Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter
Scholar of Romance Language Literature & Religion, fiction writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Drawn to all that is strange, surreal, sacred, and transcendent.
About
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and undergraduate scholar at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she studies Romance Languages and Literatures with concentrations in Spanish and French, alongside a minor in Religion. Her academic and creative pursuits traverse the realms of language, literature, philosophy, and religion.
Across her work, Ava embraces alternative modes of perception—ways of attuning to the world that resist rigid binaries and instead dwell within its entangled intricacies and irreducible complexity. Her fiction moves through the enigmatic shadows of the gothic, the kaleidoscopic visions of magical realism, and the oneiric dissonance of the surreal. Within these passages, she descends into the depths of eros and mortality; the natural and the numinous; the ineffable and the unconscious; the sacred and the divine. She writes to dissolve the boundaries between dream and waking, myth and memory, the seen and the unspoken—seeking to rekindle wonder, re-enchant perception, and retrace the threads of magic and meaning woven through the vast, iridescent web of the cosmos.
In addition to her literary and scholarly work, Ava engages visual and musical forms of expression through painting, drawing, piano, and songwriting. Her aesthetic sensibility gravitates toward liminal worlds where beauty and strangeness intertwine, where melancholy waltzes with the miraculous and the ordinary slips into enchantment.
Beyond art and academia, she is deeply committed to literacy, educational access, and the cultivation of a lifelong love of learning among students of all ages. Over the years, she has worked as a teacher, tutor, and mentor both within her community and beyond.
This site is a growing archive of her fiction, essays, research, and artwork, alongside occasional ruminations and reflections on the questions, fascinations, and wanderings that continue to shape her path.
Research Interests
Primary Fields of Study: Comparative Literature; Indigenous Studies (Mesoamerican and Andean); Literary Theory and Criticism; Decolonial Studies; Metaphysics and Ontology (relational and non-Western traditions); Indigenous and Comparative Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies; Indigenous Literatures of the Americas; Mexican Literary Studies; Magical Realism and the Marvelous Real (lo real maravilloso americano); The Fantastic; Comparative and Theoretical Religious Studies; Literature and Philosophy; Anthropological Theory and Philosophical Anthropology; Myth Theory; Narrative Theory; Critical and Post-Structural Semiotics; Environmental Humanities; Romance Languages and Literatures; Indigenismo; Surrealism; Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature.
Theoretical Frameworks: Decolonial Theory and Philosophy; Coloniality of Knowledge; Indigenous and Comparative Philosophy; Ontological Anthropology; Amerindian Perspectivism and Multinaturalism; Relational Ontology and Ontological Pluralism; Cosmopolitics (pluriversal and Indigenous formulations); Critical Philosophy of Language; Non-Representational and Generative Theories of Language; Critiques of Signifier–Referent Dualism; Metaphysics and Ontology (relational and non-Western traditions); Non-Linear and Cyclical Theories of Temporality; Post-Structural Semiotics; Philosophy of Difference; Deconstruction; Psychoanalytic Theory (Freudian and post-Freudian); Analytical Psychology (Jungian theory); Phenomenology of Religion and Spiritual Experience.
Anthropology and Linguistics: Mesoamerican Philosophy; Indigenous Metaphysics and Ontology (Mesoamerican and Andean); Mexica Metaphysics, Ontology, and Epistemology; Mexica Cosmovision; Amerindian Perspectivism; Philosophical Anthropology; Linguistic Anthropology; Anthropology of Religion; Uto-Aztecan Linguistics; Nahuatl Language, Poetics, and Verbal Art; Quechua Linguistics; Comparative–Historical Linguistics; Indigenous Language Ideologies; Language Revitalization and Reclamation.
Religious and Mystical Studies: Mysticism (comparative and theoretical approaches); Comparative Religion; Western Esotericism; Christian Mysticism; Hermetic Traditions; Alchemical Traditions; Gnostic Traditions and Gnosis; Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism); Apophatic and Negative Theology; Theopoetics; Ritual Studies; Sacrifice Theory; Indigenous Sacred Traditions; Sacred Time and Ritual Calendrics; Phenomenology of the Sacred; Mystical Hermeneutics; Archetypal Psychology (religion and symbolism).
Environmental and Indigenous Thought: Indigenous Environmental Thought; Indigenous Eco-Ontologies; Indigenous Environmental Epistemologies; Relational Ontologies and Epistemologies; Decolonial Ecologies; Indigenous Ecologies; Environmental Humanities; Cosmopolitics (environmental and Indigenous formulations); Human–More-than-Human Relations; More-than-Human Worlds; Land-Based and Place-Centered Literatures; Ecocriticism (decolonial and Indigenous approaches); Ecopoetics.
Language and Pedagogy: Literacy Studies; Multilingualism and Multilingual Education; Second Language Acquisition; Applied Linguistics; Language Pedagogy; Sociolinguistics; Language Ideologies in Educational Contexts.
Key Authors, Theorists, and Scholars
Authors: Juan Rulfo; Carlos Fuentes; José María Arguedas; Miguel Ángel Asturias; Elena Garro; Gabriel García Márquez; Jorge Luis Borges; Julio Cortázar; João Guimarães Rosa; Clarice Lispector; José Donoso; Isabel Allende; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Leonora Carrington; Remedios Varo; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë; Edgar Allan Poe; Meister Eckhart; Teresa of Ávila.
Theorists and Scholars: Marisol de la Cadena; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Rodolfo Kusch; James Maffie; Miguel León-Portilla; Eduardo Kohn; Walter Mignolo; Jacques Derrida; Georges Bataille; Julia Kristeva; Hélène Cixous; Luce Irigaray; Sigmund Freud; Carl Gustav Jung; Mircea Eliade.
“Tú, que me lees, ¿estás seguro de entender mi lenguaje?
— Jorge Luis Borges, “La Biblioteca de Babel”
Academic & Creative Work
Academic Work
Literary Work
Visual Art
Posts & Reflections
Latest Publications
Books Creative Writing Fantastic Fiction Fantasy Female Sexuality Feminism Fiction Forest French Gothic Gothic Fiction Indigenous Cosmology Jorge Luis Borges Language Linguistics Literature Magic Magical Realism & the Marvelous Mesoamerica Mysticism Mythology Nahuatl Nature Occult Poetry Religion Romance Short Story Spanish Storytelling
Selected Writings
“The Dance of Love and Death”: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes
Academic Thesis
ABSTRACT
Anglophone literary criticism has long approached Latin American literature through a narrowly postcolonial lens, privileging historical and sociopolitical interpretation while seldom granting it the philosophical seriousness routinely accorded to European literary traditions. This critical habit frequently reduces Latin American literary production to the aftereffects of colonial history, thereby obscuring its sustained engagement with metaphysical, existential, and ontological inquiry. Yet the defining characteristics of Latin American literature—its formal experimentation and its seamless interweaving of the fantastic and the real—demand a more capacious critical framework. By foregrounding philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches, this thesis reclaims Carlos Fuentes as a thinker whose work rigorously interrogates the fundamental conditions of human existence, despite his persistent marginalization as a philosopher within Anglophone criticism. It argues for the necessity of reading Latin American literature not only as historically situated but as philosophically and psychoanalytically generative in its own right.
This study contends that Fuentes’s oeuvre is structured by an intimate and persistent interrelation between the erotic and the macabre—an obsession with sex and death that culminates in their fusion as inseparable, transcendental forces. In Fuentes’s narratives, sex and death are not merely juxtaposed but revealed as dual expressions of the same ontological impulse. The macabre functions as the shadow of the erotic, suggesting that desire is inextricable from mortality, while eroticism itself bears the imprint of destruction, pain, and sadistic excess. This dynamic closely parallels the Freudian relation between Eros and Thanatos, wherein the life drive and the death drive collide, converge, and ultimately coalesce. For Fuentes, death is erotic, and sex is irreducibly macabre.
Through close readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, this thesis demonstrates how Fuentes reconceptualizes love as an act of metaphysical self-abnegation and transcendence. Erotic union mirrors death: to lose oneself in another through love parallels the dissolution of the self in mortality. By reconfiguring sex and death as cosmic and philosophical phenomena rather than merely thematic motifs, this study repositions Fuentes as a thinker of the human condition. It argues that within his literary universe, love and death are not opposites but seductive and sinister forces locked in an eternal dance—each ceaselessly entwined with the other to form a single continuum of transcendence. Through the interpenetration of the erotic and the macabre, Fuentes ultimately posits that to love is already to die, and that dying itself constitutes an erotic, transcendent act.
Atziluth, Tzaphiron, Tassili n’Ajjer
Short Story
“Atziluth, Tzaphiron, Tassili n’Ajjer” is a short story that blends philosophical, speculative, and historical fiction, psychological horror, and magical realism. In 1977, a German archaeologist uncovers a lost journal in the Algerian desert belonging to Ariadne Mornève, a brilliant French linguist who disappeared in 1927 while searching for a primordial, pre-Babelian language. As her entries spiral into dreams, symbols, and madness, the story explores the limits of language, memory, and reality—tracing a haunting linguistic enigma across time, myth, and the collective human (un)consciousness.
The Virgin Ceiba
Short Story
Set in sixteenth-century Castile and New Spain, “The Virgin Ceiba” traces the mystical trajectory of Sor Anacleta de la Luz Carmesí, a Castilian novice whose visions of the Virgin Mary culminate in ecstatic revelations of God embodied in a ceiba tree in the jungles of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. In the New World she encounters Leonor Xóchitl, and together they enter a clandestine, transgressive communion that entwines mysticism, eros, and the natural world—articulating a feral theology in which faith and desire converge to reimagine the sacred beyond ecclesiastical bounds.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 