Representation of childhood in the streets in Brazilian Cordel Literature: a critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the modes in which contemporary Cordel Literature legitimises and/or questions neoliberal logic in its nullifying of the State and its subsequent aggravating of social risk and isolation in Brazilian society. A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Cordel booklet on childhood in the streets is combined with Ethnographic fieldwork to better understand the discursive and social practices embedded in the current production of Cordel Literature. Various social actors involved in Cordel production were interviewed, including the authoress of the booklet analysed. Research results indicate the internalisation of discourses in the Cordel that support a fatalist perception of neoliberal globalisation. This highlights how the mass distribution of such representations of the social world through various types of texts in institutional environments is an important aspect of hegemony. This is so given that the booklets studied here do not seek, to overtly legitimise neoliberalism and isolation, but, nonetheless, through the internalisation of their discourses end up in many instances legitimising them all the same.