THE PRIDE OF READING: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF WHAT YOUTH AND ADULT EDUCATION STUDENTS SAY ABOUT READING

Abstract

With this research, we intend to contribute to the analysis of the discourses on reading in Brazil, analyzing the ways in which subjects of a very specific group, when talking about themselves as readers, when stating their preferences, habits and opinions about reading, works read, authors, and even when expressing their opinion about other readers, also express certain prototypical emotions, consistent with this theme and with the protocols that are generally imposed when talking about reading. We start from Curcino's (2020; 2022) assumption that the allusion to certain emotions responds to a specific discursive regime: not just any emotion is enunciated when talking about reading or about oneself as a reader, and not just any way one does it. The emotions most frequently evoked in relation to reading, as the author notes, are 'nostalgia', 'pride' and 'shame'. Although not the only ones, they seem to be the most common, those most often reiterated. The analysis we intend to carry out in this research aims to verify whether this finding of the author is also confirmed in other contexts, with other enunciators. In the proposed project, we intend to constitute and analyze a corpus of statements that indicate the "pride" of being a reader in statements from students of Adult and Young Adult Education (EJA), obtained through semi-structured interviews. Unlike other groups of readers, these students are not usually recognized as readers, nor do they fully recognize themselves as such. Thus, what they say about reading and about themselves as readers interests us to the extent that these statements echo consensual collective representations that we all share about this practice. Moreover, what they say has the singularity of the position of those who most often did not have the right to become readers and who live from an early age with the most depreciative cultural verdicts in this regard. We aim to deduce the ways in which they present themselves as readers and the discourses about reading that these forms of representation refer to, in order to identify probable continuities and/or discontinuities in what is consensually stated about reading. We also seek to describe regularities and variations in the representations of "pride" in being a reader. To do so, we will draw on principles from Discourse Analysis, the Cultural History of reading, and the History of sensibilities or emotions.