“Are you ready to test yourself?”: a semiolinguistic approach to the quiz genre in Clarice Lispector’s Correio Feminino

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to characterize, based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Semiolinguistic Discourse Analysis, the genre Quiz within Clarice Lispector’s collection of journalistic texts, Correio Feminino. This approach looks at genres from the viewpoint of its situational, discursive and formal constraints. The results show that the Quiz, in the corpus under analysis, is a media genre intended to question the reader on aspects of his/her personality and behavior, through a series of informational, encouraging and instructional questions. The genre, in its discursive and formal levels, is characterized by the presence of descriptive and enunciative organizational modes, as well as by some impersonal grammatical structures.