The Land of Carnival: grotesque manifestations in two utopias of the baroque Germany

• Grant number: 15/22329-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2016
• End date: February 28, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel
• Grantee: Julia Ciasca Brandão
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In 1640, Utopia, the homonymous work of Thomas More, written by Jakob Bidermann, German Jesuit and Inquisitor of the Catholic Church in Rome, was published. The author, an active member of the Tridentine Culture, wrote the text in Latin with the didactic purpose of teaching moral example to his students at the Jesuit College in the city of Augsburg.In 1677, Christoph von Andreas Hörl von Waltersdorf, of whom little is known, translated the text from Latin into German, and published it under the title Bacchusia oder Fastnachtland.Except for some differences between the original work and its translation, the text recounts the journey of three friends to an imaginary land where the inhabitants celebrate an eternal carnival, chaos is institutionalized and the rules of good behavior are suspended. The travelers experience the terrible consequences in this "upside down world" and, at the end, they discover that the real world, based on the virtues and on the Christian morality - and especially if guided by the Catholic Church - is a better and more peaceful place to live. The Carnival Land is a grotesque world in which notions of order seems to disjoin themselves. To Wilhelm Kayser (1957), the grotesque manifestations don't consist in their own domains and in a totally free fantasizing: the grotesque world is our own world, based precisely on the experience that our world, apparently reliable and organized, is actually alienated in the emergence of abysmal powers and dissolves itself in its ordinations. The grotesque pictured in the Land of Carnival acquires an underground relation to reality and, therefore, allows the reader to approach the Baroque culture of Germany in the seventeenth-century. This is the object of my research, which will be added to the complete translation of Bacchusia oder Fastnachtland, from German to Portuguese.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

BRANDÃO, Julia Ciasca. Bacchusia, or the carnival land: the refined laughter of eutrapelia. 2017. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem Campinas, SP.