Changing political cartoons, establishing controversies: limits of intertextuality in the media disagreement arena

Abstract

Considered as a basic characteristic of discourse, argumentation has the same historical and social roots as democracy and, like this, it gives meaning to citizen practice, promoting and structuring dialogue in order to solve problems and lead to consensus. Supported by the linguistic principles of influence and alterity, argumentativeness is, therefore, inherent to all discourse and it allows man to share his worldviews and defend them before his peers, making his voice heard in the dialogical arena in which life is staged in society. From the perspective of Discourse Analysis (Amossy, 2011, 2018; Charaudeau, 2004a, 2008), argumentation is a social practice determined by the situation and the communicative contract that give rise to language acts, which is developed in a space of restrictions and freedoms. Considering the unique features of controversial argumentation – the one whose discourse arises from a confrontation of antagonistic theses –, the present research focuses on a corpus composed of three cartoons designed by Brazilian cartoonists, which deal with political issues at national and international levels. We are interested, more closely, in analyzing three controversial versions of these political cartoons, created by opponents, in which the verbal-visual resources were manipulated in order to impute an opposite argumentative orientation. Finally, based on argumentation in discourse, the analysis of the cartoons original versions compared to their conflicting ‘copies’ allowed us to observe the controversial dimension of the corpus that arises from mechanisms of revisiting and refutation of the other's verbal-visual discourse, by means of a parodistic intertextuality.