Horacio Quiroga, a Writer on the Limits

Authors

  • Carlos Abreu Mendoza The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Keywords:

Latin American Literature, Criticism, Modernismo, Aesthetics, Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

Merging nature and death, two favorite themes in Horacio Quiroga’s work, this article demonstrates his singularity as an author who rethinks the fatal confrontation between man and nature that has long marked Latin American letters. Quiroga’s answer to such a pervasive Latin American subject emerges in the short stories that take place in the jungle of Misiones. I propose to narrow down this comprehensive canon to focus on five short stories that share a similar plotline: “La miel silvestre” (1911), “A la deriva” (1912), “El hombre muerto” (1920), “Los desterrados” (1925) and “Las moscas” (1933). Using Eugenio Trías’ concept of “limit,” I explore death’s liminal dimension in Quiroga’s narrative, which poses an alternative to the appeal of sublimity in Latin American literature and positions his work in an interstitial space within this tradition.

Author Biography

Carlos Abreu Mendoza, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carlos Abreu Mendoza was born in Huelva, Spain and received a B.A. in Spanish Philology from the University his PhD dissertation, “Sublime peligro: naturaleza, sujeto y nación en Latinoamérica,” in the Department of Romance Languages at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are nineteenth century and contemporary Latin American literature, Hispanic Modernismo, subaltern studies, and aesthetics. His article “Borges’s Complete Works after the Inquisition,” published in Latin American Literary Review (2013), analyzes a frequently overlooked gap in Borges’s corpus: his decision to exclude Inquisiciones (1925), El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926), and El idioma de los argentinos (1928) from his Complete Works. Another essay on Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel La muerte me da (2008), published in the volume Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto… (2010), studies problems of literary genres, the refashioning of the literary canon in Latin America, and the mechanics of the author’s poetic experimentation. Lastly, he also published an essay, “Borges y ‘El milagro secreto’ de la creación literaria,” that appeared in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana (2009) in which he analyzes Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle” as a summary of his ideas on literary creation.

Published

2014-01-31

How to Cite

Abreu Mendoza, C. (2014). Horacio Quiroga, a Writer on the Limits. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 11(2), 302–322. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/802

Issue

Section

Articles / Artículos