Production of meanings about the Chilean revolt in literary texts by students in a university access program

Abstract

In the following analytical exercise, the main question was about the sense about the Chilean revolt of October 2019, in literary texts written by low-income students who are part of a university access program. The specific objectives were: first, to understand the educational context in which literary texts were produced. And second, to understand the internal functioning of each text. In Bakhtin and the Circle's proposal, the text is only comprehensible in its dialogical context. Thus, this analytical exercise is faced with an object of study that is not only a subject, but also an author, that is, a speaking subject, a replica, and a position of sense. Therefore, the analytical exercise is about an encounter not only between texts and between different authors, but also between subjects. From the Bakhtinian perspective, delimiting a corpus is an interpretative activity, since the corpus is cut out of the uninterrupted communicative chain. Thus, to delimit the research object related to the production of sense in literary texts, the starting point, or corpus, were three winning chronicles of a school literary competition. The results of this competition were published on a social network, the Instagram of a university institution, which develops a program for access to Chilean Higher Education and in which the authors participate. The exercise of discursive analysis of the literary texts was supported by the notion of discursive genre, based on two texts by Bakhtin on the genre of discourse: “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Literary Creation”, from the book Questions of Literature and Aesthetics; and Discourse Genres. The reconstruction of the context in which the short chronicles were produced led to the hypothesis of a dialogic relationship between the educational, literary and political discursive genres. Because the texts have different authors and present a dialogic relationship between different fields, polyphony is proposed as a discursive function in the production of meaning about the revolt.