McOndo Revisited

Thomas Nulley-Valdés

doi:10.5771/9781666903058

Summary

The Pan-Hispanic short story anthology “McOndo” (Grijalbo Mondadori Barcelona, 1996), edited by the Chileans Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, was envisaged as a forceful contestation of local and global horizons of expectation in Latin American literature, still fixated with exoticized and politicized narratives most especially in the magical realist style.

By drawing on as well as developing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches from World Literature scholarship, McOndo Revisited reconsiders the literary, political, and publishing ecologies which gave rise to this anthology. This rich context, as well as numerous author interviews, informs a holistic analysis of its controversial prologue, short stories, authors, and reception.

As the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the “McOndo” anthology, McOndo Revisited rectifies numerous misreadings and reclaims its primarily artistic intentions. Its analysis zooms back and forth from the macro to the micro perspective, analyzing the artistic trajectories of the authors involved through a complex evaluation of the Latin American literature-world as well as individual authors’ habitus.

Considered by many a commercial and critical failure, McOndo Revisited sheds light on this controversial anthology and demonstrates its role in historicizing the Latin American Literature-World and indeed becoming a generation defining anthology, even if through a most paradoxical fashion.