Post-testimonial novel in Mexico and Central America (1994–2004)

The institutional agency conferred to testimonio in 1992 by the academic critics marked a significant shift in attitude, displayed in the discursive patterns of literature in the region of Central America and Mexico, during the remaining years of the decade and the early years of the new millennium. This canonization and institutionalization of testimonio, as argued in this dissertation, will function as an axial point from where processes of change and innovation in the imaginative discourse of the area will take a new direction. By recognizing the dynamics involved in the processes of change in literary discourse I analyze the way in which novelists such as Jorge Volpi, Mario Roberto Morales, Juan Villoro, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Sergio Ramírez, and Cristina Rivera Garza adopt narrative strategies that reflect the sociopolitical transition of the latter half of the twentieth century. These writers, I argue, evoke in their creative discourses a metacynical approach to historic, cultural, political, and social referents in a post-testimonial setting