IDIHCS   22126
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN HUMANIDADES Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
capítulos de libros
Título:
Social Identifications and Culturally Located Identities: Developing Cultural Understanding through Literature.
Autor/es:
MELINA PORTO
Libro:
Social Identities and Multiple Selves in Foreign Language Education.
Editorial:
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Referencias:
Lugar: Londres; Año: 2013; p. 103 - 120
Resumen:
In this chapter I explore cultural understanding through literary texts. Whereas in general cultural understanding in reading is investigated within static and essentialist notions of culture and identity, in this chapter I describe the multiple and simultaneous social identifications and groupings that played a role in reading in the context of Argentina, namely the social groupings of the home, the community, and the country; and the identifications of age, atheism, gender, race and ethnicity. The aim is to show that multiple social identifications simultaneously play an active role in the understanding of text in this specific sociocultural context. The chapter is exploratory and innovative because cultural understanding in reading is almost exclusively investigated with a focus on the notions of schema, cultural background and culturally familiar/unfamiliar prior knowledge. I begin by presenting the concepts of identity and culture upon which this study rests. Within a dynamic conception of culture, identity is seen here as a construction (i.e. as fluid, multiple and hybrid, as a positioning rather than as essence). I continue to briefly describe the investigation within which this chapter is framed and I then describe the case of one reader in this setting, herein referred to as Tess. I conclude by highlighting some implications for reading such as the need to take into account the subtle and varied ways in which comprehension can take place, away from standardized and generalizable interpretations.