A study in multimodality: captions, text and images in the Portuguese popular newspaper ‘António Maria‘ and in the British ‘The Punch‘

• Autores: Elsa-Simoes-Lucas Freitas, Sandra Tuna
• Localización: Shaping realities in news reporting: from Early Modern English to the dawn of the twentieth century / coord. por Nicholas Brownlees, Elsa-Simoes-Lucas Freitas, Sandra Tuna, Jorge Pedro Sousa, 2018, ISBN 9789897291920, págs. 75-84
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • One of the most famous and long-living Portuguese ‘popular’ newspapers of the 19th century was ‘O António Maria’, which was founded, written and illustrated by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, an extraordinarily multifaceted Portuguese artist.

    The ‘António Maria’ had two series (1879-1885 and 1891-1898), which account for a total of fifteen years of intense journalistic activity, where its mentor undertakes a systematic, shrewd, incisive and often aggressive analysis of the different sectors of the Portuguese society. It strove to maintain its independence from the political powers, debating ideas and expressing opinions in a most original form, where text, illustration and cartoon est ablished complex dialogic relationships, simultaneously conveying the factuality required of news items and stimulating laughter that provided a comment on what was being reported.

    This play on multimodality – neither image nor text can function in isolat ion, and full meaning stems from their combined effects – is also a characteristic of a possible British counterpart of this Portuguese popular newspaper: in fact, in ‘The Punch, or the London Charivari’, we can find a very similar use of cartoons with satirical aims.

    It is the purpose of this paper to undertake a linguistic analysis of the interweaving of voices pertaining to different modes in the above publications and the increased possibilities for satire and parody on the political situation both in Portugal and England provided by their masterly use of text and image in such close juxtaposition. It is clearly a situation where the message, i.e. the corrosive political comment, cannot be dissociated from the medium (the satirical cartoon and, ultimately, the very specific kind of newspaper where they are published). Their criticism could be conveyed otherwise, but it would not be as meaningful and striking as it always was in these two newspapers. Perhaps even more importantly, if their messages were only conveyed in words, it would be more difficult for these popular publications to remain unscathed or downright banned by the political parties in government for such long periods, as was the case.