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 serves as a repository for research notes, critical reflections, drafts, and related materials. Interdisciplinary in scope, the project brings Latin American literary theory and criticism into conversation with metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, the philosophy of language, anthropology, linguistics, and religious studies.
Thesis Overview
“With Flowers You Write”: Nahua Cosmovisión and the Philosophy of Language in Mexican Magical Realism
This thesis examines the relationship between Nahua (Mexica) cosmovisión and twentieth-century Mexican magical realism through selected works by Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, and Carlos Fuentes. Combining philological, narratological, and comparative philosophical approaches, it analyzes how these texts engage and reconfigure Nahua metaphysical and linguistic concepts—particularly those concerning motion, relationality, death, and efficacious speech—within the historical conditions of the post-Revolutionary Mexican literary field. It argues that these works function not as transparent recuperations of Indigenous thought, but as transculturated narrative formations in which questions of language, being, and reality are recalled, reimagined, and reconfigured within the formal, spatiotemporal, and metaphysical horizons of the modern magical realist novel.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 