Terribly unimportant things - told through some bloody 16th and 17th Centuries faits divers

• Grant number: 14/17425-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2015
• End date: September 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Languages
• Agreement: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Alcir Bernardez Pecora
• Grantee: Rafael Marcelo Viegas
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 15/23717-3 - Toward a poetics of variants: bibliographical Investigations into the French canards of faits-divers (16h-17th Centuries), BE.EP.PD

Abstract

In my research project I intend to examine the French feuilletons known as "canards de faits divers". These texts had a journalistic content and were in vogue between 1529 and 1631. There are 520 titles (about 800 exemplars) in the archives of the French National Library. The "canards" used to be sold by street vendors. They were read by people from every walk of life and dealt with a variety of topics, such as for instance the life of the aristocracy, natural catastrophes, crimes, atrocities, and the bizarre. The "canards" may be considered a form of popular document quite different from traditional literary texts. For this reason, they may be analyzed and compared to well-established forms of seventeenth-century narratives. Depending on the theme they dealt with (crimes, witchcraft, news about the birth of monsters, etc.), the "canards" may be analyzed and compared to classical texts such as plays, religious texts and the so-called "récit de prodiges" such as teratological treatises. This kind of comparative approach enables one to highlight the genetic elements that underlie their material production (texts, paratexts, technical achievement). This approach also enables one to highlight the epistemology and rhetoric of their historical-cultural representation. This approach, moreover, leads to a comparative poetics of the "canards" with their scholarly homologues, and paves the way for a new reading of both the "canards" themselves and their scholarly homologues.This research project submitted to Unicamp and FAPESP will examine only 150 titles from a total of 520 texts. The texts which have been selected form my research deal with crimes, more specifically bloody crimes. My intention is to analyze and understand the relationship between, on the one hand, the tragic texts from seventeenth century (the so-called Histoires Tragiques), and "canards" that contained similar narratives, on the other. (AU)