This dissertation lies at the intersection of Marxist literary criticism, spatial literary analysis or geocriticism, and Mexican literary studies. Throughout the dissertation I interrogate the plausible concatenations of these fields for the study of the spatiality of the Mexican modernist novel of the second half of the twentieth century, a period marked by Mexico’s transition from an industrial to a new-export oriented pattern of capital accumulation. I use the notion ‘spatial composition’ to theorize the conceptual relation between the novel’s formal ordinations and the patterns that model the reproduction of capital under specific historical and geospatial conditions. I show that the formal solutions offered by the Mexican novel to the changing dynamics of capital accumulation provide a systematic account of how unevenness comes to be produced and reproduced within the world order of late multinational capital. The periodization advanced corresponds to literary modernism’s consolidation as a cultural dominant in Mexico, a process that can be traced back to the long sixties. I argue that in the context of this long decade, Mexican literary modernism came to operate as a form of symbolic compensation for the exhaustion of the developmental program of the national-popular state. Each chapter studies modernist form against the backdrop of a momentous turning point in the consolidation of a new export-oriented pattern of capital reproduction in Mexico. Thus, each chapter considers how the modernist novel absorbed the antinomies produced by transition, displacement, and economic adjustment, and how self-consciousness and experimentation became imaginary lifelines in the face of socioeconomic decimation. While modernism’s paradigmatic ascendancy continued to hold sway throughout the second half of the twentieth century, a series of narrative impetuses began to challenge modernism’s literary predominance toward the turn of the century. These apertures would continue to develop as modernism transitioned into a cultural residual. I conclude by showing how the historicization of modernism provides formal codifications to apprehend the structural couplings of subjective and objective violence at the end of accumulation
