Teen Crusade against Adults and Popular Culture in “Los poseídos de Luna Picante” by Martín Sancia

Abstract

The paper focuses on an Argentinian book for children by Martín Sancia titled Los poseídos de Luna Picante [The Possessed from Pungent Moon] from 2014. The research problem revolves around the expectations about childhood and youth literature that the analysed text appears to challenge. Tools employed in this work come primarily from cognitive poetics. The study explores the ways in which the text touches upon the place of children’s discourse in relation to the adults’ one within the system. Among these the most engaging seem to be an image of the child as an abject, metafictional techniques, the gothic, and the gore effect. In its conclusions, the study shows that all the strategies used in the analysed texts aim to blur the boundaries between child and adult discourses and, consequently, provide a space for a non-disempowering author–reader/adult–child interaction.