The Urban Narrative of Costa Rican Writer Carmen Naranjo Coto. Globalising Writing from a Central American Capital

Abstract

This article addresses two axes of analysis. The first argues that, in the context of twentieth-century Costa Rican narrative, the novels of Carmen Naranjo Coto (1928-2012) can be read as postmodern urban texts, produced by an intellectual who worked simultaneously in the cultural and political, national and international spheres at a historical moment characterised by tensions between the local and the global. The second axis analyses the destabilisation of the status quo in Naranjo's novel Diario de una multitud (1974), in order to explore in greater depth some of the formal and thematic innovations proposed by this author. Thus, this article proposes Carmen Naranjo as a writer who reflects on the contradictions generated in Costa Rican society by capitalist globalisation and how, in order to do so, uses a dialogic aesthetic that invites us to listen to the diverse voices of a modernising city.