El Infiel Espejo: The Short Stories of Silvina Ocampo

195 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.Sister of Victoria Ocampo, wife of Adolfo Bioy Casares, and life-long friend of Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo has been a major figure in literary circles of Buenos Aires for some forty years. Nevertheless, her works have received little attention from United States scholars. The study includes some biographical information about Silvina Ocamp as well as a brief survey of existing criticism. The first chapter undertakes a review of all of Ocampo's published works, which include, in addition to six volumes of short stories, a novel, a drama, and seven volumes of poetry. Chapters II through IV deal exclusively with the stories.One of the most intriguing aspects of Silvina Ocampo's short stories lies in her merging of the fantastic and the grotesque. The use of such fantastic and grotesque themes as metamorphosis, the foretelling of the future, and magic objects reflects in Ocampo's work the modern preoccupation with the blurring of lines between reality and fantasy evident in so many literary works of the twentieth century. Silvina Ocampo's short stories are noted for the everyday context in which she places fantastic and/or grotesque events, frequent use of children as narrators and main characters, a sardonic humor, and a very concise construction of her narratives. Her finest stories are contained in the volumes entitled La furia y otros cuentos (1965), Las invitadas (1961), and Los d(')ias de la noche (1970).U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD