Forms of appropiation of the "Spectator" in Romance speaking areas: French Periodicals

With the project we are planning a formal and thematic analysis of the Moral Weeklies in French, as there are Le Misantrope [sic], Le Nouveau Spectateur (Van Effen), La Spectatrice, Le Nouveau Spectateur (Bastide) and Le monde comme il est (Bastide). The aim of the work is to show the strategies of fictionalization in these texts and the principal conditions of their narrative construction in the specific surrounding of local 18th century discourse. There is still no research realized in this important field. It is necessary to describe the way, in which the phenomenon of the Moral Weeklies has taken place in France and French speaking contexts and how this event can be observed in the texts. There is a rich game of masking and unmasking of the narrators at different levels creating a whole system of communication with a great number of narrative microstructures, which are tightly connected with the social discourses, especially with the literary system of France. First we will establish a formal analysis of these narrative structures. Who tells what, in which circumstances, by what voice. It is necessary to establish a detailed structure of the communicational act to have a possibility of comparison with other European Spectators. In the second part of the work, we will give an overview of the catalogue of themes, presented in the texts. The main question will be to ask if they are related to a genuine production in French, or if they are imported by the English patterns. In a third step we will integrate our results in a larger European context and study intertextual phenomenon in different Spectators. By the method of a detailed comparison of formal and semantic structures, we can follow the files of influence in the specific areas of Romance language Spectators. In a longer run, the aim is to enlarge our database (http://gams.uni-graz.at/mws) with the Moral Weeklies of the 18th century in French. Some texts are already edited and partly analyzed, e.g. Le Spectateur français and Le Spectateur el le Socrate moderne. In this project we want to start from the current state of research, which was presented not only at the Romanistentag in Munich (2001), where we participated at the panel about Il Caffè, but especially in our own panel about the topic Moral Weeklies in Europe at the last Romanistentag in Bonn (Sept. 2009) and at the World Conference of the Studies about the 18th Century in Graz (July 2011). For the publications of the outcoming results, we have founded a book series at Peter Lang with the title Die Aufklärung in der Romania.

By means of the analysis and categorizations, our digital edition of almost all prominent French spectators in this project became an important source for research on the 18th century. In addition to the translations of the three English model texts The Tatler (1709-1711), The Spectator (1711-1712; 1714) and The Guardian (1713) into French - Le Babillard ou le Philosophe Nouvelliste (1724), Le Spectateur ou le Socrate moderne (1714-26), Le Mentor moderne (1723) -, also the translation of the influential Female Spectator (1744-1746) by Eliza Haywood, La Spectatrice, traduite de l'anglais (1750-51) was analyzed and completely digitally edited in our repository. As planned, we have also edited the work in French of Justus van Effen and Jean-François de Bastide, imitations of the English model. In the course of our research, three other genuinely continental titles from the first third of the century became the focus of our attention and were included in the repository: Le Spectateur inconnu (1723-1724), Le Censeur (1714) and Le Spectateur suisse (1727). Thus, numerous important reference texts of the European spectators and milestones in the development of aesthetics and literature of the 18th century are accessible to the (specialist) public in our repository as open-access publications. For the digital edition, the original texts had to be transferred in several correction steps into today's machine-readable font. In a close-reading process, the narrative forms and levels were then categorized and specific topics were assigned to each text. Based on these texts, xml-documents were generated according to the TEI-standard and uploaded to the repository, where several views of the same text can be generated by means of different dissemination methods. In the course of the work on the texts, two focal topics emerged, which were processed in formal and thematic analyses. On the one hand, the focus was put on the digital processing of those periodicals in the wake of the Spectator that are characterized by a female - albeit partly fictional - author figure: La Spectatrice (1729), La Spectatrice danoise (1748-1750) and Les Chiffons (1786-1787). Of particular interest for our research were the later Spectators by Jean Castilhon and Jacques-Vincent Delacroix, as well as the extensive La Bigarure [sic] (1749-1753), with regard to the further development of the genre and possible influences of the Spectators on the literary and cultural system of Europe. In the conference on "Storytelling Spectators" in Graz in December 2017, the project members were also able to present their research results at several international conferences in Rotterdam, Madrid, Düsseldorf, Paris, Berlin and Edinburgh. A commented edition of La Spectatrice danoise (1748-1750) and an analysis of the thematic and formal characteristics of the three Spectator periodicals by Jacques Vincent Delacroix from the 1790s are nearly concluded.