Swimming against the tide: Single mothers as new social actors in contemporary Mexican novels by Juan Rulfo and Julian Herbert

Abstract

Like all great literature, Mexican novels Pedro Páramo (1955) by the undisputed master of contemporary narrative Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) and Canción de tumba (2011) of the young and talented writer Julián Herbert (1971), offer a wide variety of possible observations. One that seems essential is the representation of single mothers in the symbolic imagery of the two texts. The aim of this paper is to analyze such representations in a transverse direction in order to appreciate the process of social statics and social dynamics as well as the emergence of single mothers as a new social actor. The problem will be analyzed from a theoretical framework that is based on Durand (2012) “mythocritique” and Goffman (1986) microsociology while focusing both in the literary aesthetic condition of the works and in the social dimension.