De La glorieta de los fugitivos a Las aventuras e invenciones del profesor Souto: intertextualidad e intratextualidad en los microrrelatos de José María Merino

Abstract

The literary universe of José Mª Merino starts from the short story to approach the short novel and establish itself in the micro story. The journey through his narrative texts introduces us to a nonconformist author, who is looking for an active and complicit reader of each of his fictions, as well as recurring on the themes that build his fictional worlds: the double identity of the writer-protagonist, the limbo between dreams and reality, the controversial magic of memories, the fragility of fate etc. Merino draws on intertextual and intratextual mechanisms to connect with its readers from a double perspective, that of universal literature and that of their own, so that they not only know what is narrated, but also recognize it. From La glorieta de los fugitivos (2007) to Aventuras e invenciones del profesorSouto (2017) the author’s literary career linked to the short story goes through two hybrid volumes in which different narrative writings occur: El libro de las horas contadas(2011) and The hidden plot: stories from both sides with a minimum silva (2014); The variety of short texts that make up each of these works suggests the writer’s taste for the use of textual resources that are very characteristic of minifiction, as well as experimentation and research on the proteic character of the genre.