Market Realism: Neoliberalism and Latin American Literary Movements after the Boom

Open Access
- Author:
- Amerikaner, Andres
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 31, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Sophia A Mcclennen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Sophia A Mcclennen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Member
Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Committee Member
Suresh Canagarajah, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Literary movements
Latin American literature
Neoliberalism - Abstract:
- In the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, Latin American authors scrambled to build a viable market presence after the unprecedented success of the Latin American Boom, represented by canonical figures such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. While tales of suffering at the hands of cruel dictators set in isolated jungle locales still attracted a healthy readership, these writers attempted to push back against the tropes of magical realism in search of an alternate voice that might connect with domestic and global audiences. This dissertation explores three such efforts in inter-American fiction of the period, attempting to answer the question: How do you construct a literary generation in the age of neoliberalism? I begin by analyzing the McOndo movement, led by the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet in the mid 1990s. Its name is a play on García Márquez’s fictional town of Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. McOndian stories are set in societies permeated by hegemonic cultural forces seeping in from the North, where local particularities take a back seat to globalized reality. Then, I trace the rise of what I call the M.F.A. generation, a cohort of foreign-born, U.S.-educated writers led by Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat. Their narratives are directly born out of the expansion of U.S. Latino/a Studies and the legacy of multiculturalism, and their notoriety peaks in 2007 with the publication of Díaz’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Finally, I consider the case of the misfits: authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Martín Rejtman who evade easy classification, often frustrating audiences and critics but attaining visibility through a reputation for resistance and integrity. In mapping each group’s careful navigation of genre, discourse and ideology, I outline market-driven responses to neoliberalism’s privatization of public space, as well as multiculturalism’s thrust toward strategic essentialism. Is it possible to assemble a readerly community without overt self-labeling? Can unmarketability become a marketing tool itself? And how might this alter the future trajectory of Latin American representation?