Percy Jackson and the Olympians

the contribution of children’s middle grade literature to the formation of new readers

Abstract

Since the conception of a teaching model to meet the desires of the bourgeoisie, literature has served as a conveyor of knowledge through its language adapted and directed at children and adolescents, so the teaching of literary texts has always been focused on socio-historical issues with educational purposes, especially for this age group. In the meantime, using a literature review, this article seeks to rethink the way literature is taught in the classroom, focusing on literary literacy. With the aim of contributing to the formation of literary readers among children and adolescents, the corpus is the fantastic series Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2014), which is part of the school environment. As theoretical support, authors such as Colomer (2003), Zilberman (2003), Lajolo (1993) and Soares (2006) will be used to deal with children's middle grade literature, Candido (2017), Eliade (1972) and Todorov (1970) for fantastic literature and Cosson (2021; 2022) and Margallo (2021) for literary literacy. Based on the analysis, it can be seen that the series encourages the formation of literary readers by using numerous strategies to encourage them to continue reading and seek out other more complex works, especially the use of Greek myths adapted to teach human subjects and work on individual and collective issues that permeate society, both in the reader's universe and in the stories. Finally, it was understood that the formation of the literary reader is gradual, which is why it is important to start from more accessible literature to progressively more complex ones, as the reader only matures through challenges.