“O brasileiro não lê”: mídia e discursos sobre a leitura

Abstract

This Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (TCC) was developed under the supervision of professor Luzmara Curcino, and it is registered with the Reading Studies Laboratory (LIRE-CNPq/UFSCar), in line with the common objective of the group's research, this is, to analyze discourses about reading in circulation in our society. More specifically, this TCC is linked to the general research projects “Proud readers, ashamed readers: emotions in discourses about reading”, coordinated by professor Luzmara Curcino, with support from FAPESP (2020/03615-0 Regular Research Project), and “Pride, shame and other affects: an analysis of emotions in discourses about reading” (CNPq - 305682/2022-9 - Productivity grant - PQ2). With this research, our objective is to analyze a specific set of statements about reading, those in which there is a depreciatory reference to the brazilian people as readers, which to some extent refers to shameful forms of allusion to this practice, whether in the form of the shame that one shares for being part of this people who do not read, or in the form of the shame of others for this people who do not read. It is the contribution to this discussion that LIRE's research has been carried out about the essentialization widely reproduced among us about our representation as non-readers, as an uneducated people, poorly literate, who have little interest in reading, that we seek to accomplish by analyzing a sample of statements. The data analyzed here came from the collection that we organized with the digital archive of the newspaper "O Globo", over the period from 2000 to 2010, based on the keywords: reading, book, reader, Brazil and brazilian people. Our data collection and analysis were based on principles and concepts of discourse analysis, such as “discursive formation”, “discursive memory” and “statement”, seeking to infer from what was said, how this saying was materialized in these statements and the consensual representations that we share about brazilians in their relationship with reading. To this end, we relied on studies in this discursive perspective that take reading as a theme, such as those carried out by the brazilian researchers Abreu (2001), Curcino (2016, 2020) among others, and in light of the Cultural History of reading according to Roger Chartier. Through our analysis, we were able to verify that the statements present in the research corpus reiterate, through various consensual and hierarchical representations of reading, the brazilian people as non-readers.