Literatura infanto-juvenil brasileira e religião: uma proposta de interpretação ideológica da socialização

Abstract

This is an exploratory study on Children s Literature in a catholic religious context. The objective is to contribute with the present debate on the social construction of brazilian childhood. For such purpose, thirty children s literature books were confronted based on a comparative analysis. The books in question were published from 1976 to 2000, fifteen published by secular publish houses and 15 by catholic ones. The books were randomly selected according to the legal deposit at the Rio de Janeiro National Library. Some of the questions which guided the study were: 1) if there was a process of secularization in Children s Literature; 2) if there was a reconfiguration or a reduction of the magic or of the sacred in Children s Literature; 3) if the catholic publish houses were processing the transformations observed in society and in the academic world regarding the notion of childhood, mediated by the debate around a new idea of socialization. To develop this thesis, it appeared adequate to base the discussion on the mediation of modern culture, the ideology concept and the Deep Hermeneutics methodology, as defined by John B. Thompson, complemented by the systematization of knowledge from many fields of knowledge, such as the Childhood Sociology, Children s Literature and the Sociology of Religion. The analysis confirmed the tendency towards the secularization of children s literature, hinted at in a previous research, and it enabled us to observe, in the sample s last period (from 1995 to 2000), a change in the catholic publish houses scenario, with advances in the conceptions of childhood and of socialization in the texts of some of them, though others maintained traditional standards. The results allow us to verify that there is a predominant view in the texts of catholic publish houses, a utilitarian, sometimes idealized view, whose objective is to teach values such as kindness, fraternity and obedience or to transmit Christian values, as well as a stronger tendency towards an asymmetrical portrayal of the racial and gender relations. However, in the production of both publish house categories secular and catholic it is possible to observe a similar phenomenon: the use of the Fantastic Universe, based on the magical tradition of literary production for children