As Cobras, de Veríssimo:
everyday life, memory and humour in the teaching of Portuguese language
Keywords:
comics, Portuguese as a foreign language, teacher training, hybrid languages, humorAbstract
The research project Entrecruzamientos lingüísticos, discursivos y culturales en el género historieta y sus proyecciones para la enseñanza de Portugués Lengua Extranjera (Linguistic, discursive and cultural interrelationships in the comic strip genre and its projections for the teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language) focuses on the study of comic strips for pedagogical purposes. The teaching and learning processes in the Portuguese Teacher Training Program (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - National University of Misiones) are complex. This is due to the heterogeneity of students' knowledge about Brazilian language and culture. The aforementioned hypergenre is a relevant resource for the development of pedagogical proposals aimed at developing oral and written comprehension and production skills from a meaningful and criticai perspective. It also makes it possible to work with humour, memory, and identities. In this sense, we analysed the production of Luís Fernando Veríssimo. His work, As Cobras. Antología Definitiva—published in 2010—, served as the source for the construction of the research corpus. The characters, drawn with simple lines, emerged in the 1970s in a context of absence of individual freedoms due to the dictatorship. However, they managed to circumvent censorship and express themselves in widely circulated newspapers until the end of the 1990s. The created worlds highlight Veríssimo’s ¡deas in scenarios that are absent or have few elements. The three-panel sequences condense themes relevant to contemporary Brazil, such as existential and everyday issues, as well as others linked to corruption, the historical review of colonization and indigenous peoples, slavery and structural racism.
Furthermore, the specificities of the author's comic strip language include social and political dimensions, fundamental for the training of future teachers of Portuguese as a Foreign Language.
