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Abstract
This work analyzes the representation of Mexico City's urban dynamic and the functionality of its historical sites and its monuments in a selection of novels from 1958-2000. The focus is on the relationship of the individual to the city and on the growth of the city that changes constantly this relationship. More specifically, I study the retention and recollection of personal memory, which gives continuity to an individual's identity, in relation to the physical environment, which is supposed to contain the memory and to serve as aid in the remembrance of it.
In the selected novels by Ana Clavel, Gonzalo Celorio, Luis González de Alba and Carlos Fuentes, the city appears not only as the setting but also as an interactive entity, full of complexities and contradictions wherein we find various functions and perceptions. The different plots unfold depicting their protagonists' awareness, or lack thereof, of the city and their negotiation of it as a milieu containing historical and personal memory.
In order to understand the city, memory and their dynamic, the examination of the chosen texts rely on readings from different fields such as architecture, urban studies, visual studies, phenomenology of space, urban semiotics, history, sociology, philosophy and psychology. By expanding the analysis to these fields, this study intends to present a wider view of the relationship between a city's architecture and the personal memories of its residents.
The studied novels are ordered in reverse chronology from their date of publication following the archeological method of unearthing stratums. Starting with the Introduction, which establishes the theoretical basis of my analysis, I endeavor to peel away, in each of the four chapters, the layers that separate the postmodern from the premodern subject, and in so doing retrace the evolution of collective identity as a construct that conditions the individual's sense of self and nation.
