Academic Work
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter’s research examines the intersections of literature, language, and thought, with a particular focus on the philosophical, spiritual, and mystical dimensions of narrative. Her work takes an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, drawing on literary theory, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies, among other fields. Selected papers and essays are presented below.
The Dance of Love and Death: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes
This paper examines Carlos Fuentes’ fiction through philosophical and psychoanalytic frameworks, exploring how erotic desire and mortality converge as inseparable forces. Moving beyond conventional postcolonial readings, it analyzes the interplay of Eros and Thanatos, Gothic and macabre motifs, and the sacrificial dimensions of love, highlighting Fuentes’ engagement with existential and metaphysical questions. The full paper can be accessed via the link below.
Hispanic & Latin American Literature
This section showcases my research on Latin American and early modern Hispanic literature, investigating how language, narrative, and imagination shape identity, knowledge, and experience. My work focuses on Indigenous and magical realist storytelling, female mysticism, and the intersections of history, myth, and desire, spanning authors from João Guimarães Rosa and José María Arguedas to Isabel Allende, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Saint Teresa of Ávila.
French & Francophone Literature
This section highlights research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, exploring the fantastic, modernist, and feminist poststructuralist traditions. My work investigates ontological ambiguity, liminal spaces, and the interplay of language, identity, and power, drawing on Todorov, Freud, Derrida, and poststructuralist feminist theory.
English, American, and World Literature
This section presents my research in English and American literature, with occasional engagement in world literature in translation. It explores how literature—across Gothic, Modernist, and speculative forms, as well as poetic and mystical traditions—interrogates human experience, imagination, desire, and subjectivity through psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, postcolonial, ecocritical, and mythological frameworks.
Religion, Philosophy & Cosmology
This section showcases interdisciplinary research across religion, philosophy, literature, linguistics, and anthropology, centering on Indigenous and Latin American traditions alongside Western esoteric, mystical, and occult systems—including Christian and Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, and Hermetic thought. The essays engage with cosmology, temporality, ritual, metaphysics, and ontology, weaving together diverse cultural, historical, and temporal perspectives to explore how humans conceive, experience, and articulate the sacred and the cosmos.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 