Literatura e Conhecimento: Machado, James e Maupassant

Funder

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Organizational Unit

Publications

António Patrício: Versos incompletos (ou, melhor, cenas incompletas)

Publication . Reis, Amândio

2017Journal article

Open access

Writing the Unknown : Fiction, Reality, and the Supernatural in the Late-Nineteenth Century Short Story (Machado, James, Maupassant)

Publication . Reis, Amândio Pereira; Buescu, Helena Etelvina de Lemos Carvalhão; Salado, Régis Augustin François

This dissertation offers a comparative perspective on the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James, and Guy de Maupassant written in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Contextualizing my close interpretation of the texts in this historical period, which corresponds to the birth of the modern short story and, at the same time, of the modern fantastic, I argue that notwithstanding their differences, which are also taken into consideration, these three authors similarly explore the supernatural as a subgenre that given its intrinsic association with the unnatural and, by extension, with the unknown, allows them to approach, through fiction, the various dimensions of an epistemological problem. But this epistemological problem is intimately connected with the nature and experience of literary language, which these authors consistently represent, thematize, and even allegorize in their supernatural short stories. Thus, the main goal of this dissertation is not to arrive at a strict definition of the late-nineteenth century supernatural story, but to investigate the ways in which, in different linguistic, cultural, and literary contexts, the genre resists stabilization and problematizes itself in a constant correlation with various notions of “fiction” and “reality”, as exemplified in the literary as well as critical works of Machado, James, and Maupassant. In this sense, this study distances itself from more habitual approaches that tend to analyze these authors as more or less non-conforming cases of the “fantastic” proper. Instead, I focus on how they explore and renovate the genre through the employment of diverse formal and/or narrative elements — namely, the use of multiple diegetic levels, the figuration of ghostly manuscripts, and the metaliterary representation of writing — which together contribute to form a common notion of “supernatural textuality” that has largely escaped critical attention. My final objective is to demonstrate that a close analysis of these typically neglected texts shows that they are “modern”, also, and above all, because they rhetorically, structurally, and thematically formulate an implicit reflection on literature that focuses on its imaginative ability to represent the unreal by giving shape to the unknown.

2020-01-16Doctoral thesis

Open access