Discursive ethos: an image, a polemic

Abstract

This work aims at discussing the commercialization of education system phenomenon from the discursive ethos apprehension in a private higher education institution’s advertising, whose circulation has generated controversies by portraying the socio-historical time in which the financial market advances on the education system. For this, we resort to the French Discourse Analysis theoretical-methodological framework, in its enunciative way, and to the concept of Discursive Ethos, as developed by Dominique Maingueneau. Collected in its digital format, corpus consists of an advertising poster that engendered polemic in social networks and, therefore, was withdrawn from circulation. Results show that the choice of the guarantor of the speech represents the embodiment of neoliberalism in its current conjuncture. However, although with the favorable conditions of production, the ethical world offered in this discourse was not well accepted, ending up in its interdiction.