QUAND LE MONDE PARAÎT AUTREMENT : IMAGINATION ET FANTAISIE DANS LES HISTOIRES POUR ENFANTS, ENTRE PERCEPTION ET CRÉATION
WHEN THE WORLD LOOKS DIFFERENT: IMAGINATION AND FANTASY IN CHILDREN'S STORIES, BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND CREATION

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the way children’s fairy tales articulate a poetic mode of perception in which reality “appears otherwise” through the mechanisms of phantasia. Starting from the Aristotelian concept of phantasia – an intermediary faculty between sensation and thought – the paper explores the distinction between mental representation of the world and the free invention specific to literary fantasy. Classical fairy tales (Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Ion Creangă) begin from a recognizable reality that undergoes a coherent deformation meant to activate the child’s reproductive imagination. By contrast, contemporary children’s literature, illustrated here through the writings of Darie Ducan, cultivates a poetics of total imaginative freedom, closer to Husserlian phenomenology, in which phantasia becomes autonomous from reality. Dream, reverie and wonder thus appear not only as recurring motifs, but as narrative forms of imaginary perception that shape the child’s understanding of the world. The study highlights the fundamental distinction between “appearing” (image-mediated perception) and “inventing” (creation ex nihilo), revealing the role of children’s literature as a formative space for the development of imagination.

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