De la maravilla-ficción de fantasía al surrealismo fantástico: una nueva genología – ilustrada en la narrativa mexicana, 1900-1999.

Abstract

My research deals with fantasy and the fantastic as genres, as well as with their subgenres. I propose a new genology for fantasy and fantastic literature and their subgenres in which they are part of a continuum, with fantasy standing on one end and mimetic literature standing on the other, the fantastic being their middle ground. Within this continuum, the subgenres – which I call fantasy marvel-fiction and fantastic marvel-fiction, fantasy science-fiction and fantastic science-fiction, fantasy surrealism and fantastic surrealism – are distinguished among themselves according to two axes, namely: a) the inner coherence or incoherence of the world the text presents – their being subjected or not to the laws of that world –; b) the nature, and the appropriate explanation – marvelous or scientific –, of the phenomenon that breaks the natural laws of the reader’s known real world. This relationship between reality and fantasy has been essential to my investigation. More specifically, what I have named “the scientific urban gaze” of reality has been the touch-stone to establish what is fantasy and what is not and to create the consequent genology. The genology I propose must therefore be pragmatic: the reader’s view of reality must be taken into account in the process of placing a text within this continuum and the proper genre and subgenre. Once the genology is fully explained, I compare it to the work of some of the most prominent critics on the field of fantasy and the fantastic in order to see similitudes and differences between their research and mine. For the validity of my genology to be demonstrated, I apply it in the analysis of some Mexican narrative works and show how the genre and subgenre of a text – in interaction with the text’s archetypes and narrative components – can be an effective means to convey ideology or worldview. The genological approach, therefore, integrated with an archetypal and a narratological one, constitutes an efficient tool for a holistic semiotic analysis. Notwithstanding that in my thesis I apply it to literary works, it can also be applied to cinema and theatre.