The romantic architecture in Erico Verissimo’s short stories

Abstract

Considering that a compositional form makes an architectonic form (Bakhtin, 1990) which unifies and organizes the cognitive and aesthetic values of a worldview, the present paper intends to discuss how the final effect compositional form organizes the architecture of Erico Verissimo’s short stories first published in As mãos de meu filho (1942) and O ataque (1959), and afterwards collected - with the exception O ataque - under the title of Contos. Analyzing the corpus - consisting of the narratives As mãos de meu filho, O navio das sombras, Os devaneios do general, Sonata, Esquilos de outono and A ponte - we concluded that in all these texts the final effect narrative produces an epiphany of modern man’s alienated condition and gives architectonic form to a romantic worldview in crisis, because the conflict which happens between its utopian expression and the resigned and restitutionalist expressions is constantly rejected by the elaborate final effects.