In the dissertation, I trace how the Latin American Boom novelists answered to the temporal demands of developmentalism, a modernization theory that proposes economic growth through mass industrialization as the main drive of social progress.
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The writers I study exhibit a persistent distrust of development, especially as a narrative frame for narrating the history of the region. The novels use a highly sophisticated reversal of time by embedding into the story infrastructures in which the past is always present. A closely related strategy is that the infrastructures conforming the setting of the novels are always failed – unprofitable industries, uninhabitable housing, and unworkable transportation. My corpus comprises the Santa María trilogy –La vida breve (1950), El astillero (1961), Juntacadáveres (1964)– by the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, Pedro Páramo (1955) by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971) by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas. To date, most scholarly literature has focused on the central figures of the Latin American boom such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar, yet less attention has been paid to the influential role these other writers played in the emergence of a literary answer against developmentalist temporality.
