Geografia e Literatura: as crônicas literárias como linguagem para o estudo do lugar e das paisagens da cidade de Manaus

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to understand how the literary chronicles, as language, manifest the sense of geographicity in the students of Elementary School II of the Municipal School Arthur Engrácio da Silva - Municipality of Manaus, Eastern Zone. This comprehension consisted of discovering how this literary genre reports on places and landscapes present in the daily lives of elementary school students. The geographic knowledge about the city of Manaus from the use solely of the contents presented in the textbooks, has been pointed out as one of the difficulties faced by some Geography teachers who yearn to bring and correlate the knowledge about Brazilian cities to the reality present in the space of students' experience, thus making the learning more meaningful. From this concern, the need arose in order to seek new methodologies that could assist in the construction of a more solid knowledge about the place, Manaus and its landscapes from the dialogue between Geography and Literature, specifically through the use of the chronic genre. In this sense, the study was based on Cultural Humanist Geography, with Phenomenology as the approach method. There was an effort to discover the existing relationship between Geography and Literature for the study of place and landscapes over time, as well as to investigate the manner in which the literary chronicles of Milton Hatoum, Tenório Telles, Mazé Mourão, Ribamar B. Freire and do geographer professor José Aldemir de Oliveira addressed the city of Manaus and its landscapes. The present study also dared to investigate the perception that students of the seventh and ninth grades had of the city of Manaus as a lived world, assigning them the role of chronicler of their time. The objective of this research was also to discover, through the production of the chronicles carried out by the students, how they perceived the city, and then seeking to reflect on the possibility of correlating the geographical contents that were seen in the classroom of their reality. In the last chapter, we aimed to understand how the chronicles of the selected writers could lead students to perceive and represent the space of their geographicity, that is, their place (Manaus) and their landscapes through the production of mind maps. The collaborating agents of the research, were students of two classes of the seventh grades and two classes of the ninth grades, with ages between 12 to 14 years. From this study, it was discovered that literary chronicles are rich sources of geographic information for the study of cities, because desides encouraging reading, they present themselves in a singular manner and add subjective values to those who observe and experience them, in the political, social, cultural, environmental and economic spheres, among others, throughout their experiences. In addition to awaken a critical view of reality in students, the literary chronicle is also a key language for the study of a geographic nature, since it leads students to better understand the place of their existence and to become citizens better prepared to exercise their citizenship and to fight for a better city to live.