Communities of Readers: Youth Culture and the Acts of Decollecting

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the constitution of communities of readers based on the Bakhtin Circle’s conceptions of language, centrifugal and centripetal forces; Canclini’s understanding of culture/collection; contemporary authors’s reflections on youths and youth culture, and Chartier’s reflection on reading. It interests us to problematize how these communities are constituted and how the reading practices occur as they are related to works that are placed outside the canon and are not considered “good reading”. As part of a broader research study, we investigated how these youths are organized in communities of readers for the production and sharing of knowledge and experience.