Academic Work
My research centers on the intersections of literature, language, and thought, with particular attention to the philosophical, spiritual, and mystical dimensions of narrative. Interdisciplinary and comparative in scope, it draws on literary theory, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies. Selected papers and essays are included below.
The Dance of Love and Death: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes
This paper examines Carlos Fuentes’s fiction through philosophical and psychoanalytic frameworks, focusing on the convergence of erotic desire and mortality. It traces the interplay of Eros and Thanatos, gothic and macabre motifs, and the sacrificial dimensions of love, with particular attention to existential and metaphysical questions.
Hispanic & Latin American Literature
This section brings together my work on Latin American and early modern Hispanic literature. It focuses on language, narrative, and imagination in relation to identity, knowledge, and experience, with particular attention to Indigenous and magical realist storytelling, women’s mysticism, and the interplay of history, myth, and desire.
French & Francophone Literature
This section gathers my work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Francophone literature. It focuses on the fantastic, modernism, and feminist poststructuralist thought, with particular attention to liminal spaces, narrative ambiguity, and the relations among language, identity, and power.
English, American, and World Literature
This section presents my work in English and American literature, along with occasional work on literature in translation. It considers how texts across gothic, modernist, speculative, poetic, and mystical traditions engage questions of experience, imagination, desire, and subjectivity.
Religion, Philosophy & Cosmology
This section brings together interdisciplinary work across religion, philosophy, literature, linguistics, and anthropology. It focuses on Indigenous and Latin American traditions alongside selected currents in Western esoteric, mystical, and occult thought, with particular attention to cosmology, temporality, ritual, metaphysics, and ontology.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 