Reimagining life, reimagining form

Abstract

In an attempt to circumvent the apocalyptic diagnoses that predict the end of the literary, this essay aims at investing in another trend, considering the nonspecific (GARRAMUÑO, 2014) present in contemporary works less as a dissolution of the form than as a rearrangement of the strategies of narrative composition that ensures the vitality of the novel in the 21st century. Thus, the essay starts from the notion of “aesthetics of imminence” presented by Canclini (2012) to discuss the novel “Leaving the Atocha Station”, by Ben Lerner, a novel that offers the reader the process of its own composition, of the work in the framework as a “laboratory of intellectual experimentation”. The analysis of the work wants to advance in the understanding of present-day romanesque forms, especially those that are inscribed via formal hybridity, putting themselves at the frontier of the essay and of what I understand as the aesthetic of the annotation.