ABC, folheto, romance ou verso: a literatura impressa que se quer oral

Abstract

Brazilian northeast popular literature in verses, today known as Cordel literature, is
discussed in its relationships with orality. The concept of orality should be understood not only as a
way to transmit knowledge, but, mainly, as a system of knowledge typical from oral cultures, what
differs from the system of written cultures. The contribution for studies in this area states on data
obtained by research work, in which audiovisual recording done from the folhetos performed by
singing or presented out loud, with or without reading the texts in real time. In most cases, the
narrated poems are memorized, known by heart and only read when memory fails. Both iliterate and
those who read the poems and memorize them configure themselves as “book men” and “book
women”, for sorting out certain stories, identifying themselves with such stories to the point of
offering their own bodies as a cover for those titles. There are some people who are a kind of “living
libraries” of this kind of literature, representing really the Brazilian immaterial heritage. This is the
first result of a new research on a subject that has been gathering sparse experiences throughout
decades of observation, audio and audiovisual recordings.