No more sex, drugs and rock and roll: formal aspects of the story of the Cuban posnovísimos

Abstract

This essay studies the formal aspects of the short story written by the young Cuban writers known as posnovísimos. Focusing in Ronaldo Menéndez' short stories published in El derecho al pataleo de los ahorcados (1997), this analysis aims to respond to the question about what is the "nuevo" in these short narrations, specifically in terms of the narrative strategies and the stories' structure. The main hypothesis propases that the connection, at the formal level, of these short stories with the founding narrating models of the genre in the Latin American literary tradition, such as those present in Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Juan José Arreola y Virgilio Piñera, rather than evidencing a particular characteristic, exhibits a distinctive saying of "state of things" on politics within the Cuban literature.