There was so much disagreement and vagueness in all the theory I read about fantastic literature. But I didn’t know how to think about them critically. I had by then read most of the short stories I could find by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, and others who would later find their way into my book, Unraveling the Real. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, when I took a seminar in Spanish American fantastic literature, that I learned there was a name for the kind of fiction I loved. The uncertainty of the texts fascinated me. I could read them again and again without ever reaching any conclusion about why things happened as they did. Stories like “The Telltale Heart” and “The Monkey’s Paw” fascinated me, because they slipped so effortlessly between the recognizable world of the reader and the seemingly unreal. The supernatural wasn’t random and inexplicable it erupted into the real world as a moral warning, or a kind of vengeance. This seemed both logical and possible to me, although, of course, improbable. The ghost of a beautiful, vain woman lived inside an old mirror, and she punished any other woman foolish enough to spend too much time admiring her own beauty by reaching through the glass and dragging her to the other side.

show, maybe something from The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, that haunted me for years. I loved the more subtle forms, set in the everyday real world I could recognize as my own, where the supernatural was only suggested, never overt, and fear was balanced out by doubt and disbelief. The books and films I loved the most weren’t about fantasy creatures that lived on other planets or mutant monsters who ripped off heads and stomped on skyscrapers. It opened the doors to my imagination, and to a love of reading and watching films about these other worlds. It made the world much more exciting, like there was the promise of something beyond what I could touch, see, or hear around me.

I liked the idea that within the everyday world I inhabited there could be magical and mysterious things with no rational explanation. When I was a little girl, I loved old fashioned ghost stories. Try again later.Ĭynthia Duncan, author of Unraveling the Real, reveals why she is attracted to ghost stories and Latin American ficciones.

An error has occurred the feed is probably down.

activism african american african american studies american studies animals Anthropology art Asian American asian american studies baseball basketball Book books brazil business civil rights COVID crime criminology cultural studies culture Democracy disability economics economy Education elections environment ethics ethnicity football gender gender studies government health history immigration inequality labor Labor Studies law LGBT literature media migration music open access philadelphia philosophy photography political science politics poverty publishing race race and ethnicity racism refugee religion science sex sexuality slavery social justice sociology sports Temple University Press transnational politics Trump University Press University Press Week urban studies violence war women.

Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19.

No More Consenting to Corruption in Philadelphia.

Carlos fuentes chac mool