A personagem e a representação de grupos sociais na narrativa juvenil contemporânea : 1999-2009

Abstract

The research presented in this paper aims at analyzing the construction of the characters of Brazilian contemporary youth literature, in view of the social representations that are outstanding in this literary source. Children literature has in its bases didactic and moral paradigms, which influenced excessively, throughout the 20th century, the productions to the children and, also, to the youth public. The dominant bourgeois culture dictated the rules for the literary production, excluding cultural habits as well as entire segments of the society that were not adequate to the moulds from that society. According to the new social and economic possibilities and the cultural plurality of the new Brazilian society, that makes the history of the 21st century, it was analyzed the character who the young reader finds in the literary composition. To develop the present study, it was necessary to understand the formation of children literature in Brazil, its constant thematic, as well as the form of construction of its characters during the 20th century. It was also essential to verify the influence of the publishing market in the literary field, the impositions from those ones that hold the means of production and circulation of literary composition and also how the minorities in contemporary Brazilian literature are legitimated and represented. In this last aspect the conclusions gotten in other relative works about the representation of the minorities in literature had been essential, the research of Dalcastagnè (2005), Blacksmith (2008) and Rosemberg (1985). These studies made possible the analysis in counterpoint of how some segments of the society in our youth literature are represented. Twenty-five literary compositions directed to the youth public were analyzed, in a total of two hundred forty-two characters. The methodology used was quali-quantitative, since the quantitative verification of each analyzed aspect was essential to the real configuration of the social representation of the characters, for, thus, to prevent the exacerbated subjectivism in the verification of aspects as the exclusion of afro-descendants, yellows, Indians, homosexuals or even the discrimination against the women in Brazilian contemporary youth literature.