Contemporary Mexican Literarture
This synopsis gives you an overview of just one of the days on the 2009 seminar, spent focusing on the theme of contemporary Mexican literature.
Today we move into our second theme, contemporary literature. Here again, most people are more familiar with Mexico’s participation in the “Boom,” Latin America’s major literary movement of the 60’s and 70’s which propelled this region’s literature onto the world scene. Magical realism featured prominently into this period, as does the name of Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s key representative of this era. The first lecture today will discuss how current work differs radically from what came before. The next two talks will focus in on more specific themes. La generación del crack refers to 30- and 40- something writers such as Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, Eloy Urroz, Pëdro Angel Palou, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda. Their work is less tied to traditional Mexican sites, themes, and imagery; and veers into the noir genre, detective stories, and other such areas.
The third lecture takes up a different thread in contemporary work and focuses on Jewish literature. Many of Mexico’s most prominent and representative writers of the 20th and 21st centuries are Jewish – Jacobo and Margo Glantz, Sarah Sefchovitz, Rosa Nissán and the now U.S.-based Ilan Stavans, to name several - and their writing offers pointed departures from the Catholic-centric themes and images one might expect in this still 90% Catholic nation.
