Date of Completion

5-10-2020

Embargo Period

4-25-2021

Advisors

Miguel Gomes, Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos, Rose helena Chinchilla

Field of Study

Literatures, Cultures & Languages

Degree

Master of Arts

Open Access

Campus Access

Abstract

This work examines the short stories of Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga within a biopolitical frame as it relates to the representations of animals in the texts. It delineates two corpora of stories where animals are presented as real or metaphor and a second where they make use of human speech and are the protagonists of the stories. In both, the relationship between animals and humans is studied in connection to how Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine demarcates the difference between lives to make live and to let die. Quiroga’s work problematizes this differentiation in the bodies of human and non-human animals, but relies on the same mechanisms of exclusion as early XX century Southern Cone society to establish the rearticulated hierarchies. However, in stories where close proximity to real animals in the lives of his human characters occur in proximity to death, the machine is suspended and traces of different organizations of lives and bodies are displayed.

Major Advisor

Miguel Gomes

Share

COinS