This paper explores the evolution of the articuento, a hybrid genre created by Juan José Millás, conceived as a result of fragmentation and recomposition on the border between literature and journalism. This blurred boundary invites a broader reflection on processes of cross-contamination among heterogeneous codes, which in Millás’ work extends to the intermedial and iconotextual dimension. After a preliminary consideration of hybridity as a constitutive feature of the genre, the discussion focuses on the text-image nexus, proposing to read the articuentos as dual-register texts in sustained dialogue with the image.

In the summer of 1914 Henry James worked on The Ivory Tower, a novel he left unfinished when the outbreak of World War I made it impossible, in his view, to tell a story about the present. What is left of the novel is a fragment, consisting of three books and one chapter of the fourth book (out of the projected ten books), as well as several pages of notes wherein James sketched the plot, the setting, the delineation of the main characters, the themes he wished to explore, and his narrative strategy. The Ivory Tower was to offer a large-scale portrait of the United States – which James had recently visited after a very long absence – as a country dominated by the power of money, which found expression in rapacious and aggressive masculinity. Within this context, the protagonist of The Ivory Tower, Graham Fielder, was to represent an alternative model of masculinity (one that valued, above all, beauty and kindness) and perhaps a hope for the future of America.

This essay investigates the practice of microfiction, from six-word stories to narratives of only a few hundred words. Through examples from Brown, Campanile, Aub, Delerm,
and others, it highlights mechanisms of brevity, surprise, and reader participation. The study shows how these minimal forms, situated between literature and play, can serve not only artistic purposes but also educational, social, and psychological functions.

In April 1989, the Spanish periodical “ABC” published a text by the philosopher María Zambrano, Desde entonces, fragmento de una novela inconclusa, which had previously appeared in 1936 in the magazine Noreste. It is likely that the narrative project recorded a setback in the face of the Civil War drama, which exploded a few months later, and the exile. However, together with other possible ‘pieces’ of the project, previously published in the form of articles, this literary text seems to make its own poetics of the fragment as a possibility of representing the complex vision of the world of modernity.