Ocaso fantástico

Abstract

The following work is comprised of two sections: an essay and a literary text. The essay, titled “Procedural narratives: luck and agency in the construction of fictional text”, explores literary forms in which the writing combines fiction and rules in order to build a text that escapes the author’s control, texts in which the reading also depends on understanding the design principles. We briefly discuss this type of writing, departing from the creations of Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature), the conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith and the procedural narratives build digitally with the aid of the Tracery language, in order to identify a particular reading effect — one that comes forward through the existence of luck or reader agency, and that distinguishes these works from traditional fiction. The literary section, “Fantastic Twilight”, on the other hand, is a collection of fantastic and speculative short stories, inspired by authors such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, among others. The stories show characters trapped by existential pitfalls, everlasting cycles and epiphanies on life, creation and purpose.