Ett annorlunda BRUS : ett läromedels litteraturförmedling i spänningsfältet mellan tradition och förnyelse

Sammanfattning: This thesis discusses different challenges of mediating literature in textbooks. The study is based on a critical analysis of the textbook BRUS as well as other textbooks. BRUS displays evident and pastiche- like influences from postmodern culture, features that are still unusual in textbooks. In my research therefore I ask: Which innovative as well as traditional features can be discerned in the BRUS material, and how can they be explained? Which notions of literature are represented by BRUS? What pedagogical challenges are expressed in BRUS? The result indicates several non-traditional features. For example how BRUS introduces literature to the reader through a postmodern discourse in which high culture and low culture are mixed. The selection of genres in BRUS contains a relatively high proportion of non-fiction literature, and literature that is considered as low culture. BRUS uses a significant large number of writing assignments which demand different creative performances. The purpose is presumably to engage the students in the process of constructing literary meaning by presenting contemporary literature that actually matters to young people. However, the intellectual operations lack analytical depth and are focused on describing contextual features which sometimes are tenuously connected to the literature. My conclusion is that BRUS initiates a variation of fruitful literary ideas in a pedagogical context. The problem is the lack of a critical filter and pedagogical meta-discussions in which BRUS for instance discusses what functions the study of literature might fill in today’s media landscape. In my opinion, such questions should be in focus in a postmodern textbook.