Literatura juvenil sob a ótica de leitores adolescentes de meios populares

Abstract

This dissertation aims at understanding the literary experiences of lower income teenagers in order to highlight their reading preferences, the processes of construction of their trajectories and their repertoires, as well as the perceptions about reading through the reader's own perspective. The research collaborators are public school students from the suburbs of the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area, enrolled in the final years of Middle School and in High School. The main motivation of this study was to focus on the subjective processes that involve the relationship between young people and literary reading. The theoretical framework is based on scholars from different fields of knowledge, which allows for a better understanding of the phenomena analyzed. Among these authors, the contributions of Michèle Petit, Rildo Cosson, Louise Rosenblatt and Regina Zilberman stand out in Literary Studies. In the field of Sociology, there are dialogues with authors such as Bernard Lahire, François Dubet and Danilo Martuccelli. As for the methodology, the main references are Alda Judith Alves-Mazzotti, Christian Laville, Jean Dionne, and Wivian Weller. The research approach is qualitative and the method in the field consisted of three basic steps: questionnaire administration, individual interviews and group discussion. When considering literary preferences, it was established that there is a particularity in how the lower class has access to the works, since young adult literature is immersed in a wider context in which several cultural productions converge and whose circulation is enhanced by networks of sociability that reach different classes. Regarding the construction of trajectories, not only does the research show that there are family investments, but it also reveals the importance of the school in this process, especially in neighborhoods where the circulation of books is restricted to the school library. The dissertation also addresses some aspects related to the tensions between school readings and non-school readings. It also shows that the appropriation of the books young people read is influenced by their social experiences, which reveals the potential for some best-sellers to allow for critical thinking about their reality. It was also possible to perceive that teenagers have their own criteria when choosing a new reading and are able to evaluate critically both spontaneous readings and award-winning works, since one of the proposals of the research was the appreciation of books awarded in the "young adult" category by the National Book Foundation for Children and Youth, which provided the means to establish a contrast between the perception of academic literary criticism and that of the potential recipient of these works. The elements brought by young people lead to reflections on ways of appropriating different readings, drawing attention mostly to the importance of mediation.