FORTY YEARS PICTURING DISABILITY: FRAMINGS AND APPROACHES TO BRAZILIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

The research analyzed, according to the assumptions of the French School of Discourse Analysis, one hundred and fifty children’s book, published in the last forty years, which depicted disability. It was found that the books from the seventies and eighties, whose authors were professional writers, are more ideologically independent. Brazilian authors, that started writing for children and adolescents in the nineties and then portrayed disability in their books, were amateur writers that took the authority from their own experience with disability. They, thus, focused their purposes on the provision of scientific information and on bringing moralizing messages about the ideal behavior toward people with disabilities. This political engagement was to the cost of the quality of these works, which have not preserved their artistic integrity. The technical information compromised the playful aims of the literature and the books were not successful because of these serious conceptual errors. This investigation was justified by the semiotic contribution to literary criticism and also to the possible uses of its results when setting parameters for the children’s books chosen to be distributed to public schools by the Ministry of Education in Brazil.

children’s literature; people with disabilities; discourse analysis