Abstract

This paper offers a critical overview of the literary scene in Latin America during the last two decades. The latest trends in fiction and poetry are read together as symptoms of an epochal cultural vector that tends to be critical of hegemonic discourses (neoliberalism, globalization) and of literary operations that work for sublimation, transcendence, allegory, and essentialist conceptions of identity. The latest generations of Latin American writers --writers such as César Aira, Wáshington Cucurto and Sergio Raimondi, whose work is examined here in detail, and others such as Alberto Laiseca, Gabriela Bejerman, Alberto Fuguet, Mario Bellatin or Rita Indiana Hernández-- share a desire to depart from Latin American literary movements associated with those operations (namely, from magical realism and fantastic literature in fiction, and from the rich tradition of 20th-century modernist poetry), as well as an attempt to establish the ground for a new definition and practice of realism, a re-imagining of the local and the community in the face of globalization which, in its effort to fully embrace the present --its actual socio-economic conditions as much as the discursive layers and fantasies that pervade it--, tends to a certain occlusion of memory and history.