Maria Soledad Fernandez Utrera

My dissertation Europe(s): The Spanish and Italian 19th Century Political Essay studies the archetypes of an imagined European community posited by four nineteenth-century authors. More precisely, I analyse political essays written by Juan Donoso Cortés, Jaime Balmes, Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Mazzini. While the first two belong to the Spanish Catholic tradition, the latter two are anchored in Italian Liberalism and Republicanism. Once I ascertained that there exists a precise and profound awareness on the part of these authors regarding the necessity to build a broader and stronger connection among the European nation-states, I started to search for the reasons and aims that surround their “proposed community”. Therefore, in my dissertation I inquire into the connection between the interests of the nation itself and the potential supranational entity, exploring contacts and boundaries that define the political struggle of the aforementioned authors in their historical contexts. In order to shed light into the argument, I analyse selected texts through close reading, demonstrating how the socio-political identity of each thinker emerges from the topic they choose to broach, and the strategies they adopt to convince the readers. The epistemology of their discourses is associated to different projects of Europeanism, pinpointing the essential characters of their ideal Europe. The imagined communities that emerge when exploring these texts are often diverse and diachronically opposed to each other, but nonetheless they coincide in subverting the existing hegemonic powers that ruled a good deal of the European nineteenth-century economic and diplomatic spheres. Because of this, I aim to demonstrate that issues that concern contemporary European sovereignty were already present and broached in the Southern European nineteenth-century essay. The use of a comparative research applied in my work offers a novel way to revisit the Spanish traditional discourse as well as the Italian Risorgimento canon. Furthermore, my interpretation of Donoso, Balmes, Cattaneo and Mazzini offers a broader and improved comprehension of these authors, whose theories emerge as being more complex and multifaceted than was previously believed.

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This thesis explores the presence of prisons in contemporary Spanish culture, investigating both their portrayal and the place of cultural projects in current and former prisons. I consider how the selected films, written texts, sites of former prisons, and performance art shape attitudes about punishment and its alternatives. The first part focuses on portrayals of the prison experience, as fictionalized on screen in Azuloscurocasinegro (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, 2006) and Celda 211 (Daniel Monzón, 2009) and as witnessed in writing and theatre work by prisoners, through the work of Elena Cánovas and Teatro Yeses, and Andrés Rabadán’s Historias desde la cárcel (2003). The second part moves into a discussion of transformations – firstly exploring former prison sites (in Carabanchel, Segovia, and Palencia), and then considering how imprisonment is represented through performance art in the work of Abel Azcona and Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca.Through mapping the prison and its relation to contemporary Spanish cultural production, I consider how the presence and portrayal of prisons shapes perceptions and experiences of exclusion and belonging in Spain today, engaging with the wider issue of movement, immigration, and borders. Using notions of ‘borderland’ and liminality to interrogate points of encounter between prisons and culture, this project looks for ways that these intersections can offer potential for movement, dialogue, and connection.

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This thesis is the first sustained study of a new wave of Spanish writers. Known in the press as the “Nocilla Generation”, after Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Project trilogy, the work of these authors responds to changing relations between urban subjects, virtual spaces and local places. This study portrays a broad group of writers, but it focuses on four texts: Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream, Javier Calvo’s “Una belleza rusa” [“A Russian Beauty”], Gabi Martínez’s Ático [Top Floor Apartment] and Esther García Llovet’s Coda. The new wave authors have been described as belonging to a new digital consciousness wholly shaped by audiovisual media and the Internet. I argue instead that their narrative represents an effort to assimilate global and virtual space with local and physical places. Their varied texts converge around the theme of how subjects locate themselves within a fragmented and interconnected world. They create hybrid fictional spaces where social practices and meaning are produced through a continuous negotiation of the physical and virtual realms.Within this overall theme I delineate two general tendencies. The first emphasizes the subject’s immersion in a global sphere of networked relations, portraying what Roland Robertson defines as a world space where “the local is merely a ‘micro’ manifestation of the global”. The second focuses on the subject’s relation to the particular places where this global space is manifested. However, while each text can be placed closer to one or the other conceptions, both these ideas are present to some degree in all of these narratives. This creates a persistent dialectic tension and shows the difficulty of reconciling the superimposed physical and cultural contexts that shape subjectivity in the contemporary world.What drives these narratives is the search for new subjectivities, open to the plurality of today’s interconnected and fluctuating spaces. However, the hypothetical or metaphorical character of the new fluid subjectivities presented in these fictions underlines the ambiguities involved in seeking this new way of inhabiting the world. These fictions do not present or reflect new subjectivities but rather participate in an ongoing societal dialogue about how to confront a changing cultural environment.

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In this study I examine the literary and philosophical engagement with homosexuality (“homotextuality”) of the Spanish writer Álvaro Pombo (1939). Pombo spent eleven years in exile in England from Franco’s National-Catholic Spain, and he returned to his homeland at the dawn of its transition to democracy in 1976. Pombo’s literary efforts coincide with a re-emergence of Spanish homotextual writing (Goytisolo, Moix, Cardín, de Biedma, et al.) before and during the Transición. Although homosexuality as a central leitmotif encompasses all phases of his prodigious literary output, Pombo’s homotextuality has been, with few notable exceptions, dismissed by gay critics as self-loathing and homophobic, and has been all but ignored by mainstream critics. This omission, I argue, owes to a fundamental misreading of Pombo’s dialectical and philosophical approach to homotextuality.In my analysis I show that Pombo’s opulent, eclectic writing style emerges as an interrogational dialectic that deconstructs the nature of the existential alienation that has perennially shaped the lives of homosexuals living within the preponderant domain of heterosexuality (“heteronormativity”). Pombo’s dialectic is in trenchant engagement with a historical epistemological discursivity (and literary tradition) that essentializes homosexuality as a perversion of the “natural, truthful order” (what I call “heterologocentrism”). Using the deconstructive methodology of queer theory (Edelman, Butler, Llamas, Dollimore, Hocquenghem, et al.) and the philosophical frameworks of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Taylor, among others, I demonstrate that Pombo’s homotextual narrative radically challenges and unsettles heterologocentric discursivity related to “unnatural” homosexual Being (or homosexualisms in all their manifestations). At the same time, I show that Pombo’s dialectic characterizes as “inauthentic” what he perceives to be the frivolous, hedonistic (Dionysian) behaviours of homosexual solipsism. Furthermore, I argue that Pombo’s dialectic forcefully prescribes an authenticity of Being, which confronts the fear and degradation of the homosexual’s historical situatedness and impels the subject to engage truthfully, ethically, morally, and without prevarication or dissemblance with the subjective Other. Pombo’s narrative concerning authentic Being compels the subject to “overcome” the shackles of oppression inherent in the situatedness of a denaturalizing morality and alterity and “to be who one is,” as Nietzsche says, while simultaneously rejecting inward-turning nihilism.

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