Literature and Identity: weaving narratives in reading groups

Abstract

This text is the result of research that investigated how literature, through reading circles and from the point of view of those who participate in them, affects the formation of the person and is meaningful in the constitution of their identity. The participants were adults acquiring literacy in an adult learning course in Rio de Janeiro. I looked for answers to two questions within these circles: what does literature mean (in the scope of the reading circles) to the transformation of subjectivity by the subject (this is where the topics of formation and identity come in) and how to bring about the love and the habit of reading, in those who it would seem had no interest in it? The theoretical -methodological standpoint based on ethnography is supported by the observation of the relation between subjects and subjects and subjects and “objects”, looking for their meanings, symbolic systems and of classification, practices, values and attitudes. Roger Chartier, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault and Paulo Freire were some of the authors with whom I dialog.