O ENSINO E A PESQUISA DA LITERATURA PORTUGUESA NO BRASIL EM PERSPECTIVA

Abstract

: In July 2024, the law that restructured Brazilian high school education was enacted, after years of debate and controversy surrounding the so-called High School Reform, a law that was no less controversial and was enacted in 2017. The event led me to reflect again not only on the presence of Portuguese Literature in the curriculum of this level of Education and in Basic Education as a whole, but especially on the changes related to the area that have occurred and are occurring in the curricula of undergraduate programs in Literature at various Brazilian colleges and universities. Courses that previously dealt with content specific to the area had their workload reduced or even began to encompass a broad literary production, going beyond portuguese literary production or not even encompassing it. In addition to recognizing the vast possibility that these new courses offer in working with literary comparatism and that in many contexts they were modified or created to comply with the demands of the federal government itself, regarding a minimum workload for the training of undergraduates, it is clear that with the changes the presence of the area of Portuguese Literature in university programs in Literature – and consequently in postgraduate courses – suffered impacts in our country. Without a doubt, one of the emblematic events that drew attention to the situation that had already been occurring was the first proposal presented by the federal government for the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), in 2015, whose text did not include Portuguese Literature as a mandatory subject for Brazilian students in elementary and high school, the stages known as Basic Education. The document, although focused on Basic Education, largely shed light on the training that future teachers of these students would receive in higher education, thus putting this level of education into perspective as well. Only after several protests against the text, made by entities related to the field of Literature and the academic community, did subsequent versions—a preliminary draft in 2016 and the final one, approved in 2018—begin to mention the subject. In this text, I intend to propose a reflection on the issues raised above.