Literature at the university. Lucid reading and creative writing towards an integrated linguistic-literary education

Abstract

Reading and writing are irreplaceable activities for the formation of the citizen in a modern and democratic society, of free individuals who have a high level of self-knowledge. It is understood that the reduction of the linguistic and literary training of the population has been one of the most regressive features (because it is dehumanizing) of recent times. And conversely, his current incipient rehabilitation opens up prospects for positive work for those of us who detect the humanizing power of language.

This article supports the idea that there is no better way to teach writing than teaching reading, because writing and reading are reciprocal activities (Roca, 2021). Starting from this premise, a pedagogy of the literary text will be proposed based on the three phases of Ricoeur's (1980) hermeneutics: understand, explain and apply. The understanding of the (morpho)-logical structure, the explanation of the validity of the interpretation -and its discussion-, and the application, which refers to the ability to unite horizons and broaden them through dialogue, of an attitude that allows the work to manifest itself and invites the reader to creative writing (Galvan, 2004, Montilla-Narváez, 2021). This way of studying the literary work focused on the concept of application provides guidelines for a pluralism open to the essence of the works, encourages critical thinking and allows the emergence of improvement and transformation processes (Bain, 2006; Aguirre-Romero, 2019 ; Rock, 2021). The chapter will detail the vertices on which the didactic application of this theory is based (the theory of the complexity of communicative competence, problem-based learning and literary hermeneutics).