This study aims at making a comparative interpretative analysis of two national programmes aiming at encouraging reading: PNL (Reading National Plan) from Portugal and PNLL (Book and Reading National Plan) from Brazil seeking to understand reading, its useful and redeeming qualities, and the best way to promote it socially and scholarly. From the theoretical standpoint, the paper uses the Foucauldian discourse understanding as a truth making stance which is subject to external and internal statement restrictions, and it seeks to make connections with other current reading discourses. We have also used some tools from the Critical Discursive Analysis to assess how truths about reading and its power are reassured in socially distinguished texts while pointing to some uniformity and particularity in both plans trying to unnaturalise them.
reading; discourse; established texts