THE BRAZILIAN SOAP OPERA AND THE MASS CULTURE: A RELATIONSHIP BEYOND THE ZAPPING

Abstract

Heir of serials, the Telenovela is nothing more than an electronic version of this literary genre that emerged in the nineteenth century to meet the demand of the people for entertainment, for the first time in history, had earned the right to leisure. As we can see, the story of the serial is intimately linked to the history of leisure, a phenomenon of the modern era that emerged from the French Revolution and intensified with the Industrial Revolution. While mass culture, the success of the Brazilian Telenovela is related to the proximity of the receiver and the everyday "common language". It is noticed that, in general, the scripts can talk to all layers of society, not favoring one or the other. This quality also finds himself tied to "Brazilianization" of plots in Brazilian Telenovelas, especially from the 1970s and 1980, when they win the "most profitable product status of the Brazilian cultural industry." Thus, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the role of the telenovela in the Brazilian context, relating it to mass culture and wide acceptance by the public receptor. Therefore, revisits the main concepts of mass culture crafted by Umberto Eco in Apocalyptic and Integrated (2004), and Alfredo Bosi in Dialectics of Colonization (1992), among others, in search of possible approaches to this type of narrative television. For the suitability to the concepts proposed, adopted as the methodology literature. As results, the theoretical allowed the rescue of the importance of this artistic manifestation in the cultural scene reinforcing their contribution in shaping the current Brazilian society.

Keywords: Brazilian soap opera, popular culture; subject; spectator.