Artificial Life in Horacio Quiroga. Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension of Disbelief
Abstract
The fictional works of the Uruguayan-Argentinian writer Horacio Quiroga allow for a case study on how media shape the image of artificial life. While “El hombre artificial”, one of his early novellas, follows a nineteenth-century scheme of electromagnetic transmission of consciousness, later texts choose “N-rays” (“El vampiro”) or cinematographic projection (“El espectro”) as grounds for spectral life. This is not, however, the only difference between his early and later fiction. On the one hand, the models of literary invention follow the history of technology and the author’s own passion for science and cinema; on the other hand, they can be related to forms of publication, such as the serialized novellas of the illustrated magazine, and the way illustrations and commercial advertisements pervade literary creation. The approach to artificial life in Quiroga’s work sheds light on his own constitution as an author: behind the making of the artificial being stands the making of the artist.
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