A bunny in the throat: the absurd genre as a clipping of the fictional strangeness

Abstract

The hypothesis addressed in the article, and consequently in the author’s PhD dissertation, is that there is an increasing number of narratives, modern and contemporary ones, which cannot be analysed according to any of the conceptual parameters associated with the fictional strangeness subgenres (Marvelous, Magical Realism or Fantastic). Although the specialized literature attempts recurrently to fit them in the Fantastic, neither the original construction of Tzvetan Todorov, nor the further redrawings developed by other theorists are convincing enough when attempting to do so. Therefore, the current work aims to discuss this question, presenting a corpus of five texts representative of this genre, which we named temporarily of Absurd thus following the insight of Todorov’s classical work. With the purpose of pointing out the singularities of this category, a brief study about the other subgenres of the Strange is conducted and from the literary theory its characteristics are outlined in order to, in the end, in a comparative perspective, make some observations about the features, that from now on, rather incipiently, can already be noticed in the proposed subgenre. This is an exploratory article that aims to specify the problematic, which will be the object of the author’s studies in the field of the PhD in Modern Languages: Cultures, Literatures and Translation in the University of Coimbra that began in September 2017.