Re-thinking McOndo and its Canonization

Abstract

Through Pascale Casanova’s theory and methodology of world literary space the McOndo intervention and its process of canonization can be rethought beyond prevailing interpretations and misinterpretations. Through micro- and macro-analysis of the literary context which McOndo intervenes into, its various interventions (here explored exclusively in its prologue), its reception and analysis of its critical production, and informed by interviews with the editors and contributors, the literary value of this polemical Pan-Hispanic short-story anthology can be reconsidered. Here McOndo’s profoundly literary intentions come to the fore as a fundamental regional expression of isolated but comparable projects carried out by a whole generation of writers attempting to step out of the shadow of the Spanish American literary Boom, reject magical realism and the resulting international horizon of expectation, seeking to create a more autonomous literary space for Spanish American writers and assert their own position within the Latin American literary canon.