Christian Manipulation (or Anointed Humor?): A Semiotic Analysis of the Phenomenon “Cleycianne”

Abstract

In the framework of discursive semiotic, we present an analysis of the blog h www.cleycianne.com i. Released in July 2009, the website was quickly converted into an internet hit. Its proposal is to comment the celebrity world with a “Christian perspective”. But where some users see humor, others find prejudice. As we will show, that happens because there is a fuzzy line between fiction and reality inside the blog texts. Media has announced that Cleycianne’s website is written by a man, but the existence of a character is not expressly highlighted. Thus, what one can see as irony and humor can also be understood literally by others. For our analysis, we investigate the posts from March 2010, trying to bring forth the generative trajectory of meaning, which we connect with semi-symbolic plastic features. The relations found between content and expression are very complex, producing two different narrative schemes that account for the two possible readings of the same text.