For the renewal of a (non) canon. Critics and narrators in the 21st century, Mexico and Diaspora

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the narrative production of contemporary Mexican women writers in order to shine light on the work of those with college degrees in the humanities, with the goal of understanding how a formal background on literary criticism relates to literary production and how their writings act as a conduit for epistemological proposals aiming to denounce and recuse power structures, promote gender equality or offer new aesthetical representations. I base the study on the work of four writers representative of the generations of the 1970s and 1980s: Guadalupe Nettel (México, D.F. 1973), Marina Herrera (Saltillo 1977),Verónica Gerber (México, D.F. 1981) y Valeria Luiselli (México, D.F. 1983), sample which I selected because their works all share a marked creative innovation, put forward new aesthetic proposals, and subscribe to contemporary and renewed perspectives on critical theories, such as cultural studies, and post-colonial gender studies. This work is a first phase within a broader project that will eventually yield a chapter in a textbook meant for a high school or college instruction of textual analysis from gender, social and cultural perspectives that will better fit the contemporary circumstances of women and the way literature is taught in Mexico.