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This article aims to discuss some issues related to the failure of the teaching of literature in school, especially for teenagers, observing that the traditional pattern can and should be replaced by an approach of the literary text that prioritizes the involvement of the reader subject with its personal reading, that enriches their impressions of the undertaken reading in the light of new theories still contributory of aesthetics of reception. To illustrate the proposal, we present a didactic sequence, which can be appropriate to teaching work, even if he/she follows current traditional programs.

This article discusses the crisis which threatens the “right to literature” (expression used by Antonio Candido, a renowned theoretician in Brazilian Literature) in schools regarding the process of devaluing literature as a school subject. In later years, there is a growing tendency to an imposition of Enem (Brazilian Portuguese acronym that stands for Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio; in English, National Secondary Education Examination) as the virtually sole admission test for enrollment in universities in Brazil. Questions about literature extracted from Enem tests from 1998 to 2013 were subject to quantitative and qualitative analyzes. The data show a tendency to be countered: the gradual loss of ground of the subject in the admission exam – and, as a consequence, in school curricula –, as well as the neglecting of the literary text specificities and the overvaluation of functional reading, inter alia. Finally, this article analyzes the consequences of the adoption of Enem as a national college admission exam, and adopts a standpoint which privileges cultural reading (to the detriment of a functional approach to the literary text) and the values implied in the dissemination of the literary tradition (according to concepts by Assumção, Candido, Colomer, Giardinelli, and others).

This article - part of the postdoctoral project A Bakhtinian theoretical and methodological approach of the literary collection of the National Program School Library (PNBE) / 2013 for high school – aims to show the relevance of some concepts of Bakhtin’s theory of discourse for teaching literature. In working with literature in the classroom, if we want to face the evils of its inadequate schooling (SOARES, 2011), it is important to understand concepts such as dialogism, which helps to address the different stylistic and axiological layers of the artistic discourses in general, not only of the literary ones. Working didactically with the notion of “dialogic construction” of the literary discourse means to form readers able to notice the nuances of the polysemic text, who can build interpretations of it according to their world view and knowledge, who can make “aesthetic and / or affective” appreciations with confidence and develop “appreciations on ethical and / or political values” (ROJO, 2004). Under Bakhtin’s perspective, it is understood that communication is done through the concrete utterance comprising two parts: the part perceived or performed on words and the assumed part - the spatial and ideational horizon shared by speakers; its distinctive feature is that it provides a myriad of connections with the extra verbal context of life (BAKHTIN, VOLOSHINOV, 1976). The understanding of the concept of concrete utterance contributes to the teacher perceives the question of ideology from the Bakhtinian point of view - everything that involves the worldview and its value scale. This notion allows us to see the positive and negative values that run through all the discourses and constitute them as discourses from different social voices.