The Comic in the Republic of Machado de Assis

This article analyzes the tale “A Sereníssima República” (The Most Serene Republic), by Machado de Assis, approaching the rhetorical artifices of this narrative as constitutive of the conventions of the comic genre. Understanding that this genre consists in a textual unit formalized by images that subvert the common places of realistic enunciation, it points out to the presence of wonder, the fantastic in this fiction, whose conventions amplify the comic and grotesque character of the enunciation. Formed by oxymorons, paradoxical sentences and ingenious metaphors, this narrative satirizes, taking the metonymy as an interpretative procedure, the current values ​​of politics, moral and justice present in the scenes of the nineteenth-century Brazilian republic.