Turning ideologies inside out: Developing young readers’ empathy for critical voices in narrative fiction

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Íris Susana
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Campos, Ângela
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/46915
• topic: Literature; Empathy; Critical narrative discourse analysis; Ideology; Point of view; Ciências Sociais::Ciências da Educação; Social Sciences

This article is located at the crossroads between two distinctive human traits, empathy and rational thought, with narrative emerging as a particularly powerful means to enable young readers to bring them together. Specifically, we discuss the role that critical literary exegesis plays in the development of empathic consciousness in literary readers. The discussion is conducted through the critical narrative discourse analysis of a short story that is widely read by Portuguese young students. The story deals with what has become a living experience for many students – emigration – and puts opposing social ideologies about this experience in a subtle dialogue. Narratological critical analysis provides an essential tool for readers to turn those ideologies inside out. It enables them to escape the main character’s conformist positioning and develop a liberating empathy, and hence a more sensitive perspective about the social reality that the narrator offers for our consideration.