A REFLECTION ON THE FORMATION OF THE CRITICAL READER

Abstract

Thinking about the formation of critical readers is a fundamental basis for considering how, within pedagogical spaces, human development can be strengthened, insofar as reading has redefined human processes of meaning-making and the configuration of one’s worldview, allowing individuals to enrich both their subjective and social spheres. In this sense, it becomes necessary to propose reflective perspectives regarding the formation of critical readers in the school setting—an environment called to face this challenge—drawing on the theoretical contributions of semiotics and on several proposals by Professor Fabio Jurado concerning the reading of literary texts. This is framed within the methodological structure of Gadamer’s hermeneutic method, adopting a comprehensive approach to ontological reality that enables interpretation and access to the underlying discourses present in the texts that surround us, thereby highlighting essential elements of the method such as understanding and its subsequent interpretation. Accordingly, the first section of this essay explores certain pathways related to critical reading as dialogism among texts. The second section analyzes the way meaning is configured in a poem by Rogelio Echavarría, using selected interpretive models to identify how meaning is constructed and interpreted, as well as to trace intertextual dialogues with other texts. Finally, the essay elucidates the need to integrate the contributions of semiotics and hermeneutics to guide the formation of critical readers capable of uncovering within texts those symbolic structures, tensions, and intertextual dialogues that shape meaning in its deepest, most crafted form, along with the internal and cultural relationships that sustain it.