Semiotic approaches to syncretic discourses

• Grant number: 16/50473-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2017
• End date: May 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Agreement: Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.- FNRS)
• Mobility Program: SPRINT - Projetos de pesquisa - Mobilidade
• Principal Investigator: Jean Cristtus Portela
• Grantee: Jean Cristtus Portela
• Principal researcher abroad: Maria Giulia Dondero
• Institution abroad: Université de Liège (ULg), Belgium
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 16/22466-0 - Semiotics of discourse: epistemology and history, AP.R

Abstract

This project intends to study syncretic discourses in Belgian and Brazilian culture from a semiotic perspective. By syncretic discourse, we mean a device consisting of at least two language systems (text and image, image and sound, etc.), as found, among others, in advertising posters, graphic novels, opera, comics, art installations, and graffiti. At a theoretical level, the project will identify and compare the approaches that enable the correspondence between different languages, among which the narrative, the semi-symbolic and the enunciative approaches. More in particular, the study will address the materiality of syncretic discourses, identifying their modalities of inscription on media (paper, wall, canvas etc.). This approach has the advantage to overcome a structuralist methodology based exclusively on content analysis, and thus to enhance the perceptual specificity of each discourse. At the methodological level, the project will focus on a series of comparative analyses of a Belgian and Brazilian syncretic corpus, in which both teams will pool their skills. In order to take advantage of the cultural interference of these approaches, we will make extensive use of cross-analysis: the Belgian corpus (concrete poetry, from Dotremont to Kéguenne; comics, from Hergé to Peeters I Schuiten) will be primarily studied by the Brazilian team; the Brazilian corpus (graffiti from São Paulo; concrete poetry, from Augusto de Campos to Júlio Plaza and Arnaldo Antunes) by the Belgian team. (AU)