KAFKA AND PORTUGUESE MICROFICTION: INTERCONNECTIONS AND INTERTEXTUAL APPROACHES IN RUI MANUEL AMARAL
Keywords:
Franz Kafka, microfiction, intertextuality, Rui Manuel Amaral, metamorphosis, absurd, Gregor SamsaAbstract
As a sub-genre with scarce representation in the Portuguese literary field, microfiction nevertheless maintains a revealingly productive dialogue with Kafka’s short fiction, which manifests itself in the narrative architecture, in the choice of isolated characters oscillating between vigilance and paranoia, in the visual writing, in the exploration of the unusual and of the bleak oneiric, in the construction of the absurd and in the interweaving of the real, the unreal and the super-real.
This paper will highlight contemporary Portuguese microfiction that reveals clear Kafkaesque influence, exploring explicit or implicit intertextual interconnections with Kafka's texts. For that will focus on (transl. titles): “Gregor Samsa” from the collection Caravan (2008) and “The story of so and so” and “A terrible blow to the scientific pride of geckos”, included in Doctor Avalanche (2010), by Rui Manuel Amaral.
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