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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on September 9, 2008
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2008 44(4):379-393; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqn056
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: The Fantastic: An Enduring Literary Mode [View the issue table of contents]

A "Superior Magic": Literary Politics and the Rise of the Fantastic in Latin American Fiction

Pablo Brescia

Department of World Languages
University of South Florida
Tampa
Florida 33620
USA

pbrescia{at}cas.usf.edu

  Abstract

Writers in Latin America have theorised about literature throughout the twentieth century, frequently intervening in the literary debates of the times. What happened to fantastic literature, a major mode of literary expression for Latin American literature, in this context? This essay argues that between 1930 and 1950 two major writers, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan José Arreola, actively engaged in a promotion of the fantastic, a reading and writing code that deviated from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth-century realist paradigm. The articulation of this convention entailed not only the practice of fiction but also reflection and dissemination in a variety of forms such as essays, prologues, lectures, etc. I call this under-studied process "literary politics", referring to interventions in favour of a specific way to approach the literary, which, in turn, determined the place and influence of fantastic literature in Latin American literary historiography.

Key Words: Latin America • fantastic, the • realism • literary politics • 1930–1950 • aesthetics • narrative strategies • Book of Fantasy, The • Bioy Casares, Adolfo • Borges, Jorge Luis • Arreola, Juan José


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