Laughter, irony and self-derision in Charles Baudelaire and Cruz e Sousa: comparative study

• Grant number: 24/20483-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 04, 2025
• End date: April 03, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal Investigator: Francine Fernandes Weiss Ricieri
• Grantee: Francine Fernandes Weiss Ricieri
• Host Investigator: Alain Vaillant
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Paris 10), France

Abstract

The project supports a request for a Research Grant Abroad (BPE) to subsidize short-term bibliographical research (30 days), with the central objective of gathering theoretical, critical, and historical support for a comparative study dedicated to particularizing the role played by the categories laughter, irony and self-derision in the proposition of a theorization of the poetic (more specifically of lyricism - with consequences for thinking about the social role of the artist and art in modernity) internalized to the writing of the poets central to the work. Moving away from a tradition of thematic approaches to the relationships between Brazilian poets and Charles Baudelaire, I intend to investigate how aesthetic reflections present themselves in Cruz e Sousa's writing, in dialogue with Baudelaire. Such reflections can manifest as allegories of art and the artist, as direct insertions of dialogues with the French poet, or even as unsystematic exercises in theorization. The problems proposed depend on the concept of tragic clown proposed by Starobinski and previous studies on Baudelaire's reception in Brazil. Vaillant's studies, dedicated to the role played by laughter in Baudelaire's poetics, allow us to develop reflections around irony and its role in the production of a specific form of lyricism. The work falls within the field called "Comparative Literature", in the terms proposed in works by Jobim and Rocha. Rocha has dedicated himself to identifying "strategies used in asymmetric contexts by those located in the least favored pole of exchanges" (2017, p. 186). We also assume the constitution of networks of references and interactions whose borders are subjected to dynamics of forces broader than what can be thought from a localist perspective, in "a non-traditional relationship with tradition itself" and in the admission of co-presence of "radically heterogeneous temporalities", to recover Antelo's words.