AREA OF CONCENTRATION: READING: linguistic, literary and media studies
Literary and media studies
Research of professors from Literature, Philosophy, Education and Communication fields is brought together. The projects are placed in the largest field of literary and aesthetics theories but concentrate, more specifically, on narratives, literature studies in classroom and literary studies about authors, topics or literary historiography, as well as the interfaces between literature and media. Considering, also, the Program´s inter/transdisciplinary perspective and its target on reading and Elementary Education, the line of research is based on a solid theoretical training focused on applied issues. Thus, the line of research “Literary and media studies” is defined through proposals of hermeneutic, critical and historical projects that discuss violence, memory, autobiography and autofiction, genre and identity issues, media narratives, reading and hyper-reading, predominantly in an inter/transdisciplinary way. In addition, there are other projects of transdisciplinar nature that address the complexity theories and self-narratives.
Linguistic studies and cognition
The purpose is to discuss and problematize the two sides of reading studies – one represented by the natural sciences and the other one by the social sciences. On the one hand, it seeks to analyze and discuss existing models of brain function and, on the other hand, to outline research inter-linking linguistic and enunciative phenomena to cognitive and cultural phenomena. From this perspective, the study of cognition is understood as a means of access and understanding of the subject, which discusses his place in the contemporary society. It seeks to explain the interactional genesis of the meaning, considering the symbolic representation and cultural manifestations, as well as the interaction ways created by human groups throughout their evolution, bearing in mind the possibilities and limitations of the human mind. Thus, the objective of this line of research is to problematize, analyze and test, whenever possible, theoretical alternatives and hypotheses that provide subsidies to formulate explanatory mechanisms that involve language, cognition and cultural context. Therefore, the interdisciplinary nature of Linguistics, predominant perspective in this line of research, interacts with other programs, such as Biology, Anthropology, Cognitive Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and History, in a study of a wide range of phenomena. Professors graduated in Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy and Education take part in this line of research.
Studies of mediation in reading
This line seeks to gather scientific research that investigates the processes of knowledge mediation involving the language in its different dimensions as well as Basic Education. The aim is to highlight the educational implications of reading experience by recognizing that the mechanisms of understanding and attribution of meaning, which both derive and restructure the interaction between subjects (and of them with the world), in a relation mediated by cultural artifacts, being the language itself the most evident. Therefore, the focus of this line is the reading of different genres, which can be understood both in the broad sense (such as the way to understand and interpret the multimodality present in the various languages), and in the strict sense (the ability to decode a code, such as the alphabetical, a sine qua non requirement for reading comprehension).
In the quadrennium 2013-2016, PPGL lines of research were:
Text, Subjectivity and Memory
How reading is developed in cognitive processes and its relation with subjectivity and memory, through links with self-knowledge, imagination and emotion.
Cognitive Processes and Textualization
Studies about the interaction between cultural and cognitive processes, mainly the linguistic ones, which are involved in constructing meaning from reading.
Narrative, Poetic and communication Processes
Investigation of knowledge and meaning processes related to reading literary and communicational texts. It comprehends the study of written, imagistic, sonorous and hypertext productions.
