Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter

This page gathers materials related to my ongoing honors thesis in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University, undertaken in partial fulfillment of the B.A. with Honors in Romance Studies. It acts as a blossoming repository of research notes, critical reflections, drafts, and related materials. Interdisciplinary in scope, the project integrates Latin American literary theory and criticism with metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, the philosophy of language, anthropology, linguistics, and religious studies.

Thesis Overview

This thesis examines how Indigenous Mesoamerican and Andean cosmologies and philosophies—particularly their metaphysical frameworks, ontologies, and theories of language and reality—shape the literary modalities of magical realism and the marvelous in Latin America. Centering on authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Elena Garro, the project conceptualizes magical realist texts as philosophical nexuses through which Indigenous worldviews, epistemologies, and linguistic world-making practices are mediated and materialized in the present. These works enact elusive yet consequential literary transmutations of space, time, language, and reality that echo and diffract Mesoamerican and Andean cosmovisions, situating the text itself as a locus of cosmo-ontological regeneration.

Anchored in literary criticism, critical theory, and philosophy—and informed by religious studies, anthropology, and linguistics—the thesis excavates alternative modes of being, temporality, and reality sedimented within the dense textual weave of magical realist narrative. In doing so, it contests reductive symbolic or purely aesthetic accounts of the genre, foregrounding Indigenous cosmovisions as generative infrastructures of Latin American reality rather than as decorative residues or archaic mythic remnants. From this vantage, the magical realist metamorphosis of the quotidian assumes a cosmogenetic valence: through carefully calibrated metaphysical and linguistic manipulations, narrative form becomes a pluriversal domain in which ancestral worldviews are not merely remembered or represented, but reactivated in the present. Through continuous interlacings of dualities and proliferations of possibility, the genre engenders a singular literary language—one that eludes the confines of ineffability, deferral, and différance that delimit dominant Western theories of language and knowledge. Drawing on theories of linguistic relativity, the thesis argues that this language opens a spatiotemporal and ontological horizon unbound by hegemonic presuppositions, within which rigid binaries dissolve and essential elements of Indigenous cosmovisions—non-duality, relational ontology, pluriversal metaphysics, and being-as-becoming—intervene directly in the production of the real. Within this cosmopolitical co-presence of worlds and ontologies, magical realist texts derive their spiritually reparative force, embodying a ritual logic analogous to shamanic practices of interworld mediation oriented toward collective renewal. By reconstituting reciprocal, relational, and more-than-human modes of coexistence, these texts re-mystify and revivify existence, countering the disenchantments of modernity with a reawakened cosmovision of a dynamically plural, kaleidoscopic world.

Keywords

Latin American Literary Studies and Genre
Magical realism in the Latin American tradition; genre theory, with particular attention to the epistemological and ontological implications of magical realism.

Indigenous Philosophy, Cosmology, and Epistemology
Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies of the Americas; Indigenous epistemologies and modes of knowing; Mexica metaphysics; Amerindian perspectivism; sentient earth-beings and animate landscapes.

Metaphysics and Ontology
Metaphysics and ontology; relational ontology; ontological plurality and continuity; non-dualist (non-binary) metaphysical systems; pluriversality; ecological ontology.

Philosophy of Language and World-Making
Philosophy of language; generative and world-producing language; cosmogenesis; destabilization of the signifier–referent relation; critiques of mimetic realism.

Temporality, Narrative Form, and Mediation
Recursive temporality; cyclical and non-linear temporalities; spatiotemporal disjunction; collective memory; narrative mediation; ritualized narrative forms; shamanic mediation; the remystification of narrative.

Decolonial Thought and Political–Ethical Horizons
Decolonial theory; coloniality of knowledge; epistemic violence; cosmopolitics (cosmopolítica); existential repair; collective healing.

Research Map: Key Texts, Theorists, and Scholars

I. Indigenous Latin American Cosmologies, Ontologies, and Philosophies of Knowledge

Key Scholars: James Maffie; Miguel León-Portilla; Alfredo López Austin; Davíd Carrasco; Dennis Tedlock; James Lockhart; Frances Karttunen; Guilhem Olivier; Patrick Johansson Keraudren.

II. Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, and Reality

Key Philosophers and Theorists: Rodolfo Kusch; Martin Heidegger; Walter Benjamin; Georges Bataille; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Ernst Cassirer; Gilbert Durand; Hans-Georg Gadamer; Benjamin Lee Whorf; Edward Sapir; Mircea Eliade; Philippe Descola.

III. Latin American Magical Realism and the Fantastic

Key Authors and Theorists: José María Arguedas; Juan Rulfo; Miguel Ángel Asturias; Elena Garro; Alejo Carpentier; Carlos Fuentes; Sara Gallardo; Augusto Roa Bastos; Gabriel García Márquez; Manuel Scorza; Roberto González Echevarría; Wendy B. Faris; Tzvetan Todorov.

Primary Works: Arguedas, José María. Los ríos profundos (1978); Bierhorst, John. Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (1985); Fuentes, Carlos. Aura (1962); Fuentes, Carlos. Instinto de Inez (2001); Gallardo, Sara. Eisejuaz (1971); Garro, Elena. Los recuerdos del porvenir (1977); Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo (1955).

Secondary Works: Bautista Gutiérrez, Gloria. Realismo mágico, cosmos latinoamericano: teoría y práctica (1991); Camayd-Freixas, Erik. Realismo mágico y primitivismo: relecturas de Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo y García Márquez (1998); Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (2004); Maffie, James. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (2014); León-Portilla, Miguel. La filosofía náhuatl: estudiada en sus fuentes (1966); Warnes, Christopher, and Kim Anderson Sasser. Magical Realism and Literature (2020); Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas (2004).

IV. Decolonial Theory and Critiques of Western Epistemology

Key Scholars and Theorists: Marisol de la Cadena; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Mario Blaser; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; Arturo Escobar; Aníbal Quijano; Enrique Dussel; Walter Mignolo.

Methodology

I. Philological Close Reading & Philological–Semantic Analysis (classical philology; historical semantics; literary criticism)

Lexical field analysis; identification of recurrent semantic clusters; analysis of polysemy and semantic instability; tracking semantic drift across contexts; examination of neologisms, archaisms, and untranslatable terms; systematic analysis of diction, syntax, and etymology; attention to translation effects and cross-linguistic mediation.

II. Narratological and Ontological Narrative Analysis (structuralist narratology; post-classical narratology; ontology-oriented narrative theory)

Analysis of narrative structure, voice, and focalization; examination of temporal organization (linear, cyclical, recursive, layered); identification of narrative disruptions and metalepsis; analysis of ontological boundary crossings; examination of distributed or more-than-human agency; analysis of narrative form as ontological modeling.

III. Ontological and Metaphysical Criticism (metaphysical literary criticism; ontology-oriented literary theory)

Identification of implicit ontological premises; analysis of human–non-human relations; examination of plural or unstable realities; correlation of ontology with narrative form; refusal of allegorical or psychological reduction; analysis of reality as enacted rather than represented.

IV. Philosophy as Analytic Infrastructure (philosophical analysis; conceptual criticism; metaphysical inquiry)

Identification of philosophical problems immanent to the text; clarification of operative concepts embedded in language and form; testing conceptual coherence and tension; articulation of metaphysical stakes generated by close reading; use of philosophy to formalize, not impose, interpretation.

V. Anthropology as Epistemological Intervention (ontology-oriented anthropology; epistemology; decolonial theory)

Identification of naturalized epistemic assumptions; deployment of anthropological concepts to unsettle dominant categories; treatment of Indigenous knowledge systems as theoretical interventions; analysis of mediation between epistemic regimes; attention to incommensurability and epistemic decentering.

VI. Pragmatic, Speech-Act, and Onto-Linguistic Analysis (philosophy of language; linguistic anthropology; Indigenous epistemologies)

Identification of performative utterances; distinction between descriptive and constitutive speech; analysis of naming, invocation, and silence; examination of ritualized language; analysis of language as world-making practice; tracking narrative effects of linguistic acts.

VII. Nahuatl-Informed Linguistic–Poetic Analysis (Nahuatl linguistics; Mesoamerican poetics; comparative literary linguistics)

Analysis of semantic parallelism and syntactic doubling; examination of difrasismos as conceptual structures; analysis of repetition and rhythmic patterning; attention to relational meaning-making; identification of Indigenous rhetorical logics within Spanish-language texts.

Provisional Chapter Overview

Prospectus & Working Annotated Bibliography