Abstract

CRUZ-POLO, Evelin. Rewriting the myth of Asterion from contemporary horror. An approach to “Sacrificios” by María Fernanda Ampuero. Rev Cien Cult [online]. 2022, vol.26, n.49, pp.11-27.  Epub Nov 30, 2022. ISSN 2077-3323.

Amid the remarkable development and visibility of current Ecuatorian literature, María Fernanda Ampuero’s proposal is an unavoidable reading reference. The constant themes that identify her writing - outraged human condition, the monstrous, the abjectness of family and religious practices, inter alia - tend to resignify the realm of everyday life, an aspect that is reaffirmed in her anthology of short stories Sacrificios humanos, published in 2021. The text, whose condition is inscribed in the called Latin American Neo-Gothic, articulates, through twelve stories, a plurality of looks around the notion of sacrifice, thus the violence-death duo becomes the axis that revitalizes each diegetic structure. Therefore, this paper centers on the ninth story entitled Sacrificios for which it is proposed, as a hypothesis, a construction of meaning determined by the recovery of the myth of Asterion, from which the labyrinth structures -spatial and discursive - stand out as devices of enclosure and sacrifice. In this line, an established correspondence between the traversed space and the discourse of the characters leads to horror.

Keywords : Myth; sacrifice; horror; labyrinth; maze; Latin American Neo-Gothic.

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