pedagogy, death is interpreted as the extreme figure of limit, capable of revealing the dramaturgical structure of existence and of activating processes of subject formation. The analysis of selected narrative figures from youth literature shows how the encounter with the tragic generates not only individual awareness, but also a renewed quality of relationality, responsibility, and common life. Citizenship thus emerges not as a subsequent outcome of education, but as its intrinsic relational form. The narration of death is therefore configured as an experience that simultaneously shapes the human person and its way of inhabiting a shared world.