Immersive Media in Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar. What Allegories Tell about Transportation Experience

Authors

  • Matei Chihaia

Abstract

In the short stories of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, immersive media are frequently staged as allegories of immersion. They are associated with a specific type of plot which is about the access to diegetic worlds or exit from them, and which provides more information about historical contracts on fiction than do the frozen metaphors of being “lost in a text”. Media frames that are represented as fictional frames come with a variety of functions, including not only re-centring, but also disorientation (Quiroga); they refer to existing discourse rather than to existing technology and raise the question how experience can be narrated (Borges); and they tend to cross the line between allegoric representation and intermedial enactment of immersion (Cortázar). The methodological conclusion from this corpus would be to reconsider what fiction says about immersive media. As this would help understand how fictional frames change throughout history, it would also allow discussion of the cultural horizons of interview-based studies on immersive experience.

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Published

06/14/2013