Literatura transetária : leituras para além das idades em “Contos de lugares distantes”, de Shaun Tan

Abstract

Among the books recommended "for children", there is a welcome multitude of stories that go beyond age limits. Stories that allow us to read childhoods beyond our ages, but rather understood as ways of being in the world, linked to cultural elaborations. These extended childhoods inhabit literatures that go beyond a previously calculated audience, and offer readers a libertarian “loophole”, that of encountering books outside pre-programmed routes. This research presents as a guiding question: How does the notion of transetary literature appear in “Tales from outer suburbia”, by Shaun Tan? The general objective is to analyze how transetary literature” can be perceived based on a critical reading of the book. The specific objectives are: 1) Study the work “Tales from distant places” (Tan, 2012a), taking into account the concept of “implicit reader” (Iser, 1996) and other assumptions of Reception Aesthetics; 2) Map productions on crossover literature (Beckett, 2009) and its derivations in terms of academic production and theoretical bibliography, in order to understand how different names of literatures whose significant portions can potentially be cross-age are being used; 3) Present the perceptions of writer and illustrator Shaun Tan, based on an unpublished interview carried out for this dissertation. In this section, we revisit the precepts of the theoretical basis in dialogue with the non-fiction book "Creature" (Tan, 2022b), in order to provide a view on “transetary literature” from the dimension of authorship. To achieve the objectives listed, we resorted to the assumptions of Reader-Response Criticism, with the works of Iser (1996 and 1999), Jauss (1994), and also considering the critical reading of Zilberman (2015). We also dialogue with contemporary perspectives regarding the relationship between book and reader, such as: Turrión (2023), Squilloni (2023) and Bajour (2018). Regarding the methodological design, from the perspective of Minayo (2007), we carried out an exploratory research based on analytical bibliography, with a qualitative approach. In the critical reading of the stories, we map the way in which each one, through the articulations between verbal and visual languages, invokes multiple readers, seeking in every potential reader a possible dialogue with the element of childhood. Thus, the readings of the literary corpus point to a work of cross-age audiences, by evoking associative elements from multiple age universes. We hope to contribute to the scientific production of this expanding field of literary theory and criticism aimed at children's productions, bearing in mind the relevance of bringing multiple readers into play; a field that is increasingly situated as a place of borders, transitions and subjectivities, as are the subjects who cohabit it.