Is the Future Ours? Exploring Literature and Politics in Contemporary Mexican Fiction Through the Bildungsroman

This project aims to make an important contribution to the study of contemporary Latin American literature by challenging the idea that it has turned away from politics. The generations of writers born in the 1960s and 1970s have been described as apolitical because of their focus on individuals who are often passive or self-centered, and because of their rejection of former, more politicized literary models. In contrast, I will show how Mexican authors from these generations do engage with politics, but in a different way: instead of contesting the limiting influence of political conceptions and ideologies, they show how these have increasingly lost effectiveness in realities that call for change. I focus on the case of Mexico, as it is the country in which the control of the state over its territory has most visibly been diminished, and which is home to some of the most vocal representatives of these literary groups. I take the Bildungsroman as a fruitful testing ground, as its elements are often used by contemporary writers and the genre precisely centers on the way in which an individual learns about society. I rely on literary as well as political theory in order to study how these novels construct their characters and storyworlds, and the way in which they reflect on the relationships between literature and politics. A comparative analysis of 14 novels will chart the new articulations between the political and the aesthetic which these writers bring to the fore.