The aim of my thesis is a complete analysis of child characters in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt´s tetralogy Le cycle de l´invisible. The child characters are the main protagonists of all the cycle. Therefore they the have been given the main focus in my work. In the theoretical part of my work I'm introducing the basis of the analysis of the characters in general. A treatise of the character with it´s different aspects and functions in a literary text is a part of the theoretical basis. In the subsequent analysis of individual texts I have been analyzing child characters appearing in the cycle. I have been dealing with their characteristics, their relation to the storyline and to the narrative structure of the text, to the other characters, especially adults. During my work I have been trying to reach a more general characteristic of Schmitt´s child fables and also to answer the question why the author chose children as his prose protagonists.

The past two decades of political and social disintegration in Bosnia and Herzegovina have given birth to literary counterreactions against hegemonic ways of imagining social life in the country. This thesis deals with a particular practice in BosnianHerzegovinian war and post-war literature, which uses infantile perspectives to critically address issues related to the socialist history of Bosnia as part of Yugoslavia, the war in the 1990s, and the socalled transitional post-war period. Drawing on an old Western literary tradition of using the child character to estrange conventional experiences of the world, the texts (by authors such as Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić) use the skewing and dislocating outlook associated with the infantile subject to expose and undermine perceivably problematic mechanisms in socialist, ethnonationalist, and Western liberal hegemonic discourses. In contrast to previous research on the topic, which has primarily focussed upon the narratological conditions for the infantile perspective, the focus here is on the subversive infantilisation of hegemonic discourse—that is, the very discursive act of representing and contesting dominant concepts, narratives, and representations. The texts are seen as transitional areas through which input from the social world passes and, in this process, is restructured and ultimately transformed into a configuration slightly or radically different from the original input. Theoretically inspired by discourse theory and ideas from New Historicism, the study isolates and investigates a set of techniques through which this reconfiguration occurs. Apart from discussing the use of the basic infantile perspective as such a technique, the study also considers how the notion of the infantile influences techniques of dichotomisation (the production of positional counterpoints), appropriation (the critical subsuming of dominant discourse), and blending (the mixing of dominant and childish imagery). The thesis also addresses the possible political implications of the strategy of subversive infantilisation. Here the approach is influenced by the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, which enables an understanding of the aesthetic reconfiguration of how Bosnian social life is imagined as a way of constituting a new form of subjectivity that evades the excluding and oppressive framework of hegemonic discourse.

Le théâtre pour la jeunesse est un théâtre de recherche où se redéfinissent à chaque fois le désir et les modalités d’une rencontre entre des créateurs et un public spécifique. Notre thèse met en lumière la construction historique de ce théâtre en France et en Italie et donne à comprendre les expérimentations menées par les pionniers du domaine. Elle se concentre sur l’apparition d’un nouveau protagoniste du champ théâtral, l’enfant, et cherche à savoir si celui-ci se situe bien au cœur des processus de création. Dans une première partie, nous soulignons le rôle déterminant qu’a joué l’animation théâtrale au tournant des années 1960-1970. De la France à l’Italie, on voit se transmettre l’idée d’une transition naturelle entre expérience artistique avec les jeunes et œuvre dramatique à leur intention ; en identifiant l’enfant comme partenaire possible de la création, l’animation préfigure la naissance de formes esthétiques nouvelles adressées aux jeunes spectateurs. Dans une deuxième partie, nous montrons comment, des années 1980 à nos jours, la recherche artistique s’est cristallisée sur l’enfant spectateur, cible spécifique des metteurs en scène et des dramaturges. Tout en réfléchissant aux conditions de son émancipation, les artistes s’approprient des matériaux textuels parfois inattendus ; un chemin peut se dessiner de l’adaptation à la création. En France, on assiste à l’émergence d’un répertoire dramatique qui appartient aujourd’hui de plein droit à la littérature de jeunesse, tandis que, dans les deux pays, l’enfant personnage conquiert sa place dans les textes et sur les scènes. Une relation spéculaire peut ainsi s’instaurer entre l’enfant spectateur et son double. / Theatre for young people is experimental—the desire for and the modalities of an encounter between creators and a specific audience undergo redefinition with each performance. This PhD thesis sheds light on how theatre for young people came to be in France and Italy throughout history, as well as on the experiments carried out by the pioneers in the field. The focus is on the emergence of the child as a new protagonist within the theatrical field and on attempting to determine whether he indeed lies at the core of the creative process. In the first part, the emphasis is on the significance of the role of theatrical animation at the turn of the 1960s. The idea of a natural transition from artistic experiences involving young people to theatrical works designed for them was passed on from France to Italy ; by identifying the child as a potential partner in the creative process, theatrical animation prefigured the onset of new aesthetic forms directed to young audiences. In the second part, the aim is to show how artistic research has been crystallizing on the child as a spectator, who has become a specific target for stage directors and playwrights from the 1980s onwards. While reflecting on how to emancipate him, artists have taken ownership of various textual materials—some of which unexpected—and a path can therefore be traced from adaptation to creation. In France, a theatrical repertoire which belongs to youth literature in its own right has been emerging. At the same time, in both countries, the child as a character has been earning his way in play scripts and on stages. Thus, a specular relationship can be established between the child as a spectator and his double.

Meanings of Literary Childhood Spaces: The Garden in Twentieth-Century Literature focuses on the analysis of selected twentieth-century childhood novels for adults with regard to the relationship between child character and fictional space, and reflects generally accepted cultural concept of paradisal childhood and its images in literature. In theory, the dissertation is inspired by the treatises on spatiality of human existence by phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and O. F. Bollnow. It also elaborates insights of the Garden archetype in literary history. The critical reading of selected works examines phenomenological issues, such as child specific perception of space, nature as an extension of the human consciousness, sacred space, home, intimacy of space and death of space. Furthermore, it describes features the literary garden acquires by the union with the child in twentieth-century literature (childhood paradisal gardens, character of divine chid, character of child hermaphrodite, dynamism between fictional house and garden, garden as a miniature of the universe and children games as the imitation of Creation).