The 21st century football world cup in newspaper covers: a reading from the concept of discursive formation

• Grant number: 22/14968-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: February 01, 2023
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Journalism and Publishing
• Principal Investigator: José Carlos Marques
• Grantee: José Carlos Marques
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Artes, Comunicação e Design (FAAC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project seeks to analyze which discursive formations, as defined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his work The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), were present in Brazilian and international printed journalism regarding the Football World Cups held in the 21st Century, namely: the 2014 World Cup in Brazil; the 2018 World Cup in Russia; and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The notion of "discursive formation" will also be extended to the redefinitions proposed by Michel Pêcheux, the main theorist of French Discourse Analysis, who sought to give new contours to the original Foucauldian notion. This concept constitutes the theoretical and methodological basis of our analysis regarding how some remarkable facts were portrayed by the covers of printed newspapers, in three different events, around one of the main sporting events on the planet - the FIFA World Cup (Fédération Internationale de Football Association).We presume that the first pages of printed newspapers carry argumentative formula-tions and meaning effects that are built through the relationship between verbal discourse (headline, title, fine line, caption, text, etc.) and visual discourse (photographs, cartoons, illus-trations) from the perspective of reading their interlocutors - hence the importance of perceiv-ing the forces of adhesion, contrast, silencing, convergence, divergence, etc. in journalistic discourse about football. Furthermore, with this approach, we intend to value the importance and uniqueness of the newspaper in the face of the successive crises that the printed medium is going through after the advent of digital media. All this will allow: a better understanding of the discursive functioning of the printed newspaper covers; the perception of the relations of meaning, historicity and discursive materiality in press production; the identification of the mechanisms that act in the discursive production of the covers of newspapers in the recon-struction of contemporary facts. (AU)