Summary: | From the mid fifties the world of art and literature were deeply transformed by the global consumption of new cultural forms made possible by the technologies of mass media. The new generations brought up in this cultural milieu experienced new ways of inhabiting the city and gave rise to very specific manifestations of youth culture. Central to this process was the adoption of rock and roll as the privileged way of life and expression for the younger generations. Rock music as a global phenomenon promoted a process of deterritorialization, hybridization and cultural exchange that transcended borders and national identities. In the mid sixties, Mexican authors started to give literary form to youth culture by using rock music, urban slang and adopting an oppositional stance towards established literary practices. As rock music itself, this literature was produced by extremely young authors for their contemporaries. Colombian authors and, some time later, Chilean writers will join in this portrayal of youth culture in their societies. Although these young authors did not get the international exposure and acclaim that older writers part of the famous Boom of Latin American literature did get, their work was very relevant as it pioneered a global cultural phenomenon in literature that has become characteristic of our times, aesthetics cosmopolitanism. In my dissertation I proposed to study the work of Jose Agustin, Parmenides Garcia Saldana, Colombian nadaistas, Andres Caicedo and Alberto Fuguet as representations of the historical relevance of youth culture in their countries. My analysis focuses on the ways their novels narrative strategies and represented worlds are constructed as soundscapes where rock music, and in the case of Caicedo also salsa, allow for new forms of utopias, audiotopias, alternatives spaces of resistance and community forming based on new notions of citizenship and identity where artistic creation is hybrid, global and cosmopolitan.
|