McOndo (Explained) in the Latin American Literature-World

Abstract

The end-of-century heuristic shift in the study of world literature introduced by Pascale Casanova and other critics has provided new tools of literary analysis in need of testing within discrete and concrete fields. Casanova's theorisation of the literature-world, in particular, has amassed considerable critical attention across the globe. Rather than approach Casanova's proposal with a euphoric acceptance or a confrontational rejection of her theorisations, I propose an assessment of this model to evaluate its explanatory strength within the Latin American field. The test case is the Latin American short story anthology McOndo, edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez and published in 1996. It is a compilation which both affirms and challenges conceptions of Latin American identity and literature, as well as the very processes of canonisation. This anthology, which generated a substantial polemic, can be re-interpreted in a more holistic and genuine manner than has hitherto been possible, while at the same time accounting for its paradoxical positioning. Casanova's theoretical and conceptual tools--founded on Bourdieu's sociological approach to the study of literature (especially his theory of fields)--, permit a thorough and nuanced reading of this text through its context, authorial and editorial position-takings, narrative devices, impacts, and processes of canonisation, made possible by a Casanovian methodology centred on a back-and-forth mutually informing process of macroscopic analysis of contexts and microscopic analysis of texts, as well as authors' trajectories. After thoroughly exploring the scope and limits of this theoretical approach, corrections and enhancements can be applied to this developing theory, grounding it firmly within the world it analogically seeks to explain.