As múltiplas histórias de José Saramago: um olhar benjaminiano para A Viagem do Elefante (2008)

Abstract

Our study is concerned with the analysis of José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey (2008), mainly based on two essays by Walter Benjamin: On the concept of history (1940) and The narrator: Considerations on the work of Nikolai Leskov (1936). The choice of this theoretical framework is due to the nearness between Benjamin9s conceptions about History and Saramago's ideas on the author of literature9s work (these ideas were retrieved from As palavras de Saramago (2010), a collection by Fernando Gómez Aguilera). We will also bring some of Linda Hutcheon's considerations discussed in A poetic of postmodernism (1991), mainly about the compositional charcateristics of the postmodern artistic production together with other scientific articles. The paper will then consist on the establishment of the conceptual relation between José Saramago and Walter Benjamin, followed by the literary analysis and will end with a closer look of the narrator and some final considerations.