Quando a terra era redonda, by José J. Veiga, an intuitive dystopia

Abstract

This work proposes an analysis of the short story “Quando a Terra era redonda,” by José J. Veiga, as a dystopia. In this narrative, written in the form of an essay, the narrator/author conducts a bibliographic review on the thesis that the Earth is round. Based on this premise, several passages reveal that, in the reality of the text, the belief that one lives on a flat planet is a strategy of domination orchestrated by an oppressive regime, as occurs in dystopian texts. Thus, we intend to perceive the occurrence of dystopia in Veiga’s text by comparing narrative passages with the considerations of scholars on the subject, who point out its characteristic features. The research is bibliographic and exploratory, based on authors such as Claeys (2017), Moylan (2016), and Sargent (2010). The results demonstrate that the short story is a dystopia, not in a usual way, but intuitively, which confirms the various possibilities of hybridism that can operate in this textual form.