Abstract
Mexican writer Juan José Arreola (1918-2001), widely recognized as having renovated at the beginning of the 1950’s the short story in Mexico and Latin America, published his piece “Baby H.P.” in 1952, in his collection Confabulario. This article explores pseudoscientific discourse in Arreola’s work and shows the process by which such discourse, when translated to the literary page, lays bare the anxities that technological progress imposed on writers during the 1950s. Arreola acts as a sort of an obsessive scientist and takes a scientific proposition to its last consequences, leaving the reader to contemplate the consequences. Secondly, the article focuses on a neglected aspect of the story, that is the ethical questions it poses, beneath its humoristic facade. I will do this by bringing reality into play and comparing “Baby H.P” with a recent technological invention involving children. In
Original language | American English |
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Journal | Revista Iberoamericana |
State | Published - 2012 |
Keywords
- Arreola
- ciencia ficción
- Latinoamérica
Disciplines
- Arts and Humanities
- Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature