Literary Criticism, teaching literature and best-sellers

Abstract

Debates about literature and its teaching are constantly being discussed in the fields of education in Brazil, but some points deserve greater emphasis, given their special relevance to the teaching of literature. In this sense, the article aims to investigate how works that have been relegated by critics can play a positive role in the teaching of literature and the training of readers in primary education. Although some critics stigmatise and prejudge them as a type of lesser literature, or even non-literature, these literary texts have been widely consumed by children, teenagers and young adults, which demonstrates the importance of these works. There has been little discussion of the teaching of literature in literary studies programmes, because researchers in the field consider it to be a topic to be discussed by education scholars, a thesis we disagree with. In this way, the article is justified in terms of filling the existing gap, as well as introducing literary studies to a subject that is extremely dear to the hearts of literature students and researchers.