A morte do romance? Espaço e tempo como recursos de renovação estética em António Lobo Antunes

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyse the formalistic strategies and innovations used by the contemporary Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes in order to preclude and, in time, surpass the saturation of the novel as genre. Likewise, as we resume the analyses of the recurring themes in his work, we approach the author’s subjective perspective about the colonial struggle in Angola. Therefore, for the purposes intended, It is basic to examine the narrative discourse (which at first sight follows a chronological and objective ordering of the facts) and the traumatic memory of the horrors of war (marked by psychological and factual chaos). Thus, we will approach the way in which the author, in an attempt to transmit his experiences, ends up producing a temporally and psychologically entropic literature, in which fragments of memories and shattered images constitute a picture of the devastation caused by the armed conflict that he was a part of. Finally, we will investigate the strategies used to further the romance genre, either by revising forms already consecrated by use (through the unusual application of syntax and dysphemistic metaphors) or by investing in aggressive and brutal themes (descriptions of torture, war devastation, lethal technologies and cruel assassinations) or in original conceptions about modern fiction, such as the “world-text” concept proposed by Franco Moretti.