Rewriting the canon, reinventing teaching

Creative writing practices inspired by classics of Portuguese literature in the context of teacher training.

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the place of canonical literature in higher education, based on a creative writing experience with undergraduate students in Basic Education, future teachers of the 1st and 2nd cycles of Elementary Education. The workshop, entitled "(Other) writings of the classics: between the canonical and the contemporary in Portuguese literature," held in the 2019-2020 academic year, aimed to promote active and creative contact with works from the Portuguese literary canon, challenging students to create stories based on characters, times, and spaces inspired by classic texts of the national literary tradition, reorganized into original narrative constellations. More than a technical exercise, it proved to be a space for aesthetic experimentation and critical appropriation of literary texts, allowing students to creatively reformulate canonical references, combining them with their own imagination and transforming the classics from untouchable objects into living material for creation. Based on theoretical assumptions by Harold Bloom, Gérard Genette, and João Barrento, among others, the activity highlighted the intertextual power of literary creation, which rewrites, reconstructs, and updates traditions, revealing how the canon is, above all, a living, malleable, and constantly reinterpreted heritage. By reimagining the classics, the workshop restored their formative power and revealed creative writing as a pedagogical strategy capable of crossing tradition and authorship, reading and experience.