General Aims of our Research Activity

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Two are the main aims of the group's activity and they are intimately related. The first is the analysis and interpretation of contemporary literature and culture in English, especially British, Irish, US and, more recently, Australian narrative. And the second, the contribution to the theoretical debate on and the design of models for the analysis of narrative texts, especially in the fields of narrative poetics, the post-structuralisms, myth criticism and ideological approaches including the analysis of the ethical and traumatic components in literature

 

The study of contemporary narrative in English is relevant in that it casts light on the intrinsic characteristics of literary works belonging to authors not yet canonised, who are still immersed in their creative process, thus contributing to the detection and configuration of new literary movements, currents or trends. Further, the identification of the distinctive traits common to various authors and works belonging to our own period is also a relevant critical issue in the sense that it offers us valuable clues for the understanding of the society we are living in.

 

Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary British Novel

Thus, in the first competitive research project undertaken by the group, 'Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary British Novel', the team analysed the emergence in Britain in the 1980s of a new narrative trend, called 'historiographic metafiction', similar to that detected by Linda Hutcheon in the 1960s and 70s in other European countries and in America.
We showed how this type of narrative combines a historical theme with a constant interrogation of the act of writing and of the mechanisms of representation, thus expressing a generalised loss of confidence in the capacity of history and of language to tell the truth. We also showed that this world-view was shared both by other contemporary fields of knowledge (philosophy, historiography, linguistics) and by other, more realistic literary trends, a fact which led us to postulate the existence of a paradoxical postmodernist realism.

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Structure and Ideology in Present-day Anglo-American Narrative

In the second research project, entitled Structure and Ideology in Present-day Anglo-American Narrative: Subject, Margin, Narrativity, we undertook the analysis of the various discourses employed in the reconfiguration of reality and of the postmodern subject in this type of paradoxically realist novels.

 

We analysed the way in which these novels combine the parodic recreation of (earlier) dominant discourses (world history, religions, psychoanalysis, various scientific discourses, or canonical literary genres and figures), with a self-conscious interrogation of the act of writing and of the mechanisms of textual representation as a way to redefine the literary form itself, the other cultural discourses, and the structure of the human subject. The project demonstrated that the re-employment of these discourses has a parodic character and has both formal and aesthetic as well as cultural and ideological implications.
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The Postmodern Intertext

The third project, The Postmodern Intertext: Cultural Hermeneutics of Anglo-American Narrative at the End of the 20th Century, widened the scope of the earlier project, as it set to analyse such aspects of the narrative phenomenon as the construction of characters, narrative subjects and voices, ideological modes, plot schemes, generic conventions, etc., in the Anglo-American narrative of the 1990s. The analysis demonstrated that these aspects evolve intertextually by means of the dialectics between retrospection and the re-interpretation of earlier forms and ideological schemes as forerunners of present ones. These conclusions were the starting point for the fourth research project.
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The Dialectic Foreshadowing/Hindsight in Contemporary Narrative in English

In The Dialectic Foreshadowing/Hindsight in Contemporary Narrative in English we set to applying the hermeneutic circle to the creation and critique of contemporary narrative in English, from a narratological perspective. The analysis of the genesis of the intertextual process demonstrated, firstly, that this process takes place, not only as the direct influence of earlier texts on the present, but also by means of the a posteriori re-reading of earlier forms. Secondly, that, in contemporary Anglo-American narrative, the dialectic foreshadowing/hindsight is explicitly and prominently thematised. And thirdly, that the critical concepts evolve following the same dynamics. This suggests that the hermeneutic relation can usefully be applied not only to the textual and ideological analysis of the narrative text but also to the intertextual evolution of other types of texts (historical, scientific, philosophical, etc.), or even to the critical concepts themselves.
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The Ethics of Fiction

The research project we have just finished is entitled The Ethics of Fiction: Writing, Reading and Representation in Contemporary Narrative in English. The aim of this project stems from the ethical turn that took place in the decade of the 1980s in Anglo-American criticism, that is, the return of interest in the ethical component of writing as a reaction to the cultural relativism and radicalism propounded by certain ideological conceptions of the postmodern era. This ethical turn postulates the in-depth revision of the way in which literature in general and narrative in particular expresses and articulates ethical behaviour. Ethical criticism still lacked an analytical model capable of accounting for such variables as the adscription of text and critic to different cultures, or analytical parameters such as gender.
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Within this context, the project proposed, firstly, the elaboration of a model of ethical criticism applicable to the narrative text, starting from the work of J. Hillis Miller, Emmanuel Levinas, Christopher Falzon and Alain Badiou, among others, articulated around three basic aspects of the narrative text: writing, reading, and representation. The starting hypotheses for the construction of this model were two: firstly, that an ethical reading should admit the resistance of the text to be fixed by the critic. And secondly, that the critic establishes a creative relation with the text and with the identities articulated in it, in which and Other enter a two-sided, transformative dialogue. In its second phase, the project envisioned the application of this model to a representative corpus of narrative fictions written by contemporary British, Irish, US and Australian writers, with a view to establishing the characteristics of the ethical model proposed by each author and work. Our final aim was to determine whether such a model responds to a traditional, humanist ethics, or is rather informed by postmodernist and poststructuralist paradigms.
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Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English

In January 2008 we started a new project on Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English. The project belongs to the type called Consolider C by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, which means that our team has achieved the highest level of excellence in the Spanish research system and that we have funds to carry out the project in five, instead of three years.

 

This project is partially related to the one we just finished on The Ethics of Fiction. One of the developments of the ethical turn in the nineteen nineties was the rise of so-called Trauma Studies. The starting point for this development was the transference of the medical concept of trauma to the critical field. Several factors contributed to this transference: the effects of the two World Wars and other armed conflicts, the clash of civilisations, the processes of decolonisation and globalisation, and the alienation of affections triggered off by the new technologies and the consumer society.

 

Given its origins at the University of Yale, trauma theory has so far given preferential attention to the literature of the Holocaust and other armed conflicts, like the Vietnam war. It has also focused, though to a lesser extent, on a literature that points to History as the determining factor in causing interracial traumas. However, no attempt has yet been made to carry out a systematic and comparative analysis of the formal innovations devised by contemporary writers in order to represent both the collective traumas already mentioned and the individual traumas that appear in other types of contemporary narrative in English. Likewise, these literary works have not yet been consistently approached from an ethical perspective, oriented, firstly, to the identification of the text's resistance to absorb the dominant discourses, and, secondly, to the analysis of possible relationships between (formal) innovation and ideology.

 

The aim of our project is to accomplish this task, in three main stages:

 

1.  Adaptation of the ethical critical model devised in the former project to include aspects dealt with by Trauma Studies.

2.  Application of this model to a corpus of British, Irish, North-American, Australian and Caribbean narrative works, written from the 1960s onwards. This corpus includes works that seem to express collective traumas overtly as well as works that present a wide range of individual traumas.

3.  A comparison of the results gathered in the study of the various works and authors analysed, with a view to:

a) tracing formal, thematic, generic and socio-cultural similarities and/or differences;

b) establishing, on the basis of the previous analysis, recurrent patterns in the representation of trauma; and

c) delving into the ethical implications that the use of these recurrent patterns has in the context of contemporary narrative in English.

 

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