That Seductive Thing: Representing the Illiterate as Readers*

Abstract

In “That Seductive Thing: Representing the Illiterate as Readers”, it is argued that a historical approach to representations of readers and reading may highlight some issues pertaining to books and education. Far from being simple and neutral illustrations of some cultural practices and commodities in the past, both images and texts about books, reading and the illiterate are here considered as forms of perception and normalization of reading through the representation of (socially) contrasting readers. Thus, images and texts are in fact cultural discourses used to promote and to impose certain models of social behaviour. Yet, they are also part of the doxa which legitimate the “natural” supremacy of written forms of cultural transmission and, therefore, the excellence of books and schooling in the making of “the reader”. This guiding perspective in understanding problems of books and education is analysed here with a closer look at questions of age, race and schooling in Portuguese society during the first half of the 20th century. In that period, several institutions (State, School, Church and so forth) participate, not necessarily in the same way, in what we might call “the Portuguese battle for (national) literacy”. Books and school education are important topics within those social politics fighting “illiteracy”, generating images which represent the advantages of education and of a “culture of books” and, though in different and divergent ideological and political circumstances, creating a certain sociology of reading. * The authors would like to thank the support of the Centra de Estudos em Educação e Psicologia and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, as well as our colleague Francesca Rayner, who helped to improve this revised version of the paper, where any possible errors are exclusively due to authors’ responsibility.