Resumen de The Concept of Generation in the Study of Twenty-First Century Mexican Literature: Usefulness and Limitations

Elsa M. Treviño

• This article analyzes the concept of generation as a methodological tool for contemporaryliterary research, advancing its use to characterize aesthetic trends in the artisticproduction of diverse groups of coetaneous writers. By providing a cultural history of theuses of the category in Mexican literary studies, it examines the applicability and limitationsof the concept of generation, highliting the importance of contextual and diachronic awareness in its deployment. This study then advocates for an understanding of a generation as a porous sociobiological category that groups several people under a similar Weltanschauung. It contends that the heterogeneity of Mexican cultural nationalism generates an equivocal ground for the literature of the generation of writers born in the 1960s and 1970s, and argues for the consideration of the cluster of Mexican authors born in these decades as a generation.