Vent’anni di pagine e ragazzi. Pedagogia della narrazione di frontiera

The frontier that, symbolic and real at the same time, is placed between centrality and marginality of living, in contexts of existential peripherality inhabited by deviations and difficulties, to a careful historical observation-literary is crossed by representations and narratives that elaborate, at a pedagogical-existential level, a "new frontier" potentially educational, capable of projecting in culture its profile and its possible shape.
That frontier, at times insurmountable, becomes a potential threshold when some characters, small emblematic and exemplary protagonists, discover from time to time the value and the sense of reading, writing, art, of virtuous communication that becomes contamination of sense and embankment with respect to prospects of loss, degradation and perdition. To a literature that at the beginning of the 2000s denounced too many lost childhoods with texts such as Certi bambini by Diego De Silva, answers slowly a narrative that "makes" pedagogy negotiating - without rhetoric or useless goodwill - between a realistic representation of degraded social contexts (especially to a certain South of living, another frontier to be charged pedagogically) and a saving perspective that allows us to glimpse, without optimistic excesses, the possibility of a formation and an existential realization at least acceptable. Here appear, then, books that decline new horizons and alternative roads, as bumpy and difficult: from Ragazzi di camorra by Pina Varriale to Pusher by Antonio Ferrara; from Non leggerai by Antonella Cilento to Un ribelle a Scampia by Rosa Tiziana Bruno. In this sense, observing the last twenty years, we can reconstruct a sort of history of education or, more precisely, of the pedagogy of narration, within which a broader concept of frontier can be identified.
If on one hand, in fact, you can see a rich gallery of "childhood images", all portrayed in "border" contexts and all struggling with the difficulties arising from those contexts, on the other hand, the analysis of a very precise literary representation becomes very interesting: the narration of the possible crossing of that same frontier, once it has become a threshold by virtue of the aforementioned, possible horizon of meaning that culture can let see in the journey of children and young people without direction.