O discurso em narrativas de vida hierofânicas: construção do ethos em testemunhos de evangélicos pentecostais

Abstract

In this study, we analyze the discourse in self-narratives of Pentecostal evangelicals, known as evangelical testimony, to investigate how the discursive ethos of the authornarrator is constructed. In order to achieve this objective, we established the following specific objectives: to describe the characteristics of the communication contract that involves the production and circulation of evangelical testimonies; to verify how the narrative organization contributes to the construction of ethos in life narratives; and to observe the discursive procedures that contribute to the reality effect of the narratives, in order to legitimize them as true narratives. In order to constitute our theoretical bases, we try to reconcile a set of postulates developed within the Charaudeau’s Semiolinguistic Theory (2014a; 2015; 1995) with the theoretical discussions regarding the notions of interdiscourse and discursive formation developed by Pêcheux (1975; 1983) and Maingueneau (2008; 2011b; 2015) in French Discourse Analysis. In addition, we use the concept of Discursive Ethos, discussed mainly in Maingueneau (2013; 2015; 2011a; 2018), which assumes a discursive-enunciative perspective, and Amossy (2011; 2014), which examines it under the rhetorical approach. For the analysis of life narratives, we assume theoretical-methodological positions proposed by Charaudeau (2014a; 2015) and Maia-Vasconcelos (2020), so that we situate the life narratives of the Pentecostal evangelicals (testimonies) in the interdiscourse between the religious, autobiography and politics discourse. Thus, based on a sociodiscursive approach, our methodology included the construction of a corpus according to the following steps: definition of the research universe to the Pentecostal evangelical community and collection of six evangelical testimonies made available on the YouTube platform that had been produced in churches by individuals who did not specifically promote any religious institution when presenting their life stories. The analyses we conducted from this corpus brought us results that can be summarized as follows: the communication contract involves religious subjects who spontaneously share their life stories with interlocutors who share the same values and positions, intrinsically related to the belief in the action of the sacred; the narrative staging device helps to build a dynamic and polemic ethos, so that we propose the notion of an ethic path to try to describe it; the procedures for building the effect of reality are based mainly on values and experiences shared among individuals in the community, in movements of identification and otherness. These results allow us to conclude that the analyses of life narratives need to take into consideration the aspects of dynamism and otherness in the construction of the ethos, avoiding trying to frame it in static images, and that the study of the life narratives of evangelicals can contribute to a more plural approach to religious discourses.