A ascensão da epifania em contos modernos e contemporâneos

Abstract

The narrative, as a type of text, has been practiced by literary writers for a long time. The short story genre, specifically, was preferred by many of them, even in Modernity, and literary theory has not left it out. Among the narrative procedures considered by the theory, there is the epiphany, as was conceptualized by Irish wirter James Joyce, dissociating itself from the original religious sense, and aiming at the scope of literary studies. The goal of this research is to provide a critical perception on the relation between the brevity of the short story genre and of this epiphany concept. From the bibliographic survey of literary theory, centered on titles which present certain approximation to the theme and to the joycean concept, this reasearch focus on the speculation on the presence of epiphanic procedures in modern and contemporary short stories. The hypothesis raised is that a correlation exists between the short story and epiphany, for the concision of the genre would properly contain the fugacity of the procedure. Therefore, the confluence of these brevities would reveal how the epiphany can be enclosed in a short story. To that end, this paper sought a delimitation of the concepts of short story and epiphany from Literature thinkers followed by a comparative analysis of three short stories namely: "Amor", by Clarice Lispector; "Olhar", by Rubem Fonseca; and "Axolotle", by Julio Cortázar.