Literature with a small ‘l’ Literature with a small ‘l’

• Main Author: Vera Maria Drews Guimarães
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2008-04-01
• Series: Ilha do Desterro
• Subjects: English Language; English
• Online Access: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/8173

Having come from a different background to that of Letters, interest in literature came to me through a history teacher whose work was truly educational in the sense of exploring various approaches and strategies for the formation of critical consciousness among her students. Literature was a via of analysis of how meanings and values have been historically produced and used, of how structures of feelings — “thought as felt and feelings as thought: practical consciousness of a
 present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity” (Raymond Williams) — differed in past times and yet related to us in the present. Having come from a different background to that of Letters, interest in literature came to me through a history teacher whose work was truly educational in the sense of exploring various approaches and strategies for the formation of critical consciousness among her students. Literature was a via of analysis of how meanings and values have been historically produced and used, of how structures of feelings — “thought as felt and feelings as thought: practical consciousness of a
 present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity” (Raymond Williams) — differed in past times and yet related to us in the present.