A zona crepuscular: imagens jornalísticas do fantástico cotidiano,

Abstract

This thesis aims to delineate how certain images materialize elements of the fantastic in daily journalistic narratives. Based on the work of the historian Michel de Certeau (1994), it is assumed that daily life is an experience, built daily by individual subjects’ tactics and strategies that have autonomy to deal with what is imposed on them. Daily life, therefore, is incompatible with elements of the fantastic fiction of literary and cinematic narratives. Still, newspapers, which are configured as mediations that represent a kind of daily life, occasionally feature images that manifest fantasy as if they were part of our daily lives. Monsters, aliens, and demons materialize in photographs and illustrations that confuse the viewer, who hesitates without knowing whether that visuality is a literality or a concrete fact of everyday life. It is in this hesitation that lies the definition of fantastic by Tzvan Todorov (2014). To approach the delineation of the way in which images constitute the fantastic in everyday life, the existence of an imaginary space in which daily life and fantasy interact and gain meaning is defended. Such an environment is here called the twilight zone. This abstract area becomes an instrument of analysis of this work, which helps to think the action of journalism in the materialization of the fantastic as if it were part of everyday life. In this research, the concept is particularly useful in the analysis of two cases: the representations of the devil baby on the covers of the newspaper Notícias Populares and the chupacabra attacks reported by the Tribuna do Paraná. Both episodes are investigated with a methodology that combines the concept of mediation proposed by Jesús Martín-Barbero with the indicative paradigm of Carlo Ginzburg (2003). In these analyzes it is possible to observe that the representative images are born from an interaction of the fantastic with the daily life in the twilight zone, from which they escape and become an illustration, a montage or a photograph in the press, which presents them as a fact of daily life. This path is the delineation that we seek to reach with the general objective of this thesis, which helps to reflect on the way messages in journalism circulate, are consumed and resignified by society.