Dirce – pedagogy and poetics

Abstract

The present article depicts the relationship between the pedagogical activity and the critical discourse developed by Professor Dirce Côrtes Riedel. As it shows, her pedagogical action project influenced her conception about poetic invention. Following the Montessori method that stimulates a self-learning approach, her classes as much as her essays promoted reflections in order to create different reading perspectives. The discussion departs from the assumption that the artist, as well as the child, invents new worlds through his/her play drive. The child’s invention presupposes the small being’s own spontaneous curiosity when the child is free from both family and school submission. Professor Dirce Riedel explores this theme in Brazilian fiction written both in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, through the narratives O Ateneu, Infância, Menino de engenho, and, particularly in Guimarães Rosa’s novels. In those novels, her work points out the authoritarian power that immobili­zes children and adolescents, that inhibits their imagination and the delight provided by creative leisure, enjoyed outside school. The challenges of fictional narrators against the atrocities committed in the school environment, particularly in the work of Guimarães Rosa, are also highlighted; in his work, the wonderful world of the child can overlap the disenchantment imposed by adults. The short story Pirlimpsiquice, from Guimarães Rosa’s Primeiras estórias, shows the counterpoint: on one hand, a master imposes incontestable truths; on the other hand, the rising of invented truths inside the representation game. Texts make and unmake themselves, reconstructing the wonderful world of children. Literature teaching plays a similar game, linking poetic elaboration and pedagogical communication – something Professor Dirce Riedel has always celebrated.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2016.26024