Edmundo Paz Soldán and Jorge Carrión: an (Exo-)Canon of a New Hispanic Apocalyptic

Abstract

With the literary movements of McOndo, in the context of Latin America, and the New Spanish Narrative, in the context of Spain, a group of Hispanic authors are trying to retrace traditional paths such as those established by canonical expressions like the Latin American Boom and, thus, find new literary aesthetics that are more in accordance with the different realities of the 21st century. Two writers representative of both contexts are the Bolivian-American Edmundo Paz Soldán and the Spaniard Jorge Carrión who create with their exocanonical works an alternative “canon” of apocalyptic creations on disturbing themes such as pandemics, digital virality or environmental destruction. After outlining the specific contexts in which both authors are inscribed, we analyze and compare three different texts by each of them in order to bear witness to a new Hispanic apocalyptic: Allá afuera hay monstruos (2021), La vía del futuro (2021) and La mirada de las plantas (2022) by Paz Soldán and Lo viral (2020), Membrana (2021b) and “El ecocidio: un arma contra el cambio climático” (2021a) by Carrión.