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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Rebecca Janzen, "Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)
Description: Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017.The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi's Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and Julián Herbert's La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very...