Boom i McOndo. Wokół nowej prozy hispanoamerykańskiej

Abstract

The aim of this book is to provide a contextual look at the new narrative in Spanish written in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Hence its title: “Boom and McOndo. Around the new Hispano- American narrative”. The fact that from the 1960s onwards Latin American literature acquired a new quality is an undeniable fact, and the culmination of these changes were, in the period from 1967 to 2010, five Nobel prizes awarded to their writers and poets. However, since the Latin American Boom had not come out of nowhere, in this book, first, we will approach the literary process that led Hispanic-American authors to unprecedented success, which finally assured them a solid position on what we could call the World Republic of Letters. All of this, in order to be able to see the Boom phenomenon itself and to trace its different contexts: historical, political and social, in which it arose, and then it was established until it started to gradually disappear. McOndo, whose origins in a certain way derive from the Boom, is considered as another important pattern in the literary history of the Latin American subcontinent at the end of the twentieth century, and responds to the stereotype established as a consequence of the notoriety of some predominant trends after decades. To see how the young writers revolt, ideologically and aesthetically, against the labels they consider improper and even unfair, to approach the two phenomena in the widest possible way, as well as to look for parallels between the two, is what the pages of this publication propose. To organize these reflections it will be used, on the one hand, contemporary cultural studies that, as a research method, allow us to apply the appropriate tools for the analysis not only of the text, but also of the context; on the other hand, due to the comparative nature of the analysis, we will address the methodology elaborated by the studies referring to the field of comparative literature. In addition, the focus will be on the modern mechanisms that affect the flow and promotion of cultural goods, the role of mediators, both institutional and individual, as well as the formation of the cultural field and the symbolic management of capital, which form an inevitable referent within the sociological perspective of literature. To conclude, we will raise the issue that refers to what is meant by the concept of literary generation, suitable as a problem to be solved when studying the work of the writers of the Boom and McOndo.