Expansion of senses and legs in the short stories of Juan José Millás

Abstract

According to Marshall McLuhan, media has the purpose of expanding human senses. Therefore, he says that the development of human civilization is the development of media. Among the five human senses, sight and hearing achieved remarkable expansion due to the development of electrical technology, but the expansion of the other senses is limited. In other words, in the case of touch, smell, and taste, it is inevitable to depend on the extension of the legs. Juan José Millás deals with the extension of the senses and the extension of the legs in several of his short stories. In his works, the walls of boundaries are broken down, and the expansion of the senses is also realized by breaking down the walls between oneself and others, reality and unreality. Through this, the writer is talking about the meaning of literature in the classical sense of understanding reality through the lives of others.