Julio Cortázar and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Revision of the cortazarian concept of “feeling of the fantastic” in the light of the Chestertonian concept of “grateful astonishment”

Abstract

This work rethinks the concept of “sense of fantastic” ("sentimiento de lo fantástico"), central to the narrative of Julio Cortázar, in the light of the concept of "grateful astonishment", which occupies a fundamental place in the work of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The first part shows how Cortázar not only directly assimilated the work of the English writer, some of whose novels and poems he translated, but also, indirectly, through the work of Borges, one of his main commentators and disseminators. The second part shows how the Cortazarian concept of "sense of fantastic" is directly related to the concept of "grateful astonishment", which Chesterton theorized in his essay Orthodoxy