Media, spectacle and the grotesque

Abstract

We are interested here in the antithetical function of the grotesque against classical representation, which has given rise to the forms of dislocation and dispersion effects being related to the carnivalesque or burlesque narrative, not only in literature, but also in the cinema, television, and sometimes, in one’s own lived experience. This is possible because, from the seventeenth century on, the “grotesque” noun was gradually transformed into an adjective which found place in the semantic field of ridiculous, caricatural or parodic. Today, the grotesque is the aesthetic strategy for attracting peripheral publics on third-world countries television. With this resource, there were built national television networks even now powerful in terms of audience.