The ethos of a legacy

Abstract

In the intertwining of reflections coming from theories of discourse, argumentation and literature, the objective of this work is to present a discursive-argumentative analysis in the paratext of the autobiographical work Em nome dos pais, by Matheus Leitão (2017), with a view to analyzing traces of its argumentative dimension. Our main focus of our analysis is the construction of ethos in autobiographical writing, considered in its intrinsic relationship with the social auditorium underlying the described situation of discursive interaction. We base our analysis on the premise that the author’s ethos can be understood through the analysis of linguistic materiality in relation to its compositional and architectural dimension, thus considering the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions circumscribed to a given discourse. As a theoretical-methodological framework, we mobilize Amossy’s (2018) reflections for the discursive-argumentative analysis and the principles of Bakhtinian metalinguistics, as well as the considerations of Viart and Vercier (2008), Santos and Torga (2020) and Santos (2020) around the affiliation narrative and autobiographical genre. We observe, among other things, how ethos plays a criterion of reliability of self-centered reporting on the margins of autobiographical writing and how, in the specific case discussed, ethos emphasizes the legacy of which the narrator is the bearer.