Of dreams and visions: from the postmodern to the contemporary Brazilian short story

Abstract

An evaluation of the New Realism in literature in the work of three Brazilian writers that have produced short stories since the second half of the twentieth century, as it concerns the main characteristics of the postmodern narrative. Among them are: the referent of the narrative; the questioning of the very act of storytelling from the standpoint of a detached relationship between the referent and the world; the alternation between fictional and non-fictional languages that leads to the exchange between literature and journalistic narrative, painting, cinema, historical writing, chronicle, among so many other literary genres and expressions of the tradition of Western thought. Therefore, the article has the objective of reevaluating the conventions from the return to the historical and personal past, so as to provoke ruptures and establish new relationships between life and art in contemporary Brazilian narrative.