Short Story Criticism | Cortázar, Julio - R. Lane Kauffmann (essay date 2000)

R. Lane Kauffmann (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Kauffmann, R. Lane. “Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar's ‘Axolotl’ as Ethnographic Allegory.” In Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González, pp. 135-55. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Kauffmann offers an ethnographic interpretation of “Axolotl.”]

Is it possible to represent alterity without reifying, colonizing, or preempting it? In the diverse modes of ideology-critique prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, the Other is often invoked as though it were an amulet to ward off a host of ideological evils—humanism, sexism, monologism, and the proliferating “centrisms” (Euro-, ethno-, anthropo-, phallo-, logo-)—considered endemic to Western thought and society. But it has always been easier to invoke alterity than to depict or...

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