Abstract

PAULINO, Maria das Graças Rodrigues. Reproving the tragic: consumerist society and poetry at school. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2008, vol.8, n.3, pp. 803-828. ISSN 1518-6148.

This study confronts the presence of tragic poetry in the 1950's to its reduction in the years that followed, in elementary schools in Brasil, when the country became a consumerist society. A poetical anthology was used by children's teachers in 1957 in some schools of Minas Gerais State. That anthology is a proof of the presence of tragic texts in classrooms of that time, as a discourse about human condition and its troubles, which children could talk, hear, read and write about. Nowadays this discourse has been seen as depressive, pathological. Many schools refuse tragic texts saying that they are disruptive for children. Institutions, such some schools, cannot distinct tragic art with its midiatic banalization, in the sense of Adorno, when he denounced the cultural industry. The social-political dimension of this change is focused from the point of view of Critical Cultural Theory and also through the ideas of Discourse Analyses, according to Charaudeau and Maingueneau. Brasil became a consumerist society in the end of 1950's, but the consumer order (Lipovetsky), associated with occidental life and its degradation, has a long history, since the end of the 19^th Century. It created a permanent need of happiness in people, a situation which denies the painful discourse and turned the tragic into a "discourse show". Many cultural organizations and schools prefer to work with plain texts and many psychiatrists, ignoring the speech recovery powers, prefer to use medicine to treat all kinds of sadness and sorrows that pacients may have.

Keywords : tragic; poetry; education; consumerist society; cultural industry.

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