Univerzitetska Misao (Jan 2022)
Methodological and didactic approach to the phenomenon of dystopy in secondary school's reading books in the Republic of Serbia (the second half of XX and the beginning of XXI century)
Abstract
Selected excerpts of representative novels of various genres have a special place in gymnasium's and secondary vocational schools' reading books. Therefore, the methodical approach in the interpretive processing of this complex and layered artistic literature material is a serious teaching challenge. The hypothetical starting point in this case is the phenomenon of dystopia present in the chosen reading books which is seen through literary and artistic processing. Through this topic, we have meticulously and seriously analyzed the relationship between the novel and the reading books, as a first and obligatory textbooks for teaching literature. The aim of our research is to determine the presence of novelistic dystopian art material in gymnasium's and secondary vocational schools' manners of interpretation. The subject of the research are secondary schools' textbooks in the Republic of Serbia present in teaching practice in the period from the first half of the XX century and in the first decades of the XXI century.We based the research on forty copies of reading books from all secondary education grades. The reading samples are works of thirty authors and are printed in several different-unmodified, modified, supplementary and revised editions - focusing on the most characteristic copies of reading books from different periods and system and program phases that significantly affected their content. We believe that the chosen sample of the study is reliable, and the conclusions we came to are a realistic presentation of the state of novelistic prose in our reading books. Although the novelistic text is only one literary reading segment, our findings are largely valid for the overall genre-textbook treatment of literature. The research in this case was conducted on the reading books from the Zavod za udžbenike, which is our only decades-old publisher of textbooks that is 'current' even today.
