Ya nos cayó el chahuistle: El cuento apocalíptico mexicano contemporáneo (1996-2016)

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to cover a gap left by literary criticism in the study of Mexican apocalyptic literature. Its main objective is to make a systematized and comprehensive characterization of contemporary apocalyptic short stories in Mexico, which have been overlooked in critical works due to their status as speculative fiction. Through an extensive corpus of 69 short stories published between 1996 and 2016, this project offers a clearer picture of the place this literary production holds in the system of Mexican literature. Apocalyptic literature in Mexico has been defined by a group of novels written in the 1990s by mainstream authors, who used the end of the world as a way to imaginatively destroy the national status quo of their time. Nonetheless, an even bigger production of apocalyptic short stories began at the same time as these novels, and keeps growing in the 21st century. This production, by a generation of young writers of speculative genres, does not take the local context as a main source of meaning, but instead explores and experiments with the genre in order to present more personal visions of the end of the world. The dissertation discovers and presents the authors and works that make up the tradition of Mexican apocalyptic short stories. Additionally, through the use of quantitative analysis on a database of apocalyptic motifs in the corpus, it puts forward the features of this tradition, as well as the deviations it takes from the existing descriptions in Mexican apocalyptic literature in particular, as well as apocalyptic fiction in general. The results of the study suggest that the contemporary apocalyptic short story in Mexico can be defined by private, individual dramas in the midst of apocalyptic times, giving the end of the world a completely different meaning than the one more usually provided by the Mexican apocalyptic novel. Another result is the understanding of how this literary genre has evolved in Mexico from a place on the periphery, into the mainstream of publishing. The biggest contribution of this dissertation is that it presents the great diversity of approaches to the end of the world that the apocalyptic short story in Mexico has, which makes for interesting topics of research that are not only relevant but even popular in current times.