Études romanes de Brno (Jul 2013)
Los atajos de la ficción
Abstract
Over the last years, the proliferation of both anthologies and critical works about microfiction in Spanish American literature has imposed the necessity of keeping on studying it not only as a subgenre of the short story - as it has been considered until now - but also as an autonomous narrative discourse, therefore having its own peculiar discursive construction. The handling of narrative time is among the most relevant specific characteristics of microfiction: microfiction chooses to represent narrative time by emphasizing textual mechanisms and, since it is based on "distillation" and sudden flashes, constantly calls on the reader's cooperation to create the global meaning of the text, mostly relying on pragmatic knowledge. This essay focuses on texts whose narrative shows vertiginous leaps in the construction of narrative time by resorting to rhetorical devices, such as ellipsis, that become the main structuring mechanism of the text. It is thanks to these "shortcuts" of fiction that microfiction, despite its briefness, can embrace very distant moments in time or tell the whole history of humankind from its biblical origins to present days in a few lines. Special attention is paid to the analysis of various intertextual elements that contribute to the connotation of these texts. The aim of this essay is to open, by analyzing narrative time, new paths for the theory of microfiction, while providing a review of the latest Spanish American production.
