Kulturowe obrazy zwierząt w polskiej literaturze dla dzieci i młodzieży w perspektywie animal studies. Wybrane problemy

Goal of this doctoral dissertation is to analyze the modification of presenting animal issues in the Polish literature for children in the context of cultural animal studies (CAS). As a tool, equally important is the childhood and education studies and cultural research on children and childhood. As an auxiliary, I also refer to ecocritical studies and ecofeminist studies. The focus is mainly on prose, poetic and dramatic works created in the 21st century, but shown in the broad context of previous announcements (both in Poland and abroad) of a way of writing about animals for children, which can be considered as antithesis an anthropocentric humanistic paradigm defining children's literature. That is why selected Polish older texts, starting from the 19th century, are discussed with the use of animal studies tools. The literary texts will refer to the philosophical writing about animals by authors such as Donna Haraway, Rossi Braidotti, Kari Weil, Carol Adams, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Peter Singer, Jeremy Bentham, Andrew Linzey, Tom Regan, and Martha Nussbaum. I draw inspiration from Polish researchers from the reflections of, among others, Grzegorz Leszczyński, Anna Barcz, Ewa Domańska, as well as Justyna Schollenberger, Dariusz Gzyra, Dariusz Piechota, Agnieszka Trześniewska and Maciej Skowera. Each chapter is an attempt to show that the traditional, anthropocentric paradigms of thinking about the "animal issue" are - both in the literary tradition for children and youth, as well as in the latest texts - weakened and even reversed in several possible ways. Chapter I is theoretical and discusses three issues: first, the picture of a child and childhood as close to nature, secondly, a change in the understanding of ethical attitudes towards animals, and thirdly, the specificity of picturing animals in the literature in perspective of the theory of cultural animal studies. Chapter II contains a detailed analysis of the gradual mitigation of instrumental usage of animal themes in 19th and 20th century literature and attempts to abandon this type of usage in the latest works - also through humorous tendencies. The phenomenon of abandoning simple animal didactics in literature for children and youth will be linked not only with antipedagogical trends, but also with the gradual intensification of posthuman consciousness inscribed in this work. The subject of Chapter III is the development of motifs of children's animal folklore, which has a considerable impact on literature, especially children's poetry. Picturing in this folklore the reality of the existence of children and animals, the proximity between the child and the animal, the threads of animal suffering, as well as the crossing of this suffering to gain subjectivity through cooperation and interspecies fun - all this makes literature for children referring to children's animal folklore, soothes, reverses, and even parodies a 206 traditional, rationalist view of the relationship between people and animals. Chapter IV deals with the ways in which the texts of children and young adults reveal themselves. The analysis will include such plot schemas implemented in selected texts of children's and youth culture, which depict the interdependence of a child and an animal and the unstable status of both in the world of adult people (trash studies). I try to show that the relation of a child and an animal is shown in these works as a source of strength and subjectivity. The starting point of Chapter V is the assumption that the attitude of empathy towards animals, inscribed in the majority of works for children and young people, may become the basis for ethical reflection. The subject of the analysis in this chapter will be works in which such aspects of the human animals relation, as hunting, treatment and animal protection (eg veterinary clinics, sanctuaries, reserves), as well as the work of animals and people (mine, army), as well as ethical aspects related to meat eating (vegan literature for children) are revealed. The ending - summarizing and gathering the observations - will be devoted to a very important issue both for the trends of posthumanism, including animal studies and ecocritics, namely the issue of the future of showing animals in children's literature, as well as their relationship with people. The future of the child as the hero of the work, but also the projected addressee of the literary message is an equally important category as the future of the animal characters of children's and youth literature. The explicit query and concern for this future in children's literature, searching for the possibility of change, and even intervention in the future time are important and repeated motives. Tomorrow's awareness in children's and youth literature determines not only the direction of changes in the real relationships between people and animals, but also the direction in which the critical art of words for young people is to follow and its reception to favor such changes.