Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl” is a literary analysis of fascination. Situating the story in the history of fascination, the article highlights how it repeats well-known themes from this history. Cortázar’s short story also shows how authors have been able to use fascination as a productive force. I argue that Cortázar’s fascination is intimately connected to temporality, especially the time structure associated with reminders. As such, the fascinating story of a man’s obsession with an axolotl suggests that fascination became a major aspect of cultural reproduction and reconfiguration during the 20^th century.

Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell is professor specializing in intellectual history, including historical theory, at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University (Sweden). He currently works on the history of fascination and the impact of theories of secularization in modern historiography.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

updated on September 26, 2018

Due to the popular misperception of Robert Frost (1874–1963) as a “court” or “presidential” poet, critics have largely failed to acknowledge his lifelong preoccupation with the notion of treason as sometimes a commendable act. As a result, we do not understand adequately the intellectual roots of his ambivalent adherence to the poetic form and of his special kind of irony.

By analyzing his numerous remarks on treason and some of the many books he read on political traitors, one can develop a whole typology of loyalists and renegades crowding his imagination. These types mark out Frost’s field of reflection on the question of excessive belonging to both the state and the poem. The essay reconstructs the poet’s understanding of the political and psychological profiles of Aaron Burr, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Benedict Arnold, and Shakespeare’s Brutus. If Frost was disgusted with the shallowness of Burr and the overly rigid loyalism of Lee, he was also entirely taken with the various modes of disloyalty or betrayal exemplified by the other three figures. These five profiles shed light on some of the more difficult motifs of his imagination and, most importantly, on his tonal reserve, as is shown on the example of his poem “The Pasture.”