European Frontiers: the bullfights seen from the interwar Parisian literary world

Author(s)

Luís Felipe Bueno Sobral

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2015-12-06

Examining board members

Heloísa André Pontes; Ricardo Augusto Benzaquen de Araújo; Jorge Coli; Fernanda Arêas Peixoto; Omar Ribeiro Thomaz

• Advisor: Heloísa André Pontes

Abstract

In Paris between the wars, one finds a literary repertoire on bullfight gathering very diffe-rent writers (Ernest Hemingway, Henry de Montherlant, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Joseph Peyré) and genres (sketch, short story, newspaper article, novel, guide, poetry, es-say). Such repertoire does not only represent the apex of the interest in the subject outside Spain since the days of Romanticism as it denotes a serious conception of a cultural activity seen until then as horrible or, at best, as exotic. What caused this serious literary conception of bullfight and why did it concentrate in this period and in Paris? This thesis examines such question to apprehend in the very flow of time the transformation of the looks casted from between-the-war Paris to the bullfight. With this aim, it employs an evidential para-digm, valuing details insignificant at first glance, capable however to lead the interpretation towards a wide historical scale, and it presents itself as an essay, an appropriate genre for the tortuous path imposed by the diversity of sources and for an interdisciplinary approach (AU)