New Technologies, Old Nationalities: Mexico’s Digital Labyrinth in Marina Castañeda’s Amores virtuales

Abstract:By employing Hans Jauss’s literary reception theories as elaborated in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), I interpret Marina Castañeda’s Amores virtuales (2010) as exemplary of the persistence of lo mexicano in intellectual circles and among the public at large. Even while treating distinctly twenty-first-century themes in a postmodern manner, Amores virtuales recasts many themes most famously (and infamously) expressed in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950). In this way, Castañeda’s novel is an attempt—rather paradoxically—to dismantle the labyrinth of solitude even while accepting its terms of engagement. Ultimately, my article underscores the difficulty of thinking beyond an inherently national imaginary and proposes that Castañeda’s novel exemplifies the arduousness of overcoming what can best be understood as a “Pazian horizon of expectations.”