Overview

Relating language, culture and identity presupposes that the study of language, both in its manifestations that privilege communicational acts, as well as those in which its adhesion results in artistic and literary production, is not restricted to one or the other disciplinary field. On the contrary, the angle that addresses questions of language, should consider the need for a perspective that covers various disciplines and fields of knowledge. In the shifting territory of language, the relationship it establishes with these other fields is fundamental to understand it.

Thus, although traditionally the area of Literature is divided into sub-areas that demarcate the field of language and literature studies, the Postgraduate Program in Language Studies (PPGEL) aims to bring research and reading together that take into account the border reality of these two fronts of knowledge production in the area of Language and Literature.

Research that joins the relationship between literature and the constitution of the regional space, as well as the relationship of literature with issues related to memory, gender relations and expression modes of various social groups, minority or not, constitute a way of thinking of literary language when interwoven with broad spectra of human life. Thus, literary criticism and theory are linked to anthropology, sociology and philosophy and are combined with the study of the relations of literature with other arts, such as painting, music and graphic and imagery productions.

Language formation processes, seen from a diachronic and historical approach, can help recover aspects of collective memory that would be invisible were it not for the effort to recover the corresponding linguistic documentation. Cultural and social organization aspects are shown in the language, as seen by socio-linguistic-philological orientation studies, at the grammatical and lexical levels, whose investigations are supported in the conception that the language interprets the culture that, in its dynamics, advances more quickly over time and highlights the multiple achievements of language.

In addition, studies on text and discourse mobilize different conceptions, guiding academic-scientific issues related to reading and teaching, textualization and retextualization processes, the study of discursive genres, theories of enunciation, observing language as a practice that  involves subjects, in interaction, and the group to which they belong. Under this multidisciplinary perspective, research on language, when considering text and discourse as objects of study, is concerned with the production and circulation of historically constructed meanings, as well as subjectification processes that interfere in the constitution of identities and subjectivities. 

Molded, oriented, enriched and made possible due to the accumulation of experiences that members of the community undergo, language does not go unscathed by the varied and complex transformations of modern society. New codes, signs, discourses, socio-cultural contexts, narrative forms and identities are established and lose their boundaries when following the demands of registering human experience. In this scenario, the Postgraduate Program in Language Studies (PPGEL) offers courses marked by the interdisciplinarity of research on language, permeated, above all, by culture and the multiple identities that are reflected and refracted in/by language.