The (re)construction of discursive ethos: reflections on self images in interacting subjects

Abstract

More than ten years ago, in Brazil, the notion of discursive ethos - understood as “the image of itself in discourse” - has become a recurring theme in numerous articles, books, dissertations and theses. Currently, the conditions of production and the new objects of analysis give rise to further discussion and expansion on this subject. The main objective of this article is to present some recent theoretical reflections that have not yet had much visibility in the Brazilian Academic surrounding. More specifically, we intend to demonstrate how these studies can be used at the time of analysis. For that, we used as corpus seven television interviews conducted with former President Dilma Rousseff from 2010 to 2016. When observing the political subject in interaction, we find that the images are built no longer just the statements of the former President, but also in the statements of the questions asked by journalists. With the analysis, we can conclude that the emergence of new problems, the arrival of new wills of truth, the different profiles of journalists and the transformations that occurred in the current “political making” were the elements that proved that the discursive ethos is an eternal work of construction and reconstruction.