Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2024)
Reformulation of Adventure and Lines of Risk in Adventures among Birds by William Henry Hudson
Abstract
In Adventures among birds (1913) the Anglo-Argentine writer and naturalist William Henry Hudson narrates his encounters with the birdlife of the English landscape, threatened by hunters and collectors at a time of accelerated modernization and industrialization. First of all, we will analyze how Hudson reformulates here the idea of “adventure”, which he himself experienced in his youth and developed in his previous books: hunting, collecting and exploring in an imperial-like fashion. Secondly, we will observe that the contemplation of wild birds experienced by the writer in this and other essays is close to the medieval sense of the term “adventure” (Agamben) as an “event” of what happens at the center of life (and no longer on its margins, according to the modern conception that Simmel points out). As such, ornithological contemplation as an adventure of thought and perception among birds commits the writer to operations of risk and intensity: translation, gloss, exchange of perspectives, regressions and transformations. Finally, we will investigate the contemporaneity of naturalistic adventure in the Argentine literary scene, particularly around the collection of poems Aventuras de pájaro (2021) by Laura Forchetti and Alejandra Correa.
