Iniciação científica nos anos finais do ensino fundamental: uma análise discursiva de memes sobre a Covid-19

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of memes during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, between the years 2020 and 2022, seeking, mainly, to understand what topics were covered, the criticisms made and the production conditions in which the memes were produced. The relevance that memes have gained, especially during the pandemic, stands out, both for criticizing the way the federal government handled the situation as well as people’s attitudes and the alleviation of the situation through humor. The study was based on readings from Discourse Analysis (Pêcheux, 1997, 2015), with the aim of analyzing the effects of meaning that surround this genre and providing a broader reading. Furthermore, we take into account the intertextuality of memes and their possibilities for work in Portuguese language classes, contributing to the process of textual interpretation. Therefore, the analyzes made it possible to understand how the meme is an important discursive genre, which circulates on different social networks and manages to reach a large number of internet users. In this specific case, memes had the function of alleviating, through humor, the degrading situation highlighted by the pandemic. Furthermore, we found that this genre is an interesting teaching resource for use in the classroom.