Horror? Que horror!?: formação docente e ensino de literatura de horror nas séries iniciais do Ensino Fundamental

Abstract

The study investigated the interface between horror literature and education. Its relevance refers to the valorization of the presence of horror stories in the classroom once the fear experienced through this genre is a way of knowing and strengthening our emotional structures to face horrors in life. Fear is the oldest feeling, the strongest of mankind, and among its several kinds, the fear related to the stranger is perhaps the most powerful. The research was carried out in a public school in the city of Natal/RN, Brazil, in a class of 5th grade of elementary school with 17 students. The study is based on a qualitative research that focused on the participant observation with intervention. Video records, interviews and field diary were used as instruments for data construction. The teacher of the class was trained to act as mediator of the process. The reading sessions of horror literature were supported by the scaffolding methodology described by Graves and Graves (1995). The focus of the analysis was on the teacher training and the fear reader experimentation through Horror Literature classes. The literary corpus was composed by short stories of the book "Sete ossos e uma maldição" by Rosa Amanda Strausz (2013) and "Sete histórias para balançar o esqueleto" by Angela Lago (2011), totalizing 8 literature reading sessions. The theoretical contribution is based on children’s literature studies: Amarilha (2009), Bettelheim (2015), Zilberman (2004); Horror Literature: Burke (2013), Eco (1994), France (2008), Lovecraft (2007), Todorov (2010; 2014), among others. The results point to the need for specific training on the work with horror stories, which may encounter resistance from the mediator; the apprentices engaged in the reading sessions, demonstrating appreciation of the genre and presenting criticality to the themes; horror literature causes the feeling of physical or psychological fear in the reader; the ultimate criterion for a work authenticity is not the plot, but the kind of sensation it is able to produce. If horror literature deals with such a fundamental human feeling - fear - it is relevant, therefore, that it becomes accessible to young readers as a general experiment for life.