In the novel Memoria del frío (2021), Miguel Martínez del Arco (Madrid, 1961) retrieves the experiences of his mother, Manuela del Arco, a victim of the Francoist dictatorship, who spent nineteen years in different Francoist prisons. In the light of a theorical framework that combines Marianne Hirsch’s post–memorial studies with Martha Nussbaum’s work on the moral scope of vulnerability, this article pursues the aim of analyzing the ethical implications of the novel.

The 2008 crisis produced a readjustment of social relationships in Spain, which was mirrored by an alternative discourse in fiction which renews the canon and enhances the construction of a fictional reality that reflects society. The most contemporary narrators display a wide variety of discourses on the assimilation of the crisis. This article analyse three novels. Robert Juan-Cantavella’s El Dorado, which was published on the year the crisis began and shows the triumph of neoliberalism and consumerism in the holiday town in the years before the crisis. Alternatively, Elvira Navarro’s La trabajadora and Sara Mesa’s Cicatriz offer a realistic point of view of the impact of the crisis on urban structures and the job insecurity it caused.

The main objective of the article is to investigate the usefulness of the notion of Capitalocene proposed by Jason W. Moore in the interpretation of Alejandro Cuevas’s most recent novel: Mi corazón visto desde el espacio (2019). The work of Cuevas, a writer from Valladolid with much experience in challenging various social problems of 21st century Spain, indeed gains a much more nuanced interpretative dimension, as it reveals the scope of the author’s critique of contemporaneity that encompasses a whole range of issues that go beyond the boundaries of the Anthropocene and require a bolder and more contemporary frame of reading. Thus, Cuevas’s fifth novel can be read as a “capitalocenic novel” as it turns out to be a quasi-manifesto of the weaknesses of the self in today’s System.

The most recent Argentine gay narrative, despite being written in the post-emancipation era, is still immersed in a series of dichotomies typical of pre-emancipation gay narrative: hetero/homo, masculine/feminine, and strength/weakness. This article analyzes literary texts by contemporary Argentine writers, most widely read and commonly known in the Argentine LGTBIQ+ community (Facundo R. Soto, Peter Pank and Ioshua) in order to hypothesize the existence of a tension between a dichotomous vision of the homo and heterosexual confrontation and another, where this binarism is eroded within the texts. It also discusses whether it is possible to speak in this context of a conceptual convergence encompassed under the synthetic notion of civilibarbarie introduced by Elsa Drucaroff.

Jorge Carrión’s novel Membrana represents itself as a leaflet for the “21st Century Museum”. This intriguing premise produces in the contemporary reader a state of cognitive estrangement, as she needs to contemplate his present as the past. However, Carrión’s repertory of disconcerting strategies does not end here. His narrator is a female artificial intelligence that uses plural pronouns to identify herself (or themselves). Coming to terms with this machine will be the main purpose of the exhibition’s visitor, forced to make sense of an entangled history created by someone with a different sense of time, different ideas about cause-effect relations, and a different understanding of what truth is. This article’s aims is to describe the mechanisms used by Carrión to build the algorithm’s voice while exploring its political and epistemological possibilities.

The aim of the article is to analyse Manuel Martín Cuenca’s film The Motive (El autor, 2017) in the context of self-referential games and relationships between reality and invention. The director, adapting Javier Cercas’s short novel The Motive (El móvil, 1987), reflects also on the proximity between cinema and literature. In the film The Motive images of literary creation are mixed with cinematic metaphors. The reality invented by the film’s characters becomes a metafiction and is part of a game that involves the spectator, a characteristic feature of new narrative strategies in contemporary cinema. However, in this case, the meaning of game, concretized in the film’s diegesis as chess, goes beyond the ludic dimension and becomes a way of exposing the paradoxes of creation.

Entrevista al escritor, profesor y crítico literario Vicente Luis Mora.