A abordagem histórica do letramento: Ecos da memória na atualidade

The word literacy acquired a polysemy spectrum which put it away from the notion of social and historic process, at the same time that associates it to codification and decodification of writing. Concerning to this last perspective, we would have nothing to add. However, we sustain, in this paper, considering Pêcheux´s Discourse Analysis and Lacanian Psychoanalysis approaches, that there is a conception of literacy as a phenomenon which influences indirectly individuals and cultures for whom the competence of writing is not established. In this sense, the concept of literacy is larger than alphabetization. As an evidence of this proposal, we analyze a text written by a student, that demanded him to write about a context distant from his own, and, to do so, he mobilized places from the archive and from his particular memory, showing a singular knowledge of writing culture, even though his text presents interpenetration of oral an writing forms, aspect that is not allowed by those who defend an a-historical conception of literacy. We discuss that the student’s text ran away from the reduction of a merely pedagogic ideology and reflects a discursive coherence in face of the challenge that was proposed to him. By the end of this paper, we propose that the teachers should search for devices that make easier for their students to write texts in which their authorship could emerge.