reading bodies: childhood and school

Abstract

This writing brings literary reading and schooled childhood closer in order to highlight literature integrated to arts, as an art of the word in Basic Education. The philosophical approach of reading as an experience woven in the link between text and reader, body and soul, silence and listening, helps to forge closer relations between body and literary reading, to confabulate other meanings of reading lurking in experiences of childhood, art and the educational dimension of aesthetic perception of literary reading. The interlocution with Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ricardo Piglia and Walter Kohan allows us to think about the relation of children to the educational dimension of reading and how it can be lived/experienced. To consider reading as an experience, as distinct ways of embodying the word, requires us to rethink how education is placed before childhood. It involves considering the potential that literary reading can hold as an affective experience in childhood and how a fundamentally intellectual practice such as reading can affect our senses and resonate in our bodies as well as provoke our thinking. The arts, and among them, literature, configure the event of the privileged esthetic dimension of an irreducibly diverse body in its sensitive accesses – sensorial, sentimental, sensual, sensible. The presence of each art is unique and heterogeneous, which makes them communicate to each other, putting them in contact and affecting them. Perhaps the exercise of literary reading is less an exercise in schooling sensitivities and standardizing singularities and more a way to welcome the aesthetic perception of otherness in the experience of feeling world senses.