The total novel or the fragmented novel in Latin America and the discourses of globalization and localization

Abstract

This paper makes a comparison between two formal perspectives of the novel as a genre in the Twentieth-Century Latin American literature: The Total Novel of Mario Vargas Llosa and the fragmented novel of Macedonio Fernández. From the autor’s standpoint, each of these perspectives is related to the discourses of cultural globalization and localization, respectively. The novel is, thus, seen as a genre that responds in one way or another to the homogenizing dynamics of a certain kind of globalization or its discursive explosion, its atomization. This may be the diffuse key for reading which today means literature.