Myth and Authorship in Literacy Practices

The aim of this work is to interpret the positions of authorship articulated by the relation among discourse memory, myth and the circulation of literacy practices. We, therefore, take account of the effect of separation between myth and reality to, on the contrary, consider as literacy practice the way the questions brought up by myths occur in oral narratives told by an illiterate woman. The theoretical bases are the French Discourse Analysis by Pêcheux (AAD), Psychoanalysis and research on literacy, specially the works conducted by Tfouni and co-workers. With regard to methodology, we adopted the index paradigm of analysis proposed by Ginzburg. From these references on, we claim that there is a close connection between the mythic constitution of speech (the impossibility of finding its source) and the function of suppression in the interdiscourse (forgetfulness number one for Pêcheux) along the process of stabilization and distribution of meanings. Moreover, we understand that the discourse productions (oral and written) available in a literate society are intertwined, even though they present unlevelled symbolic empowerment due to their heterogeneity of semantic distribution sustained by ideological interdiction of files. The position of authorship is one of the ways to investigate the range of alterity of semantic distribution that takes place in literacy practices. Within this implication, there are the methods of reading the social files, all of which consist of productions from literate and illiterate subjects. Hence, according to such theoretical fundaments and the index paradigm, a corpus of thirty-four oral narratives produced by an illiterate woman, who lives in the outskirts of Ribeirão Preto, was recorded, translated and analysed. In these, we point out the marks, evidences and gestures of interpretation used by the subject-narrator, signalling that the return to the pre-constructs happens through her delimitation of boundaries towards speeches semantically crystallized from levels of literacy of different natures. By and large, the analysis of discourse sequences occurs as follows: 1 the processes of re-signification of narratives traditionally verified in oral context; 2 the transmission of knowledge present in the discourse memory through reformulation linked to interpretative strategies in which the interdiscourse converges to a certain stability of plot (intradiscourse); 3 the speech boundaries that are marked by stages of modalization and a reflection of meta-discourse, which is supported along the subjects speech; 4 the articulation of closure effect of discourse genres (axioms, proverbs, popular sayings) with the individual myth sustained by original suppression; to conclude, 5 the distribution of meanings through formulations not-marked by the subject-narrator that meets his notions of written register (Derrida) and yet dissipate the logocentric alphabetic writing supremacy that monopolises knowledge over language. Having bet on alterity between oral and written registers, thus this work proposes the interpretative effort of opposing to the dichotomy among wooden languages and factual language practices; dichotomy that also suggests the rupture between oral and written registers so as to face the knowledge monopoly formed by the written language allowing the circulation of literacy practices (FAPESP). (AU)