The constitution of the ethos of PROEJA students in their life stories

This dissertation is situated in the theoretical field of the New Rhetoric or Argumentation Theory. It falls under the heading Discourse, Memory and Identity. It deals with the representation of the speaker, or the character they assume in order to win over the audience they are addressing and aims to analyse the constitution of the self-image, the ethos, of PROEJA/IFRN students, materialised in the (re)construction of their life stories. The life story genre effectively constitutes the space in which the subject argues (logos) in favour of outlining, (re)constructing, in discourse, his/her life story, and consequently his/her self-image (ethos), based on a certain focus that he/she delimits, evidently intending to win the credibility of his/her interlocutor (pathos) to see the image the way he/she wants it to be. The corpus for analysing this work is made up of four life stories of female students from the PROEJA/IFRN Pau dos Ferros Campus. From these stories, the following dimensions of discourse were selected for analysis: the values presented to the audience, the places of argumentation, the theses and the nature of the arguments used in the discourse.