Abstract
This article analyzes the tale “A Sereníssima República” (The Most Serene Republic), by Machado de Assis, approaching the rhetorical artifices of this narrative as constitutive of the conventions of the comic genre. Understanding that this genre consists in a textual unit formalized by images that subvert the common places of realistic enunciation, it points out to the presence of wonder, the fantastic in this fiction, whose conventions amplify the comic and grotesque character of the enunciation. Formed by oxymorons, paradoxical sentences and ingenious metaphors, this narrative satirizes, taking the metonymy as an interpretative procedure, the current values of politics, moral and justice present in the scenes of the nineteenth-century Brazilian republic.
Highlights
A critical study of the tales by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis can be carried out against the conventions of the aesthetics of realism
Is the jocular and at the same time dramatic effect produced by the text, from a writing that points to an upside down education in a universe dominated by moral contradictions, far from eighteenth-century optimism, in which “there was a growing sense that one owed to society was civility, which began with soul searching and continued with education” (Schneider, 2015, p. 6). These figures of rhetoric are the basis of the artful procedure of this narrative and potentiate the comic and extraordinary effects of the text, as in the description of the election of the candidates Caneca and Nebraska, who wage in a legal dispute that will be effected by the criteria of the faculty of testimonial and interpretative proof of the texts
The virtues of serenity and wisdom do not constitute the driving force of this world, since they are “the Penelopes of our republic,” Erasmus said in conclusion
Summary
A critical study of the tales by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis can be carried out against the conventions of the aesthetics of realism. This analysis demands the knowledge of the discursive properties formalized in these narratives. “These properties arise either from the semantic aspect of the texts, or from its syntactic aspect, or verbal aspect etc” The identification of the determinations of meaning of the narrative in question presupposes a perception of the genre responsible for the configuration of the elements of form and content that constitute the characteristics of this object, once “a genre, literary or otherwise, is nothing but this codification of discursive properties” These images figure a satire to the social and political basis of the Brazilian nineteenth century universe
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