Reading and its powers - a gaze on two reading national programmes

Abstract

This study aims at making a comparative interpretative analysis of two national programmes aiming at encouraging reading: PNL (Reading National Plan) in Portugal and PNLL (Book and Reading National Plan) in Brazil seeking to understand reading, its useful and redeeming qualities, and the best way to promote it socially and scholarly. From the theoretical standpoint, the paper uses discourse Foucauldian understanding as a truth making stance subject to external and internal statement restrictions, and it seeks to make connections with other current reading discourses. We have also enacted some tools from the Critical Discursive Analysis to assess how truths about reading and its power are reassured in socially distinguished texts while pointing to some uniformity and particularity in both plans trying to unnaturalise them.