Estratégica e/ou Constitutiva? o papel da narrativa na divulgação científica midiática

Abstract

This study aims to verify the role - strategic and/or constitutive - of narrative in texts which popularize scientific themes and studies to a non-specialized public, published in the magazines Ciência Hoje, Galileu and Scientific American Brasil. The theoretical input is based on the Semiotic Studies by Algirdas Julien Greimas, on Semioliguistic Theory of Discourse Analysis, by Patrick Charaudeau, and on Textual Analysis of Discourse, postulated by Jean-Michel Adam. Under a point of view which integrates semiotic, semiolinguistic and textual perspectives, and from results of quantitative and qualitative analyses, we argue that, besides of its strategic and pragmatic functioning towards the realization, by the instance of enunciation, of different discursive macro-actions in the text, narrative plays a constitutive and immanent role in the transformation of a not-knowing state (or partial knowing) of the non-specialized reader in a knowing state with regard to the scientific knowledge. For the purposes of this investigation, we analyze the texts in relation to the communication contract in which they are inserted and to their discursive aims, as well as to the way they incorporate the phenomenon of narrativity and to the implication of this phenomenon to the primordial purpose of the mediatic scientific popularization discourse: to inform (making-know) the reader about science.