by Ricardo Monteiro

The presentation “Syncretic Rhetoric Strategies in Advertising and Propaganda” intends to offer a methodological approach to analyze syncretic texts (verbo-visual, audiovisual etc) and also to suggest some criteria to help the evaluation of their efficiency. The examples to be discussed will include both advertising and propaganda, considering their structural similarities as pieces of communication and the specificities of their targets. Although permeated by contributions by the Peircean and Russian schools of semiotics, the conceptual and methodological approach of the presentation is fundamentally based upon the so-called French semiotics, following the steps of such authors as Algirdas Greimas, Jacques Fontanille, Jean-Marie Floch and Andrea Semprini, among others. Thus, one of the methodological strategies to be exposed consists on determining the categorical oppositions that pervade the syncretic text both in the planes of content and expression, and that organize the figures and themes in the different instances of substance (verbal, visual, musical, sound etc) that compound the syncretic text. Such a research, tested throughout about seven years of consultancy, intends to contribute to supply the lack of bibliography regarding to syncretic texts as a whole – constantly obliterated by studies that treat separately the different languages that compound the syncretic text rather than investigating the consequences of their interaction in the process of generation of meaning.