Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

La Era De Los Tecnobebés: Juan José Arreola Y El Modelo Crítico De La Ciencia-Ficción, Pablo Brescia

Pablo Brescia

Mexican writer Juan José Arreola (1918-2001), widely recognized as having renovated at the beginning of the 1950’s the short story in Mexico and Latin America, published his piece “Baby H.P.” in 1952, in his collection Confabulario. This article explores pseudoscientific discourse in Arreola’s work and shows the process by which such discourse, when translated to the literary page, lays bare the anxities that technological progress imposed on writers during the 1950s. Arreola acts as a sort of an obsessive scientist and takes a scientific proposition to its last consequences, leaving the reader to contemplate the consequences. Secondly, the article focuses …