Venecia prosaica y literaria, entre Eduardo Mendoza y Pere Gimferrer

Considering two very different novels, Fortuny by Pere Gimferrer and La isla inaudita by Eduardo Mendoza, which indicated a clear recovery of Venice as a narrative space in the 1980s, this essay proposes to contextualise this renewed interest in Spanish Peninsular literature, including, due to his direct relationship with Pere Gimferrer, also some examples from Spanish-American literature and Italian cinema.

Spanish 21th Century Narrative: an Expanding Galaxy

This essay is a synchronic exploration of peninsular literature in Spanish, and its main aim is to draw a map – within the inescapable boundaries imposed by strict immediacy – of tendencies, developments, filiations, thematic patterns and socio-political contaminations that may characterise it. Starting from a negotiated definition of ‘the aughts’ as a referential frame for this reflection, the argumentation translates into an analysis of ultra-contemporary Spanish novel as a mutant and polymorphous phenomenon, on the edge (or past it, according to those who claim it has already died) of the expiration of novela social, the acrobatic statements of afterpop, the intra- and extra-literary claims of postmemory, the permeability towards the worldwide diffusion of brevity and auto-fiction, the conflict between local hyper-specificity and panhispanic pangea.