The positivism and children's literature: demystifying the doxa and mythicizing scienceAbstract:
This paper analyzes the work of the National Committee of Children's Literature (Comissão Nacional de Literatura Infantil - CNLI) established in 1936 by the ministry Gustavo Capanema during the government of Getúlio Vargas, in order to offer elements for the adoption of measures and for the creation of projects that could help the readers' formation in Brazilian schools of that time. Our research on the private archives of Gustavo Capanema, made available by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, focuses mainly on the documents related to the CNLI. It reveals that there has been a certain tension in the Committee between the criticism of a naive understanding of literature (doxa) and the implicit acceptance of the scientific, pragmatic discourse in relation to it (the search for objectivity). Besides this polarization, the emergence of an incipient critic of the cultural industry products and their influence on the readers' formation has also been noted. In order to accomplish this academic task, we used the theoretical reference of Adorno and Horkheimer to understand aspects related to concepts like mass culture, technical rationality, and society.
Keywords: children's literature; CNLI; Inep; Estado Novo