UMA ANÁLISE DAS ESTRATÉGIAS DE CARNAVALIZAÇÃOUTILIZADAS POR ARNALDO JABOR NA CRÔNICA POLÍTICASOBRE GEORGE BUSH E OSAMA BIN LADEN

by BENGHI, ODETE CICATTO

This research aims at analyzing the process of carnavalization in the political columnswritten by Arnaldo Jabor, trying to discuss the ways and strategies the author uses to give thetexts a humored accent and to build irony. The theoretical-methodological basis inserts itselfinto the dialogical view of discourse and of speech genres of Bakhtin?s Circle, as well as theviewpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis about genre, and more specific contributions inrespect to irony building. The research data consists itself of four columns by the writer andjournalist Arnaldo Jabor, published between 2002 and 2004 in newspapers with nationalcirculation (O Globo newspaper and O Estado de São Paulo newspaper), all of the themconnected to the conflict between USA and the Islamic world, personified in the figure of theAmerican president George W. Bush and of the taliban Osama Bin Laden, respectively. Theanalysis was based on the methodology proposed by Hutcheon (2000) that suggests threeanalytical perspectives: circumstantial, textual and intertextual, in order to contemplate adeeper analysis of the text, taking into account its relations with the context of production andenunciation. The circumstantial context includes the uttering situation and the communicativecontext, thus motivating a reflection about the publishing vehicles, their journalistic filiations,their ideal or expected reader, the space in which the column is published, the social-historicalmoment of enunciation and the career of the author himself, as it is the voice of the author thatmoves behind the text, constituting him as the ironist. Still in the circumstantial context itseemed necessary to carry out a brief discussion about the journalistic movement called ?newjournalism? that showed to influence the context of production. In what concerns the textualcontext, the analysis considered the lexical selection, the grammatical options, the cohesionmechanisms and the text structure as a whole, as well as the strategies used to build thedifferent characters, in order to perceive the management of humor and irony, and theconnection between the texts and carnavalization. Finally, within the intertextual context, thefocus was on the dialogical relation among the columns and between the columns and theimplied social knowledge. The data analysis pointed to the articulation of three kinds of irony:ludic, content analyzer and of opposition, what reflects the fact that the author, whenmobilizing the irony, does not do it only to institute laughter, or humor, but mainly to lead thereader to a reanalysis of the facts observed in the recent world history, which are part of thereader?s knowledge. To do so, Jabor takes advantage of a particular use of the ?ordinarylanguage?, creating parodical and carnavalized effects that seem to contribute to theemergence of both humor and irony