Innovative Form and Historical Conflicts in the Modern Novel

Project

Description
My project seeks to study the ways in which historical conflicts are introduced into the fictions by way of innovative narrative technique that achieves to present the contemporary political debates and events in all its complexity. This project is developed in two work packages. Firstly, my main book project “Narrative reliability, racial conflicts, and ideology in the Modern Novel” responds to our need of a study on the relation between racial conflicts and narrative form. It compares canonical works by Melville, Conrad, Johnson, Faulkner, Carpentier, and Camus, and it illuminates the strong effects that the exploration of narrative reliability has in the exposition of a complex and often ambivalent presentation of documented contemporary local debates about racial distinction, policies, and conflicts. On the same direction, my second work-package consists of a book entitled “Juan Benet in conversation,” which attempts to see how this understudied Spanish author introduces Spanish historical conflicts experimenting with form in a continuous dialogue with authors such as Melville, Conrad, Faulkner, Kafka, and Pío Baroja. Together, these work packages would significantly help integrate the results obtained in the last few decades by the Cultural Studies approach to literature with those achieved by the Theory of Narrative, thereby contributing to move forward with the new questions raised today in literary criticism. The first objective of this project is to gain a full specialization on Comparative literature by widening the scope of my dissertation and introducing my European and Spanish educational background in my research. Secondly, I want to expand my knowledge and competitiveness on the Spanish 20th century novel. Thirdly, I aim at gaining maturity as a researcher through the sponsorship of very relevant specialists on the field, professors Martin Puchner and Nora Catelli, and their institutions, Harvard University and the Universitat de Barcelona.
Year 2013

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