Um estudo sobre relações entre imagens e textos verbais em cartilhas de alfabetização e livros de literatura infantil

Abstract

This thesis is inserted in the joint field of Language, subjectivity and culture in the Postgraduation Program on Education of Universidade Federal Fluminense-UFF, and aims at understanding how relations between verbal text and image are established and create a dialogue in the reading primers and infant literature books. It is grounded on the concept of language formulated by Bakhtin as the axis of possibilities to produce different relations. Categories as hybridization, interdiscourse, plurilinguism, among others, have shaped methodological procedures. Christin´s study on ideogram language and its influence on western literature have guided the perspective of image/word interplay, beyond the linear aspect of alphabet writing, thus opening a way to let us think about both the image of writing and the writing of image. Based on studies I have been developing in the educational field concerning verbal and visual languages, I indicate the question comprised in the research, and analyze the theoretical and methodological context of areas that pass in between the question. I approach different faces of writing and images and present studies elaborated by Bakhtin on the prosaism of novel discourse and on the monologism of the poetic discourse as the source to understand the position of authors and illustrators of the infant picture storybooks analyzed. This study also develops theoretical grounds based on some concepts of the literary theory and of the plastic arts, such as iconotext, surface, inter text. The material analyzed is presented in two moments of the research: in Chapter 2, I go through three French primers analyzing the relation between image and verbal text; in Chapter 5, I analyze Brazilian and foreign infant picture storybooks, revealing multiple situations where text and image interplay. Although placed in distinct chapters, the analysis of the two groups of materials establishes an intense dialogue supported by the conceptual basis built along the thesis. Different possibilities to conceive the relation between image and verbal text, worked on in this study, contribute to understand the different ways to access knowledge, cultural asset in general, although these ways do not become free from the format that organize them their use in the school setting: when they become pedagogical material, especially in the first school years, images and texts define ways to face social meanings, and to face also the chosen dissemination support and style. Attention to this fact can be one more aspect to be considered in the formation of a critical awareness of materials and methods used in classroom.