La justicia y el absurdo en el cuento latinoamericano contemporáneo.: Justice and the absurd in contemporary Latin American short story.

This thesis analyzes the theme of justice in a significant showing of Latin American short stories of the second half of the twentieth century, considering as a case study the stories “Luvina” by Juan Rulfo, “La siesta del martes” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and “El regalo” by Rosario Ferre. Through the lens of cultural criticism, this analysis reveals the aesthetic and ideological strategy of the absurd employed by these authors to investigate the theme of justice and through this strategy to criticize specific aspects of contemporary society. As a theoretical framework, this study uses two intimately related social concepts: justice-as-rectification (from the Aristotelian tradition), that coincides with the ethical act defined by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975); and the absurd employed by French philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) to characterize the condition of the modern individual mediated through the irrationality and disenchantment of the world.