The journalistic discourse representation in Saramago’s literature

Abstract

Very little is said about literary intertexts of journalistic discourse that are present in the Portuguese novel. Permeating the nature of political and economic powers behind of the communication’s instruments, our special attention will be given to the analysis of the novels O ano da morte de Ricardo Ricardo Reis and A jangada de pedra. We argue that these texts were written by José Saramago in order to explore the print journalism’s set in Salazar’s Lisbon of the 1930s and the telejournalism’s set of the 1980s. Based in this reading, we will observe in this article that the journalistic discourse still suffers a brutal interference process of manipulation, which contributed to proliferate certain fictional vision among the people, even after the drop of the dictatorship of Salazar in the 1970s. We will release, finally, a more insightful approach about this discursive unreality consisting of many decades of communicative dissimulation, highlighting some literary processes by which the manipulative discourse of journalism is represented. Such processes will be recognized in the Saramago’s text by the intertextuality, in its central aspect, besides the allegory processes and the dialogism.