Call for Papers FRONTEIRAZ 36: Childhood, Childlike, Literature: Mediations

In this issue of FronteiraZ, childhood does not correspond to an age boundary which many times is confused with the child itself, but to a faculty which never ceases to inhabit each of us as an intermittent enigma that resists deciphering. In which language would it be possible to describe this enigmatic experience which, according to Rosana Kohl Bines (2022), works inwardly in silence and in ellipses undermining the articulate phrase? How to register the child’s voice, its echoes, vestiges, remainders?
According to Giorgio Agamben (2008), childhood cannot be something that precedes language chronologically and ceases to exist once it is expressed in words. An expropriation of the subject of modernity generates man as the subject of modernity in parallel at the end of the art of storytelling – this is the transition from old times to modern times. Once experience is given a place, one turns back to the word in the dual unity of language and speech – this is the rule: limit and structure of knowledge.
Therefore, outside the perspective of the experience of language, one cannot understand the articulation between voice and language in discourse, since it is through mediation that we identify with childhood, formed in a shared unity: word plus in-infancy.

It is in this gap between inarticulate language and speech – the place where childhood, acting over the subject – that the childlike arises as a mode of apprehending both the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of time, two split languages: language and speech which shift into into the poetic synchrony of Children’s Literature, seeking to say and signify. This body of language experiences childhood in a permanent return to the doors of language; it seeks to be time in the logical place of Childhood, in a permanent return, transforming the sensible certainty into a dialectical process, which is neither totality nor truth (Gagnebin, 1979).
What and which is the literary dimension of childhood? In children’s literature images are reinvented, once freed from the methods present in fable language. By identifying with the childlike, with the sense of species as genus, the voice manifests itself and exposes the way it should be conceived and signified as originary discourse; it is the voice that seeks to capture the myth that enables meaning to open, to being, no longer bound by the mimesis of the past, by placing the originary datum in the mute
experience, in the Voice. These are the signs of childhood expressed by means of the processes of growth and development of the poetic signs manifested in literature, a mediation which leads researchers to ask: what is the phenomenology of poetic language? What are the strategies of the word to being in a speech act, its discursive instance? What is the locus of wonder that this event represents? How can one create zones of passage and mediations between childhood, the childlike, and writing?
We invite contributions that sensitively and creatively interweave Childhood, the Childlike and Literature, thus enriching the comprehension of these contemporary signifiers. In that sense, we welcome proposals broaching the following thematic areas; 

- Childhood, language and imagination;
- Poetics of thought with childhood;
- Reinventions of the childlike in the literary experience;
- Ludic and imaginative dimensions with childhood;
- Politics of childhood and childlike imagination;
- Images of childhood in mediations: reading, literature and arts.

Deadline for submissions of Papers: 10/March/2026