The imagination in aesthetic experience: literary reading mediation in childhood

Authors

• Karina Feltes Alves Universidade de Caxias do Sul

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17058/signo.v51i100.20746

Keywords:

Imagination, Aesthetic experience, Children's literature, Mediation

Abstract

This study is inspired by a literary aesthetic experience mediated to a seven-year-old child in a family context. The discussion sheds light on the role of imagination in the aesthetic experience process, based on Vigotski (1999, 2025), who conceives it according to the reaction model that presupposes the existence of three elements: stimulus, re-elaboration, and response. Through the mediation of literary reading, an instrument that provokes creative activity in this case, the young reader performs the complex task of recalling associative thinking so that she can understand what is represented in the work and how she can link its different parts to her objective world. The child relates the antagonistic characters in the children's text You Can Cry, Heart, But Stay Whole (RINGTVED, 2020), Joy and Suffering, Laughter and Desolation, to fruits present in her daily life and promotes the intertwining of her real world and the symbolic world. This intertwining is done through creative activity, based on imagination, by resorting to elements of their daily lives to sublimate, reorganize, and elaborate their feelings and understanding of certain emotions that were unknown to them until then. The experience of literary art mediation referred to here is in line with the historical-dialectical perspective of human development to which Vigotski subscribes, and points to the importance of imagination and creative activity for the construction of new images that do not exist in the subject's consciousness or previous experience, since creative activity has the potential to promote, through catharsis, a profound reorganization of the psychic functional system. This is the important place of imagination as a condition for creative activity and aesthetic experience.

References

RINGTVED, Glenn. Pode chorar, coração, mas fique inteiro. Ilustrações, Charlotte Pardi; Tradução, Caetano W. Galindo. 1 ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letrinhas, 2020.

VIGOTSKI, L. S. Psicologia da arte. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999.

VIGOTSKI, L. S. Imaginação: textos escolhidos. Bernard Schneuwly, Irina Leopoldoff Martin, Daniele Nunes Henrique Silva (Org). 1 ed. Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 2025.