The exhaustion of the novel from the limits of its aesthetic creation in Pornopopéia of Reinaldo Moraes

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the novel Pornopopéia (2008) by the Brazilian writer Reinaldo Moraes. We discuss, through two narrative fragments, how Zeca, the protagonist and main character, experiments the craft of being a novelist through the absence of a proposal of a contemporary literary writing. In the second section, we resize the discussion of the literary object per se to reflect about the implications of the novel genre after Modernism and its modulations in the contemporary setting. We base our study on the reflections and postulates of Barth (1986), Compagnon (1999), Eagleton (2006), Silviano Santiago (2002), and Todorov (2009). As a result, we noticed that Pornopopéia prescinds any analytical possibility that is external to the novel, providing contemporary literature with a single analytical path: to remove mediation and reconcile text and reader.