This dissertation investigates temporality in Julio Cortázar’s short stories in the context of literary and cultural-historical frameworks. The analyzed material is comprised of ten short stories from different stages of Cortázar’s writing career, from the first collection, Bestiario (1951), to the last, Deshoras (1983). While time has been recognized by scholars as a recurrent and central theme in Cortázar’s oeuvre, the experience of “other” time, which Cortázar regards as a more genuine form of human time experience, has not been precisely defined. This doctoral thesis defines “other” time as poetic time and explores its relationship to clock time, the prevailing conception of time that Cortázar criticizes as the catalyst for modern alienation.

The concept of poetic time is examined in the context of a cultural countertradition originating in Romanticism and continuing through surrealism, Freud’s conceptions of the subconscious and dreams, and Marcuse’s views on Eros. In this tradition, art and imagination appear as a counterforce capable of resisting the domination of reductive reason characteristic of modern civilization. The concept of poetic time is rooted in the visual characteristics of dream and poetry, where boundaries between subject and object dissolve and time is experienced beyond the norms of temporal measurement. By examining and comparing the experiences of poetic time across the selected short stories of Cortázar, this thesis traces their changing implications. From an individual search for the Absolute to a communal effort to create a new man, manifestations of poetic time echo socio-historical and cultural evolutions, ultimately reflecting the tensions and instabilities of twentieth-century Latin American politics. This doctoral thesis outlines the concept of poetic time for further studies on time in literature.