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    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup"
    Ebook40 pages34 minutes

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781535846189
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "Blowup" - Gale

      18

      Blow-Up

      Julio Cortázar

      1959

      Introduction

      In Blow-Up, a 1959 short story by Argentine French author Julio Cortázar, an amateur photographer takes a walk through Paris on a quiet Sunday morning, snapping pictures of sights he finds interesting. When he photographs an adult woman talking to a teenage boy, she becomes infuriated, and he assumes that she was in the middle of some sort of seduction. Later that week, though, he enlarges the photograph he took of them—blows it up—and sees the situation differently. The misperception expands in his mind, throwing his sense of the world further and further out of sync. This philosophical story about how perceptions can change uses Cortázar's unique, slightly off-kilter style to raise questions about reality and how people understand even the most basic things that they experience. It is considered an excellent example of the kind of experimentation that writers, particularly Cortázar, were using in the mid-twentieth century to expand the range of what fiction can do.

      This story was originally published as Las babas del diablo, which translates as The Devil's Drool or The Devil's Drivel, in Cortázar's collection End of the Game and Other Stories. It became internationally famous, however, when director Michelangelo Antonioni loosely adapted it into his 1966 film Blow-Up. The film has little to do with the plot of Cortázar's story—it takes place in London, not Paris, and focuses on a fashion photographer who witnesses a murder. Antonioni's film became a standard of the New Age cinema movement that was just starting, winning the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival. Cortázar's story was renamed to give it the same title as the film that it inspired, and the collection it is in was renamed Blow-Up and Other Stories.

      This entry was prepared using the version of Blow-Up found in Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn and published in 1967.

      Author Biography

      Julio Cortázar was born of Argentine parents in Brussels, Belgium, on August 26, 1914. After the end of World War I, his family returned to Argentina, where Cortázar was raised. He received a degree in secondary education from Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, a teachers' training college, in 1935. After working as an instructor and translator, in 1951 he applied for a professorship at the University of Buenos Aires, but was refused that position because of his political opposition to the presidency of Juan

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