When students write micro-stories

Fundamentals of genre and analysis of textual productions

Abstract

This article analyzes micro-narratives produced by students of the Master's Program in Latin-Romance Translation Studies at the University of Bucharest in the project "Photographic Micro-narratives" (2022-2023). The study examines how the students assimilated the structural and aesthetic characteristics of the micro-narrative as an autonomous literary genre, starting from a theoretical characterization that addresses its origins in Hispanic-American Modernism, its consolidation in the historical Avant-gardes, and its distinctive features such as extreme brevity, verbal economy, elliptical nature, intertextuality, humor, and fantasy. The analysis of student productions is organized into four fundamental axes that demonstrate how ellipsis functions as a device for interpretative cooperation, the fantastic as a modality of mimetic transgression, intertextuality as a strategy of narrative economy, and humor as a mechanism of textual condensation and social criticism. Through Barthes' theory of punctum (Barthes, 2015[1980]), the pedagogical project combined photographic art with literary creation in Portuguese as a non-native language (PLNM), conceiving the textual production process as a long continuum of an interactive and recursive nature (Flower & Hayes, 1981).
The results reveal that the students effectively operationalized the fundamental narrative strategies of contemporary microfiction.