Project Status

I've read some biographies of Cortazar now, as well as some analyses of his major works and his corpus of work in general. I'm not sure yet which stories I'm going to focus on, as they're actually pretty varied in their content. I really wish I had time to read Hopscotch (a novel of his), because it sounds awesomely crazy - it's divided into 115 or so chapters, which can be read in at least two different orders and still create logical narratives. That's just so cool!

Project Status

I'm definitely going with Cortazar. I've read a bunch of his stories now, and they're all really crazy - some are cooler than others, some are creepy, and some are utterly incomprehensible. I've tried searching for some general info on him and his work, but there is very little information available on the internet in English, although there seems to be plenty in Spanish (a language of which I have no knowledge). I'll try using the library's databases and literary reference books to dig up some analyses and stuff.

Website Analysis

http://www.subir.com/cortazar/

Author: Unlisted, - doesnot seem to be associated with a university or other scholarly institution.
Audience: Presumably anyone interested in Cortazar; it provides onlyfactual information in a standard, objective setup
Scholarship: Not particularly high; all information seems all right, but no sources are listed for the biographical data
Bias: The author is neutral. He likes the works of Cortazar, but in providing information about them he isn't biased.
Currency: Cortazar died twenty-two years ago, so his biography isn't changing.
Links: About half of them don't work; some do, but they are mostly links to excerpts of his work. Others are to pages in Spanish.

Verdict: This site isn't particularly good. It is one of the only English Cortazar sites I could find, and although quickly dismissed, represents just about all of the qualities of a page that would make one desire to avoid it for a research paper (despite the initial appearance of validity).

December 4th Qs

Today I did some research on and reading of Julio Cortazar. I checked out "Blow-Up and Other Stories" from the library and have read three stories in it so far. His stories are fantastically eerie and dreamlike; in a lot of ways they remind me of Borges'. I'm thinking Cortazar would be an excellent author to look at for this project, and I think perhaps some formal comparisons between his work and Borges' short stories might be in order.