This paper questions some of the assumptions that permeate the current literature about soap operas and television, examining particularly the model according to which soap operas are the expression of an "essential" and universal feminine nature. The paper suggests the pertinence of a crosscultural approach to the study of melodrama as well as the need to address television as an expressive materiality that is aesthetically and rhetorically meaningful. The paper uses Louis Hjelmslev's semiotical model, as well as the rhetorical concepts of archetype, motive, and situated discourse. It also proposes the concept of "rhetoric of presentation" for describing the visual modes of address and positioning that are proper to daytime melodrama; it is a perspective of analysis from which to explore the text's concrete materiality and to visualize its relations with the ideological and cultural dimensions of the text. The paper is divided into eight sections: (1) Towards a Semiotical Reading of Soap Operas; (2) Criticism and the Materiality of the Text; (3) Art and the Popular; (4) The Frontiers of Soap Opera; (5) Rhetoric and the Generic Constraint; (6) Making Strange the Familiar Codes; (7) The Rhetoric of Presentation; and (8) Conclusion. Thirty references are attached. (Author/SR)