Literatura juvenil, ditadura e ensino: o testemunho ficcional em Clarice, de Roger Mello

Abstract

This study investigates youth testimonial literature concerning the Brazilian military dictatorship, reflecting on its aesthetic, ethical, and political elaboration, as well as its contributions to reader formation within the context of basic education. It is grounded in the understanding that testimonial literature, by narrating experiences marked by state violence, censorship, and silencing, constitutes a space of resistance against the erasure of an authoritarian past. Within this framework, the research analyzes the young adult novel Clarice (2018), by Roger Mello, a work that constructs a fictional testimony through the perspective of a young narrator, whose literary composition is characterized by fragmentation and silences articulated through both verbal text and illustration. The study is theoretically based on scholarship in testimonial literature, drawing on authors such as Seligmann-Silva (2008), Adorno (2015), and Gagnebin (2006), while also engaging with reflections on childhood, narration, and the duty of memory, particularly from Sarmento-Pantoja (2012; 2018) and Vieira (2016). The novel Clarice is examined in dialogue with its critical reception, including studies by Souza and Carvalho (2021), Brites (2022), and Cruvinel and Melo (2025), situating it within the field of testimonial literature and contemporary youth narratives. The analysis considers formal and compositional aspects such as graphic design, illustrations, narrative fragmentation, metafiction, and youth protagonism. In the field of literature teaching, the study problematizes pedagogical approaches that instrumentalize literature, discussing aspects of the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), in dialogue with authors such as Zilberman (2009), Mendes (2023), and Cechinel (2019), as well as the impacts of curricular control and the challenges posed by contexts of censorship and memory disputes. As a conceptual contribution, the research proposes the notion of youth testimonial literature, understood as a form of memory elaboration articulated through narrative strategies, committed to the young reader without simplifying reality. Methodologically, the study also presents a theoretical proposal for a reading workshop based on Clarice, designed for the final years of lower secondary education, conceived as a possible pathway for mediating literary reading. Thus, the study reaffirms youth testimonial literature as a means of fostering critical, sensitive readers committed to memory, democracy, and human rights.