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.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
CURRENT PROJECTS
- "Literature Of(f) Limits: Pluriversal Cosmologies and Relational Identities in Present-Day Writing in English".
- “Contemporary North American Fiction and the 4th Industrial Revolution: From Posthumanity to Privation and Social Change” (2020-2023)
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
- Literature in the Transmodern Era: Celebration, Limits and Transgression (2018-2021)
- Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: the Definition of Being in Contemporary North-American Fiction (2016-2019)
- Palimpsestic Knowledge: Inquiries into a Transmodern Literary Paradigm (2016-2017)
- Trauma and Beyond: The Rhetoric and Politics of Suffering in Contemporary Narrative in English (2013-2016)
- Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (2008-2012)
- The Ethics of Fiction: Writing, Reading and Representation in Contemporary Narrative in English (2005-2007)
- The Dialectic Foreshadowing/Hindsight in Contemporary Narrative in English (2001-2004)
- The Postmodern Intertext Cultural Hermeneutics of Anglo-American Narrative at the End of the 20th Century, (1998-2001)
- Structure and Ideology in Present-day Anglo-American Narrative (1995-1998)
- Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary British Novel (1991-1994)
CURRENT PROJECTS
The main aim of this project is to study how present-day writing in English both reflects and contributes to conforming recent developments in the transmodern paradigm as formulated by critics like Rodríguez Magda (1989, 2017). Our premise is that Transmodernity, which we began exploring in our previous project as nowadays dominant socio-cultural paradigm, is currently entering a new phase. This phase is prompted by accelerated global warming, non-stop migratory flows, the COVID-19 pandemic and other systemic risks that coexist with structural and other forms of insidious trauma caused by sexism, homophobia, violence against women, racism, xenophobia, aporophobia and the long-lasting effects of colonialism. Specifically, we believe that this new stage is characterised by a changing relationship to the concept of the limit in the geopolitical, socio-cultural, ideological and ethical acceptations of the term, and that close examination of such concept is essential to apprehend the transmodern definition of the subject and our relation to the contemporary world. Thus, with the conviction that the very idea of the limit and its cultural representations need to be analysed in depth, and that artistic forms in general and literary texts in particular provide an invaluable source of emotional knowledge about the most relevant and urgent socio-cultural changes, this project intends to explore how contemporary writing in English discloses the multifarious tensions and possibilities inherent in the concept of the limit, understood as boundary; as exclusion (off-limits); as porous membrane and relational network; and as an unchartered formal and generic literary territory. Our working hypothesis is that the current concern with limits takes two main forms: 1) the need to expand the boundaries of knowledge by having recourse to insufficiently explored cosmologies and thought-worlds, in keeping with Enrique Dussel's (2001, 2012) defence of pluriversality as an alternative to the univocal and teleologically-oriented knowledge provided by grand universal narratives; and 2) the concomitant need to go on broadening and reconsidering the limits of the traditional Western conception of the subject to demonstrate the urgency to regard identity as fundamentally relational, in line with critics such as Levinas (1961, 1974), Gilligan (1982), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Agamben (1993), Mbembe (2017), Coulthard and Simpson (2016), Mowaljarlai (2001) and Braidotti (1994), to mention but some. Our intention is, therefore, to analyse what we have termed transmodern literatures of(f) limits, namely, narratives that strive to imagine and articulate the variegated yet-to-come scenarios in our ever-increasing digital globalised world. Moreover, the current project follows in the footsteps of the previous ones, as it takes a cue from the critical dialogue between important areas of research into which we previously delved, namely, Ethics, Trauma, Memory, Resilience, Gender and Queer Studies, to mention but some of the most encompassing and outstanding. In short, we intend to enquire into how limits in their manifold manifestations are being articulated and tested, reinforced and challenged in contemporary writing in English, since we consider them essential to apprehend what we perceive as the two most promising defining features of our contemporary era: the promotion of pluriversal cosmologies and a relational conception of identity.
Project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-106855GB-I00). Number of researchers: 6.
In our former project “Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: The Definition of Being in Contemporary North-American Fiction”, we evaluated the effects of the combined narratives of trauma and posthumanity in the context of contemporary North American fiction. This new proposal focuses on how the new paradigm of posthumanity has blurred the “essence” of the human being in the face of the scientific and technical advances of the 4th Industrial Revolution, in which digital, physical and biological technologies blend. Human beings evolve together with the technology we have integrated as part of our identity and which leads to our fluctuation between the physical and the virtual world and our interaction with communication and information technologies which are even faster than our brains. The body is modified through surgery, technology or chemicals and is connected with other machines and other organic life forms at the same time as scientific progress and accelerated human and technological development lead us to the Anthropocene, as human action is already having a geological impact on the planet. The present project is framed within “critical posthumanism” and mainly combines the criticism against the humanist idea of “Man” as universal measure of all things and post-anthropocentrism, which analyses and questions the hierarchy of the species, and human exceptionalism. If the vision of the human offered by Humanism had excluded, for being “less than human”, certain social classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, ages and physical capacities, critical posthumanism also denounces the exclusion of other forms of life and other species with which we share genetic material and the ecosystem. This project is interested in those human beings who do not have access to the enhancement that transhumanism celebrates. Several factors contribute to this lack of access, such as the easy way in which the mass media manipulates and hides information, the lack of quality education that will promote critical thought and the shortage of ethical values necessary to face political populisms in the post-truth era. All this creates new imbalances, not necessarily linked to social class, in which people and identities become products in the information market. As a result, our main objective is the formal and ideological analysis of how these circumstances and this new conception of the human and posthuman is represented in contemporary North American narrative and how the latter evolves and converges with other media to raise awareness so as to transform present-day western society.
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
Literature in the Transmodern Era: Celebration, Limits and Transgression (2018-2021)
Starting from an acknowledgement of the critical dialogue between Ethics, Trauma Studies, Affect Theory and Transmodernity carried out in our earlier projects, the present proposal aims to further elaborate on this by casting light on the ways in which a renewed cultural politics can be enacted on the basis of the ideological cross-roads of our present or 'transmodern' age as argued by Rodriguez Magda. As coined and developed by Enrique Dussel (2001), the concept of Transmodernity offers an alternative to the Eurocentric vision of Modernity and Postmodernity by claiming that a new universal project can be generated by gathering together a multiplicity of epistemic responses from subaltern practices. Undoubtedly, we are living in a globalised era, subject to multiple threats and types of violence. Likewise, the internationalisation of financial economy, free market, global geopolitics and the new communication technologies have opened up unexpected ways of being always already inter-connected. Transmodernity is then related to globalisation and the increasing sense of human vulnerability in a globalised world. Such vulnerability extends to other living beings – i.e. the flora and the fauna – that are dangerously exposed to the pernicious effects of human violence against them. The destruction of our planet is as accelerated and instantaneous as the speed through which we connect ourselves everyday through multifarious social networks. Given the inevitable upward trend of living immersed in such an inter-connected fast world, thus exposing ourselves and others to an ever-more acute and insidious vulnerability, especially in this so-called ‘post-truth era’, we would like to propose literature as an essential tool to rethink what it means to live under the paradigm of Transmodernity. We intend to demonstrate that literature and literary analysis can be powerful and necessary vehicles, not only to denounce the manipulation of facts and social and economic inequality and injustice, but also to conform an epistemological category which enables us to imagine and move forward in time and space towards new and yet-to-come cultural representations emerging out of the discourse of globalisation. Drawing on Magda’s distinction between “narratives of celebration”, that is, those that reiterate the dominant discourse and make it hegemonic; and “narratives of the limit”, which think what has not been conceptualised yet, we will attempt to demonstrate that the latter reflect a tentative new paradigmatic shift in Western culture. Therefore, our main aim will be to establish a representative corpus of limit-case literary works in English and see whether they reflect such policies of activism and change. Our working hypothesis is that Transmodernity encompasses interdisciplinary knowledge stemming, among others, from Feminist Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Queer Theory, Trauma Studies, Memory Studies, Eco-criticism to Affect Theory. Special emphasis will also be made on an Ethics of Vulnerability and Care for and towards the other, be it human, animal or inanimate things. We will seek to demonstrate that literature plays an important role not only in the denunciation of injustices and the request of care for the other but also, and most crucially, in promoting a horizontal communication scheme among diverse cultures and nationalities based on a non-deontic transmodern ethics of alterity of the type inaugurated by Emmanuel Levinas.
“Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: the Definition of Being in Contemporary North-American Fiction” (2016-2019)
This research project studies a corpus of contemporary fiction in North-America. It addresses the belief that in recent years we are undergoing the effects of what seems to be the combined cultural and ideological approach of the paradigmatic narratives of trauma and posthumanity. The main aim of our project is to evaluate the social and political effects such paradigmatic combination may have for the contemporary understanding and definition of the (post)human being through the lens provided by contemporary fiction. Our hypothesis requires the necessary evaluation of the new definitions of human from the combined perspectives of trauma and posthumanity through such lens because we conceive of fiction as a possible forerunner and socio-political instrument that draws being and culture as exposed to nets of manipulative information searching to install a new process of enslavement based on trauma and virtuality.
Our main hypothesis is that there is an increasingly powerful paradigm in current western societies that combines trauma and posthumanity to bring about new challenges and a redefinition of being in terms of cultural and physical fluidity. Thus, the main challenges of the project are:
1. To interrogate the notion of being as fluid in relation to trauma and physicality, and its implication for current manifestations of culture and ideological control.
2. To address the role violence plays in the American collective imaginary in representations of current fiction since 9/11, and the relations between trauma, terrorism, and information.
3. To investigate the formation of a new being in transit (transhuman) and the role played by the mass media and current technological addictions in such formation (motifs of the zombie, the cyborg, the surrogate, the superhero).
4. To evaluate the notion of cultural trauma in its relation to globalization, prosthetic memory, and post-memory.
5. To catalogue current aesthetic models, narrative techniques, and new cultural symbols brought about by the combined effects of trauma and posthuman trends in current society (information, manipulation, and big data).
“Palimpsestic Knowledge: Inquiries into a Transmodern Literary Paradigm” (2016-2017)
Our working hypothesis is that, although still largely unnoticed by the Academia, there is enough evidence of a paradigm shift taking place since the 1980s that involves the assimilation and transcendence of Modernity and Postmodernity into what we will provisionally call “Transmodernity” and that, given the intrinsic capacity of literature to record and provide intuitive knowledge of inchoate changes in the culture that produces it, contemporary writers in English are already responding to the challenges set by this complex shift by generating stylistic, generic and/or modal forms capable of expressing the tensions at work in our transnational and globalized society. Accordingly, we propose the analysis of a representative corpus of literary texts in English written from the 1980s to the present, from the relational perspective provided by the metaphor of the palimpsest, by its structure and logic. That is, we intend to use that metaphor as the main interpretive device, one capable of articulating the spatio-temporal inter-connectedness of identity, history, memory and culture while skewing the risks of totalisation and universalism. By these means we expect to cast new light on the ideological, ethical and political positions sustained by these fictional works and the imaginative solutions they propose to the material and ethical problems caused by globalization, diaspora, and the suffering of those subaltern subjects who were denied a space and place in the history of modernity.
This evidence justifies the need to: 1. Select a corpus of representative fictional narratives in English written since the 1980s, aimed at bringing to the fore the interconnectedness and instability of social reality and at promoting a fluid or “transborder” transmodern mode of thinking. 2. Adapt the rhetorical and ethical model already employed in earlier projects into an “analectical” method aimed at bringing into visibility those elements in the corpus which remain hidden because they exist outside the Modernity dialectic. 3. Conduct the aforementioned task by assuming the relational perspective provided by the metaphor of the palimpsest, its structure and logic, as the main interpretive device, theorised through its consideration from de Quincey, Freud, Derrida, Genette, Dillon and Silverman, and its relation to such notions as “conic gyres” (Yeats), “constellation” (Baudelaire and Benjamin), or Rothberg’s “montage” and “multidirectionality”. This methodological revision would be aimed at: a) highlighting the essential role of fictional narratives in the task of placing the discourses of the social, cultural, ethnic and gender minorities and geopolitical margins on a par with the dominant patriarchal and Eurocentric discourse; b) casting light on the political dimension of these narratives by analysing how they contribute to the formation, transmission and subversion of cultural paradigms, and how they resist misappropriations meant to reinforce the powers and institutions that were frequently responsible for traumatic occurrences, such as wars, famines, or racial hatred; and c) bringing to light their essential role in asserting the emergence of a new global consciousness based on a more ethical, egalitarian and ecological, transmodern mode of thinking and of relating self and world.
Trauma and Beyond: The Rhetoric and Politics of Suffering in Contemporary Narrative in English (2013-2016)
This project is a further development of the earlier one. Its main aim is to establish an interdisciplinary research line on the rhetorical and political dimensions of literary narrative with a view to bringing to the fore the essential role of fictional narratives in the double task of representing both the traumas of our contemporary age and other non-traumatic forms of individual and collective suffering, and of contributing to disclosing and denouncing of conflicts and abuses which would otherwise remain hidden and silenced.
This aim requires the delimitation of a representative corpus of contemporary fictional narratives written in English, and its analysis from an aesthetic and ideological perspective, aimed at establishing the mechanisms at work in the representation and overcoming of individual and collective traumas and other forms of human suffering.
On the strength of this analysis, the project seeks to establish the essential role of narrative literature in the creation and subversion of cultural paradigms. Starting from an acknowledgement of the criticism undergone by Trauma Studies, we propose to move beyond such criticism and even beyond the notion of trauma itself by casting light on the ways in which a new cultural, social and individual politics can be enacted on the basis of a politics of resilience and an ethics of affects.
The main challenges of the project are:
1. To contest the widespread notion within a deconstructive trauma paradigm of the "unspeakability" of trauma.
2. To investigate forms of rhetorical indirection, such as symbolic language, narrative modes of excess (romance, the gothic, melodrama), fantasy and new hybrid genres onto which the effects and contents of the traumatic event are displaced, thus providing an open and unfixed meaning of trauma.
3. To study how rhetorical indirection may avoid the establishment of victimhood as a new essentialist category of identity politics and to consider the possible political and institutional misappropriations of trauma events and victims through acts of remembrance meant to consolidate the status quo.
4. To offer methodological, ontological and epistemological alternatives aimed at providing routes of escape and strategies to overcome a traumatic condition (theory of resilience and theory of affects).
Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (2008-2012)
In January 2008 we started a new project on Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English. The project belonged to the highly competitive type called Consolider C by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, which meant that our team had achieved the highest level of excellence in the Spanish research system and that we had funds to carry out the project in five, instead of three years.
This project was partially related to the one we had 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 had so far given preferential attention to the literature of the Holocaust and other armed conflicts, like the Vietnam war. It had 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 had yet been made to carry out a systematic and comparative analysis of the formal innovations devised by contemporary writers 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 had 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 was 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 included works that seem to express collective traumas overtly as well as works presenting 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.
The main results of the project include the improvement of the psychoanalytic model employed by Trauma Theory by combining it with elements of Levinasian ethic, postcolonial criticism and genre theory. The literature of trauma is usually associated with three main contexts: postmodernism, post-colonialism and a post-war consciousness. But besides the collective traumas linked to exceptional historical contexts, there are also other forms of trauma, induced by the formation of patriarchal identity and related to gender, social class and racial identity, which have been socially sublimated through systematic practices and continued behaviour patterns, so that we do not perceive their traumatic character. The selection and analysis of the corpus was carried out taking into account both types of traumas. The ensuing analysis of this corpus has allowed us to establish several significant tendencies in contemporary trauma narratives:
1. The writers’ refusal to promote a closed up value system based on universal categories and moral imperatives, easily transmissible to the readers, in favour of an ethics of sensibility or an ethics of affects, centred on a radical openness towards, and respect for the other.
2. The existence of a relationship between formal innovation and the promotion of a deconstructivist ethics privileging the spirit over the letter of the law, the Saying over the Said, Infinity over Totality.
3. The emphasis in several of the works analysed on the overcoming of trauma (working through) rather than on denial and repetition (acting out), as a first step in the direction of social compromise and the fostering of structural change.
4. The existence of a relationship between the forms of representation of individual or collective traumas and the author’s race, gender, and sexual orientation.
5. In the case of postcolonial works, a connexion was established between individual and historical traumas, and also a tendency to minimise the foundational traumas affecting native peoples.
6. In testimonial works, we observed a tendency towards the hybridisation of fictional and non-fictional genres, and towards the construction of Benjaminian "constellations" of realist, modernist and postmodernist elements.
7. The recourse to elements of the Gothic, detective fiction, the postmodernist romance, or science fiction, in order to express the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
8. The use of archetypal elements (fairy tales, myth, fantasy literature) when what is sought for is the cultural assimilation and transgenerational transmission of extreme traumatic events.
It is our conviction that these features point to a "crisis of truth" involving uncertainty and a difficult access to history, which are symptomatic of a loss of faith in the discourse of modernity in our contemporary western world.
The Ethics of Fiction (2005-2007)
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.
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 Self 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.
The Dialectic Foreshadowing/Hindsight in Contemporary Narrative in English (2001-2004)
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.
The Postmodern Intertext: Cultural Hermeneutics of Anglo-American Narrative at the End of the 20th Century, (1998-2001)
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.
Structure and Ideology in Present-day Anglo-American Narrative (1995-1998)
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.
Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary British Novel (1991-1994)
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.