Suicide in the contemporary Brazilian short story

This research analyses the representations of suicide in contemporary Brazilian short stories based on certain conceptions of contemporaneity. We gathered a corpus of twenty short stories by the following writers: Marcelino Freire, Sérgio Sant'Anna, Adriana Lunardi, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Dalton Trevisan, Lucienne Samôr, Antonio Carlos Viana, Nivaldo Tenório, Caio Fernando Abreu, Rubem Fonseca, Marcelo Benvenutti, Nelson de Oliveira, located between the 1970s and 2012. Through a comparative study between the literary text and themes from philosophy, sociology, psychology, politics and literary theory, we realised the repetition of certain characteristics and themes. After reviewing the literature on suicide, based mainly on Durkheim (2000), Camus (2008), Puente (2008), Dias (1991) and Marquetti, (2011); on the short story, in Cortázar (1974), Poe (1999), Piglia (2004) and Ogliari (2012); and on contemporaneity in Eagleton (1998), Harvey (1992), Jameson (2006a; 2006b) and Lyotard (2013), we approached literary composition using the concepts of parody, metafiction and pastiche, which were dealt with from Hutcheon.