Língua, patrimônio e museu no Museu da Língua Portuguesa e nas réplicas de seus visitantes

Abstract

This doctorate thesis is a case study having as object the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (Museum of Portuguese Language), here-in-after MLP an institution inaugurated on March 20, 2006, and sited in the center of São Paulo city, just on the centennial premises of Estação da Luz. The museum, sponsored by the state of São Paulo government and the Fundação Roberto Marinho, alongside with other public and private enterprise partners, uses a diversified iconography, anchored in new communication technologies. Our approach has as its starting point the notions of language, heritage and museum which, however belonging to distinct theoretical cartographies, are social phenomena that question the representation of social identities, the concepts of memory and forgetfulness, the power strategies. Having as theoretical bases the categories of Bakhtinian dialogism, of social memory (HALBWACHS) and the relations between memory, discourse and power (FOUCAULT), our goal is to describe and analyse the discourse network of the Museu da Língua Portuguesa, taking into consideration both its official and unofficial narrators, its exhibition discourse in its multiple shapes and above all the replies of its visitors. The research questions that we have posed concern the meanings of language and literature musealized in the MLP, the meanings of heritage proposed there and the very meanings of the concept of museum. The reading and interpretation of the MLP we have accomplished, alongside with the replies of its visitors, have brought us to stress what the MLP remembers the discoursive formations that cross its exhibit proposition and what the MLP forgets.