Multimodalidade e design no jornalismo em quadrinhos: aspectos representacionais e composicionais na construção dos sentidos

Abstract

Historically, human beings have been both producers and interpreters of meaning. In the contemporary context, communication processes have increasingly involved the frequent interplay of multiple semiotic modes, giving rise to more complex practices of reading and meaning-making. This phenomenon constitutes multimodality, in which the cultural, multifaceted, and hybrid element plays a central role in language practices. Given this scenario, the general objective of this dissertation is to analyze the constitution and effect of meanings arising from multimodal design in Comic Journalism (CJ) texts. Thus, this study is theoretically grounded in Social Semiotics (Kress; van Leeuwen, 2001; 2006; Callow, 2013; Santos; Gualberto, 2023) and the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress; van Leeuwen, 2006). It also engages with studies of Discourse Genres, based on Bakhtin (2006), and Textual Genres, according to Marcuschi (2008), as well as with authors in the field of Social Communication who investigate Comic Book Journalism as a journalistic practice, such as Dutra (2003), Gomes (2009), and Weber and Rall (2017). The research corpus consists of texts from the graphic journalism genre, primarily comic-book reports and interviews published in Badaró magazine, which were selected based on thematic and compositional criteria. To this end, methodologically, a qualitative and descriptive-analytical approach is adopted, guided by a multimodal analysis of the texts, which includes a systematic description of representational choices (processes, participants, and contexts) and compositional choices (information value, framing, and salience). The results indicate that Comic Journalism mobilizes multimodal choices that enhance the construction of meaning and reader engagement, while simultaneously reconfiguring traditional practices of journalistic discourse. Furthermore, through this research, it was possible to categorize Comic Journalism as a hypergenre traversed by a journalisticcomic interdomain. Therefore, multimodal articulation in Comic Journalism expands the expressive possibilities of the hypergenre and requires the reader to employ multiliterate practices for the critical interpretation of the texts.