Carlos Fuentes Conference 2012
\nMay 4-5, 2012<\/p>\n
Carlos Fuentes (b. November 11, 1928) ranks as the most acclaimed modern novelist in Mexico and one of the central figures in Latin America\u2019s literary \u201cBoom,\u201d a generation that consists of Julio Cort\u00e1zar, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and, among others, Mario Vargas Llosa. Raised in a family that represented Mexico\u2019s economic and diplomatic interests in Latin America and in the United States, Fuentes is an award-winning novelist often associated with questions of national identity, historical origins, Mexico\u2019s capital as a megacity, and the unresolved conflicts–with Spain, with the United States, and with itself–that define Mexico as a modern nation. <\/p>\n
From his early short stories in Los d\u00edas enmascarados (1954), to novels and essays that include La regi\u00f3n m\u00e1s transparente (1958), Cambio de piel (1967), Terra Nostra (1975), and Los cinco soles de M\u00e9xico, memoria de un milenio (2000), Fuentes has portrayed Mesoamerica\u2014generally allegorized as Mexico-Tenochtitlan, therefore with an emphasis on the Nahua–as a determining force in modern Mexico, and as an integral part in the world’s history of ruling transnational powers. The unresolved cultural and social conflicts between Mexico\u2019s native peoples in relation to the Spanish conquest and colonial New Spain remain to this day a thematic constant in Fuentes\u2019s novels and essays, portrayed as the fundamental background and condition to Mexico\u2019s modernization and political development as a democracy. Fuentes\u2019s novels thus mark the historical present as an artistic possibility for reflection and symbolic resolution to modernity\u2019s most crucial questions, arguably a juncture shared by Mexico with other developing countries.<\/p>\n
The simultaneous representation of the national and the global in Fuentes’s narrative has been a determining factor in its translations to major world languages. An impressive bibliography of critical studies has recognized in Fuentes’s work a will to poetry and an energetic narrative experimentation stemming from 20th-century aesthetic movements, such as Cubism and Surrealism. Consistent with his views on national origins–often defined by Fuentes as Mexico’s question of being and becoming, or as the weight of the past and the spur of a desired future–Fuentes claims a double origin for the modern novel: on the one hand, as an avant-garde poetics intent on redefining art and its function in a contemporary world; on the other, as the uninterrupted artistic heritage that Latin America’s literary modernity has embraced and appropriated in Miguel de Cervantes\u2019s Don Quixote de la Mancha.<\/p>\n