Ironia e outros mecanismos de descredibilização do proponente, à luz do modelo dialogal da argumentação, em crônicas de Carmen Dolores

Abstract

Carmen Dolores established herself as a major Brazilian writer early in the 20th century through the publication of her chronicles in widely circulated newspapers of the time. Motivated to study a prominent writer forgotten by literary historiography—and approaching her work within a domain distinct from the literary, namely linguistics and argumentation—this research aimed primarily to analyze how, through irony and other mechanisms we term “discrediting the Proponent”, she emphasizes her argumentative role of Opponent (Platin, 2018). To this end, in this qualitative and bibliographic study, we identified—in six chronicles selected from the survey conducted by Maria Risolete Hellmann (2015) and from the collection in the Hemeroteca Digital—ironic excerpts, based on the conditions of ironical utterance by Tindale and Gough (1987), Brait (2008) and Ducrot (2020) to elaborate our own conditions to work with this specific corpus. After identifying occurrences of irony in the chronicles, we identified which values (Perelman; Olbrechts-Tyteca, 2014) Carmen Dolores and other authors she evokes defend, in order to subsequently infer the communicative-rhetorical function (Kaufer; Neuwirth, 1982; Muecke, 1969) of each use of irony identified in the first stage: ridicule, refutation, or reinforcement. We also highlight the writer’s use of mechanisms such as praise, rhetorical questions, and moments of mockery, which were somehow linked to irony by sharing certain intrinsic characteristics. Finally, through this process, we demonstrated how the writer positions herself as an Opponent (Plantin, 2018) using irony and these other mechanisms. We concluded, therefore, that, although irony seem like a resource that conceals the ironist’s true intention, by adding these other mechanisms, Carmen Dolores revealed herself as a dissonant and fierce voice in the face of a patriarchal society and undoubtedly occupied the argumentative role of Opponent.