The Aesthetic Border : Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world. "This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature-from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez-reflects one of the world's most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia's fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel's evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia's cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez's retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country's violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a "literature of national reconstitution." Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia's relationship to the wider world"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 Preface and Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 13 1 Gabo against the World: Gabriel García Márquez and the Poetics of Early Globalization 27 2 Literary Shipwrecks: Colombian Aesthetic Citizenship after García Márquez 51 3 Narrating Disruption: From the Novela de la Violencia to the Narco-Novela 69 4 Recasting the Colombian National Story after the Inrush of the World 106 Notes 137 Bibliography 145 Index 153 About the Author 161 Examines how modern Colombian literature - from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Juan Gabriel Vasquez - reflects a tumultuous entrance into globalization. While these literary icons bookend Colombia's fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel's evolution into narco-literature.