The Ethes of the mother of the twins Farida and Carolinda in Mia Couto´s Sleepwalking Land

Abstract

Based on the notion of ethos revisited by Maingueneau, mainly in his work Discursive Ethos, the article describes the construction of the “pre-discursive”, the “enunciative “ and the “shown-discursive” ethé of a character presented as the mother of the twins Farida and Carolinda in Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land. From this theoretical framework, we conducted a qualitative, linguistic-discourse and interdisciplinary analysis of the ethé in the discourse of the mother. Our methodological and theoretical research is based on the interface between linguistics – more specifically discourse analysis – and ethos in literary discourse and history. We conclude that the ethos representation and the character “identification” contribute to the meaning negotiation processes and to the perception of individual, collective and Mozambique’s “socio-discursive imageries”