Resumen de El retorno del rostro: Narrativas postnacionales y escrituras precarias en tiempos de la globalización
Globalization in the past decades has been considered a new phase of integrated global economy, with increased cultural interactions and loss of nation-state sovereignty. In recent years, critics and citizens have raised concern towards a neoliberal system that sustains inequality and growing uncertainty. Following the financial crisis’ beginning in 2007, Spanish and Latin American citizens began voicing their opinions and shifting the attention inwards.
This dissertation explores how Hispanic novels, published from 2008 to 2018, have moved from a postnational and cosmopolitan scenario towards a conversation about precarious conditions, disappearances, the subaltern and the consequences of globalization. Using the method of narratology and the critical approach of New Historicism, the dissertation analyses the aesthetics and characteristics of selected novels from Spain, Chile, Peru and Mexico, as well as their dialogue with sociocultural and political discourses. It focuses on writers sharing an interest in visuality and in disrupting conventional novelistic forms. It argues that while some writers play with the novelistic forms in order to break national restrains, others use it to demonstrate the crisis suffered by their characters and to recover the corporeality in their works.
Chapter 1 presents an interdisciplinary discussion of theoretical key concepts and a brief review of the literary industry and its gatekeepers. Chapter 2 describes the emergence of postnational novels in Latin America in 1996 with the anthology McOndo and the Crack manifest and establishes its connections to the Spanish anthology Mutantes in 2007. Based on previous studies and through the analyses of 80M84RD3R0 (2008) by César Gutiérrez, El genuino sabor (2014) by Mercedes Cebrián and Los huérfanos (2014) by Jorge Carrión, seven characteristics in the postnational literature are proposed: fragmented structure, discontinuous time, deterritorialized space, polyphonic narrators, hybrid characters, digital visuality and technopoetics.
Chapter 3 introduces what I have termed precarious writings, which highlight the material traits of recent Hispanic novels and are characterized by fragmented structures, anachronisms, peripheral spaces, first-person narrators, marginalized characters, analogue visuality and an attentiveness to materiality. Through the analysis of La filial (2012) by Matías Celedón, Nancy (2015) by Bruno Lloret and Conjunto vacío (2015) by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, it is argued that the novels present aesthetics of the ineffable, proposing ways of understanding diverse conditions of precarity experienced by their characters.
Finally, the dissertation reaches its concluding chapter, where the similarities and differences between the two tendencies are presented. Taking different sociocultural, economic and political aspects into consideration, mapping these different spatio-temporal voices provides new knowledge of Transatlantic connections between Latin American and Spanish writers, and gives insight into the directions and responses of contemporary Hispanic Narratives in times of globalization. The “return of the face” describes the reappearance of the voice of the other in its vulnerability and subalternity, previously hidden in postnational and global novels. It discusses whether the notion of precarity, as a bottom-up approach, may contribute to a new perspective of understanding current local and global tensions and dynamics.
