What is it about?

Urban life has become a new way of live for a good part of human beings, and life in megacities has become the parangon of excesses of urban life. Through literature, and how authors pictured Mexico City in novels after 2005, we can begin to understand the experience of modern human beings. This paper analyzes three Mexican novels in light of Lionel Ruffel’s reflection on the contemporary, with an emphasis on the body.

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Why is it important?

In 2022, 56% of the world population lives in a city. In 2050, it is expected to be 70%. The experience of urban life is often depicted by fiction as one of disconnection from nature, with the result being a “spectralization” of the characters’ body. These depictions of body reflect a certain conception of realism and from there of reality.

Perspectives

Having lived myself in the great Mexico City, it was interesting to read the experience of Mexican authors living there too, and realize that this experience has many features in common with those in other cities all over the world. The features in megacities act as a magnifying glass of our modern way of living, and sometimes it is not pretty at all to look at it.

Dr Laurence Pagacz
Universite catholique de Louvain

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: « Soy Ciudad » : le corps désincarné des mégapoles modernes. Mexico dans la littérature mexicaine après 2005 : Felipe Soto Viterbo, Guillermo Fadanelli et Jorge F. Hernández, Les Lettres Romanes, January 2016, Brepols Publishers NV,
DOI: 10.1484/j.llr.5.111018.
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