Latin America and the Fascination of the Short Story
Latin America and the Fascination of the Short Story

Summary/Abstract: Latin America defines its essential identity at the intersection between Reason and Myth, where the sacred, magical element retrieved within the Indo-Afro-Hispanic roots is joined by the realist element inherited from the Renaissance tradition. The roots of the short story blend with the ones of mythology and are found in the pre-Columbus cultures. This legendary material is recorded initially in chronicles or compilations, later adapted into collections of stories, further refined, and ultimately reinterpreted by the works of contemporary writers. It is magic realism that re-establishes the importance of this discourse of differentiation and imposes it globally, within the process of perfecting the European tradition. The so-called “Boom” period, characterized by the explosion of the novel (Márquez, Llosa, Fuentes) was prepared by several essential short story collections like Borges’ Ficciones or Cortázar’s Bestiario. Also, all the accomplished novelists of this period wrote short stories and were preoccupied to elucidate the mechanism of prose writing and the function of storytelling. The “Boom” phenomenon coincides with an international awakening of interest in women’s voices, which will further increase in the last decades of the twentieth century (Isabel Allende, Luisa Valenzuela, Elena Poniatovska). The “Post-Boom” generation is considered to be a “local” representative of postmodernism, and introduces a new type of literature that is primarily characterized by accessibility. The postmodernist short story features a variety of styles: parody, introspection, grotesque, or fantasy, and determines literary criticism to elaborate new strategies of its interpretation. The “mini-short story”, defined as a sub-category of the contemporary South American short story, becomes the image of a nonconformist attitude toward the orthodox construction of the traditional story.

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