Modern fruits of baroque trees: Adaptation strategies of father António Vieira’s sermons to comic-book story

Abstract

Father António Vieira SJ,in his sermons,seeks the verbal cadenceand a set of images, ideas and concepts to create a fluid text constructed before the reader’s eyes. However,twenty-first century society is far distant from the one that sawand heard these texts, in the XVII century. Thus, it is necessary that new approaches to Vieiratexts be presented in a problematized way to the new generations. Using adaptation methods, it is possible to give a new outfit to the Portuguese Jesuit work, by illustratingin comic-book stories the argumentation reasonings, the allegories and examples presents in his texts. Therefore,this article intents to examine concepts such as adaptation, transposition and intermedia, Vieira’s constitutive elements of thought and verbal structure, and their applicability in the new Information and Communications Technology. Taking as an example the productions of comic-book stories developed in the research project Readings of Father António Vieira SJ work: The logical architecture, the rhetorical construction and the argumentative actuality, especially the one about theSermon of the Good Thief, it shows how, through the articulation between the verbal and non-verbal language, it is possible to buildpaths to new readers of Father Vieira works.