The presence of dual and ambivalent characters (good/ bad) has always constituted the aesthetic and educational content in children’s fairy tales. Since the Nineteenth century, fairy tales and children’s books have had as an essential reference increasingly complex images and illustrations with vivid colors. This, together with the narration, has allowed the flourishing of a genre of fairy tale noir, whose explicitly pedagogical content is grafted into the plots not always “to happy ending” of fairy tales. The book by Heinrich (...) Hoffmann, _Struwwelpeter_, and that by Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, _Der Sandmann_, which are at the heart of this essay, constituted a first, important example of this new kind of narrative. They have revealed, from a pedagogical-psychoanalytic perspective, the value of what Freud in a 1919 paper, _Das Unheimliche_, analyzed as a necessary manifestation of presence/absence (conscious and unconscious) in the phases of human growth. (shrink)

Edward Said was a versatile intellectual, anchored in a solid humanistic culture, who, in his career as a public figure as a university Professor at Columbia, placed at the center of his reflections the sense of commitment of the man of culture. His multifaceted education and his interests are the summit of an attention to the generative issues of pedagogical and educational culture, aimed at redefining a new “radical humanism.” For Said, however, the commitment and careful examination of texts and (...) reality can only pass through an effort of critical thinking, capable of acquiring its own autonomy of judgment and, for this reason, point out and highlight the differences of all forms of power and coercion. (shrink)