Historias que regresan: Topología y renarración en la segunda mitad del siglo XX mexicano

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to re-read the crucial texts of seven Mexican narrators of the second half of the twentieth century --Juan Rulfo´s Pedro Páramo, Carlos Fuentes´ La muerte de Artemio Cruz, José Agustín´s De perfil, Elena Poniatowska´s La noche de Tlatelolco, Carlos Monsiváis´ Entrada libre and Juan Villoro´s El disparo de argón-- in their intersection with historical events of the same time period. It explores the question of how did these books create a counterhegemonic historiography that successfully displaced the official and massmediatic versions, shedding light into the areas that privileged by them, and unsilencing what these dominant narratives muted.

Basically this entails thinking the density of the intrinsically literary as a way to create topological spaces, i.e. texts that include both the I of the narrator(s) and of the reader, thus presenting far more complex versions of historical events. This kind of textuality forces, instead of a linear narrations that explains away, a work of re-narration that involves a plurivocity of senses that never cease to emanate from the texts. In each chapter I concentrate on what makes each book different from the rest, thus, creating book-specific theories that tense the overarching topological-renarrative general conceptualization.