Paralelos fantásticos: o real, o insólito e as teorias contísticas de Edgar Allan Poe e Júlio Cortázar

Abstract

According to what argue Berger and Luckmann (2003), there is not one single reality, but multiple ones, submissive to a certain other, understood as common: The reality, as a convention, which determines standards and beliefs, interchangeable with the context and the time in which it shows up. There appeared in literature several movements in which this question worked as a subtext: horror, gothic, and fantastic literatures, among other literary genres, brought to the stage discussions that were perpetuated in the aisle of society. Among the literary genres that seek to embrace the facets of the real, in the face of everyday discourse, the fantastic presents itself as one of the oldest (BESSIÈRE, 2012), and parallel to the moralizing factor of the short story, it perpetuates an adequate space for this creation (CORTÁZAR, 2006). In this research, up from the literary and theoretical works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Julio Cortázar, we can perceive how they are acquainted to such a genre, considering it reconfigured, and how each one´s theories about the short-story serve to maximize and potentiallyze their narratives. Our corpus is composed of four short stories, two by each writer, namely, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Mesmeric Revelation", by Poe, and "The Southern Highway" and "The Persecutor", by Cortázar. We begin our journey by introducing the discussion of the real and the unusual, focusing on the concepts of the nineteenth century fantastic and its reconfiguration in contemporaneity, in such a way, we observe how Poe and Cortázar's literary reflect in their work, finally arriving at the analysis of the short stories. In this analysis, we observe how each narrative is based on temporal and historical factors and how their respective theories can be applied to their writings, considering their consonances and divergences.