The central objective of this short essay is a critical analysis regarding the tendency of Brazilian and foreign scholars alike of their analysis of symbolic production as expressed in popular verse narratives, a classificatory procedure referred to as “thematic cycles”. It is a mistaken procedure not only in its own internal logic but also in the unanswered demand for an extensive knowledge of the universe of the corpus of this literature, a procedure that introduces the perspective of each classifier much more than the narrative content of the materials over which it is applied. In addition, it empties this symbolic production of its essential historic-cultural dimension in its process of production, resulting in the recurrence of sameness. Finally, 1 formulate a working hypothesis according to which the way to overcome this deadlock resides in the proposition of a more productive hermeneutic that may face this corpus in a periodicity of a clearly historic profile.
classification; historic periodicity; popular narratives in verse; thematic cycle