What do the stories of postgraduate readers tell us about their willingness to read literature?

Abstract

We draw on a postgraduate module attended by students of Education and Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, which aimed to explore individuals' willingness to read literature. We use the written production of the readers' autobiography as a method of (auto) ethnomethodology in order to discuss the experience of readers with literary reading and the repercussions of these narratives for their training as teachers of language, literature or any subject that does not dispense with reading. The method adopted allows access to an intimate sphere of the participants, highlighting social relations and conditions that shape their particular history of socialisation, which is not typically considered in statistical studies on reading. The analysis of the autobiographies presented in the form of selected segments in the article bears witness to the diversity of subjects' dispositional heritage that teaching cannot ignore.