O papel das bibliotecas públicas na produção dos sentidos de língua, leitura e nação no Brasil do século XIX

Abstract

In this paper, which is to be included into the scope of the History of Linguistic Ideas Project, we intend to study the conditions of production under which the National Library and the Royal Portuguese Reading Room of Rio de Janeiro were established throughout the Imperial era during the 19th Century. The choice of these institutions was due to the fact that we consider them to be representative enunciative spaces for spoken Portuguese with repercussions in the political sphere. With regard to the period under scrutiny, namely 1821 to 1890, we highlight the fact that this period reflected a time during which the Brazilian society and its institutions were being organized, thereby contributing to the consolidation of the Brazilian nation. We gave priority to the exam of the founding documents of both of these public libraries, such as internal regulations and bylaws to ascertain to what extend each one contributed to structure the notions of nation, language and reading and how these constructions have affected and still affect the formation of the subject-reader in Brazil from that time on. Our research was based on the theoretical support of Discourse Analysis from French school (Pêcheux; Orlandi) whose concepts of pre-constructed, memory, imaginary formation and paraphrase were guidelines for the analysis.