Assignment Two: “Blow-Up”

The second paper is to be a metacritical discussion in which you are expected to synthesize, review, analyze, and reflect on the main arguments presented in two different articles plus one film, representing different approaches to Julio Cortázar’s “Blow-Up” (“Las Babas del diablo”: Spanish original; French translation, without paragraphing!). Everyone will critique the same three texts and will choose a fourth critical study or adaptation that represents another approach of your choice.

The four texts are:

1. Michelangelo Antonioni (dir.), Blow-Up (1966)
2. Seymour Chatman, “The Rhetoric of Difficult Fiction: Cortázar’s ‘Blow-Up'”. Poetics Today 1.4, Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader (Summer 1980): 23-66
3. David Musselwhite, “Death and the Phantasm: A Reading of Julio Cortázar’s ‘Babas del Diablo'”. Romance Studies 18.1 (June 2000): 57-68.
4. An article or other text of your choice. Please provide a copy of the text you have selected with your paper. (You could choose something like this, just to give an example of a different approach: Keith Cohen, “Cortázar and the Apparatus of Writing.” Contemporary Literature 25.1 (Spring 1984): 15-27.)