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Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement pp 303–320Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

A Specter Is Haunting the Recent Spanish Novel

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes the two specters haunting the Spanish novel. The point of departure is that the specter haunting Europe is no longer communism, but neoliberalism. Ideology explains that we experience neoliberalism as a second nature. In this sense, neoliberal ideology is invisible: we cannot see its causes, only its effects. This chapter analyzes how the current Spanish novel legitimates and reproduces this ideology in an unconscious way, making the specter invisible. However, there is also another kind of novel: a political novel that deals with the Spanish crisis from a critical point of view. It aims to render the invisible visible because, as the writer Belén Gopegui said, ‘To write is to summon the specter,’ the specter of 1848.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Angela Merkel, the actual German Chancellor.

  2. 2.

    Quoted by Martí Font.

  3. 3.

    See also Žižek (1).

  4. 4.

    I have called this kind of novel the “novel of non-ideology.” See my La novela de la no-ideología.

  5. 5.

    About this topic, see Lyotard.

  6. 6.

    We can describe Orihuela as a poet of the critical consciousness. On this literary category, see García Teresa.

  7. 7.

    See Becerra-Mayor (La Guerra Civil 62).

  8. 8.

    It refers to the Spanish proverb “se dice el pecado, pero no el pecador.”

  9. 9.

    See Falcón (13).

  10. 10.

    See also Harvey (104–106).

  11. 11.

    In this regard, Fukuyama is the locus classicus.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    David Becerra-Mayor

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  1. David Becerra-Mayor
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Óscar Pereira-Zazo

  2. Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA

    Steven L. Torres

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Becerra-Mayor, D. (2019). A Specter Is Haunting the Recent Spanish Novel. In: Pereira-Zazo, Ó., Torres, S. (eds) Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19435-2_19

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