THE PAGE AS HYPERICTIONAL HYPOTHEIS IN THE NEW PORTUGUESE LITERATURE: PATRÍCIA PORTELA, AFONSO CRUZ AND JOANA BÉRTHOLO

Abstract

Nowadays, in the new generations of authors, the material possibility of the typographic page has become an interesting, and assumed, way of exercising aesthetic creativity. Helped by graphic and technological mechanisms that make possible new variants in a format as old as the page, some authors test, in a hyper contemporary literary environment, the fictional amplitude of the narrative. This article aims to contextualize this “page tendency” – one of the possibilities of the current literature, in the convergence between writing, design and materiality of the printed book – in its pictographic, performative, narrative, or other aspects, using the help of theorists such as Glyn White (2005), Simon Barton (2016), Johanna Drucker (1994, 2014), Alexander Starre (2015), Jessica Pressman (2009), Alison Gibbons (2013, 2016) and others. This article also intends to approach the literary production in its prose fi ction of three contemporary Portuguese authors – Patrícia Portela, Afonso Cruz and Joana Bértholo – for whom the page intentionally emerges as an expressive possibility (and tendency) in the construction of its discourse fictional.