The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a new means of examining the way in which the domestic space influences the protagonists of the three following novels written by McOndo authors: Mala onda by Alberto Fuguet, Vidas ejemplares by Sergio Gómez and Fue ayer y no me acuerdo by Jaime Bayly. Until now little research has been conducted on the works of the McOndo generation with reference to the protagonists' typically dysfunctional familiar situations. Delving deeper into their sparsely related and virtually untold childhoods, this dissertation seeks to find the core of the protagonists' problems and explains how their childhood experiences have led to their near total destruction as adolescents and young adults. The narrative analysis is supported with the theoretical framework of Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, whose scholarly contributions link gender, psychoanalysis and early childhood development to the protagonists' search for individual identity. The protagonists represented within the pages of these narratives live in what the McOndo authors refer to as the true reality of Latin America during the last three decades of the twentieth century. This globalized and virtual reality is anything but the exotic or magical space represented by Gabriel García Márquez‘s fictional city Macondo in Cien años de soledad. Instead, the backdrops of these narratives are crime-ridden (sub)urban spaces which are seemingly the spaces from which the protagonists long to flee. These adolescents and young adults who are troubled by familiar expectations, rejection and abandonment have another agenda in mind, however, and that is to escape from that which has caused the gravest threat to their wellbeing: their family. In an attempt to recuperate the missing link to happiness, the protagonists are faced with a challenge: whether or not they pardon their family. My study of psychoanalysis and gender formation leads to the conclusion that the unhealthy relationships between the protagonists and their parents result from the emotional loss of the parent(s) during early childhood. The physical loss of the parent(s) during adolescence or early adulthood is what leads the protagonist to flee, but is also what ironically leads them to forgiveness.

abstract: ABSTRACT Of all the writers associated with the McOndo movement, a literary movement that focuses on the reality of urban life for millions of young Latin Americans, Jorge Franco is perhaps the most distinguished. As the author of Paraíso Travel and Rosario Tijeras, Franco has expertly shown his international audience the brutal conditions under which so many residents of his birth city of Medellín, Colombia, live. In both novels the reader is introduced to a world in which various factors have set up a society characterized by victims and predators. This study will attempt to show how economics, violence, machismo, racism and class discrimination all play a role in establishing a social hierarchy that facilitates anti-social behavior, and how these social institutions perpetuate themselves to the detriment of those caught in the cycle. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2012

This thesis argues that a literary change occurred after the fall of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, characterized by the emergence of markets that provoked a "mini-boom" in sales and, at the same time, a change of aesthetics which abandoned the allegorical models of the post-boom in favor of a realistic literature in dialogue with popular culture. This is the sign of postmodernity and globalization in Latin America, reflected in its literature, particularly in the short story writing of the Southern Cone, which has utilized the parody and pastiche of the postmodern era without the trivialization that occurred in other parts of the world. With the goal of establishing a periodization that is different from that which has always prevailed in Latin American literature, the thesis proposes the term "post-vanguardist realism" to designate the literature of the 1990s and the twenty-first century in the Southern Cone. As is the case in all periods of rupture and new beginnings, polemics and disputes appeared between literary bands. The disputes protagonized by Alberto Fuguet and Jaime Collyer in Chile, experimentalists and "planetarians" in Argentina, and Escanlar and the generation of '45 in Uruguay, reflect this new commercial and aesthetic reality. Despite the emergence of a literature more in tune with popular culture and pastiche, the continental anthologies that unite these authors demonstrate how their projects began to fade away, and showcase the appearance of new voices, who take the lead after 2000 and break with this type of literature, in favor of a less schematic narrative with more intertextual dialogue, without, however, returning to magical realism. Despite local differences in short story writing and the literary traditions of each country, these new voices are united by a common aesthetic, the use of literary genres and themes from the shared history of the Southern Cone, and by the traumatic experiences of dictatorship and globalization.