Reading as Becoming: A Narrative Review of Literature and Cultural Formation, from Arnold's Culture to the Right to Literature
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Literature's role in cultural formation is education's oldest argument and its most contemporary: what does reading poetry and novels form---a common culture, a critical citizenry, an inner freedom? This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that argument. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the cultural ideal and its critics, in which Arnold's culture and anarchy, Hirsch's cultural literacy, Bloom's closing mind, and Nussbaum's cultivated humanity defined and contested the canon's formative claim; the reading's pedagogy, in which Freire's oppressed, Candido's right to literature, Bordini and Aguiar's reader formation, Pennac's novel-like rights, and Chartier's obligatory reading built the school's practice of literary formation; and the field and the defense, in which Bourdieu's rules of art, Compagnon's why-literature lectures, and Todorov's literature in peril gave the argument its sociological and philosophical frames. It is concluded that the literature of literary formation converges on a double claim---literature forms because it gives both a shared inheritance and the capacity to question it---and that the school, the canon, and the reader's freedom are the argument's permanent triangle.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204787565