Anatomía del desencanto

After the failure of the soixante-huitards, the collapse of European communism, and the fall around 1989 of various dictatorships and revolutions in Latin America, the sentimental approach to history is again reaping successes among the humanities and the social and political sciences. In the Hispanic world, this “affective turn” is on its way to repeating another fin de siècle like the one led by the intellectuals of 1898. A century later, in both Spanish and Anglo-Saxon universities, notions such as disenchantment, trauma, memory, and empathy inform virtually all the analyses of modern Spanish culture, from the bloody Civil War and the nearly forty years of fascism that followed it to the disappointing transition to democracy.

Santiago Morales intervenes in this sentimental approach to history and to the novelistic production of the transition by recovering the links and tensions that the notion of melancholy maintains with the aesthetics of black humor in a corpus of fictional works written between 1976 and 1998. Through a methodology that alternates between the careful analysis of novels by Javier Marías, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Juan José Millás, and the distant reading or framing that places these texts in a broader history, Anatomía del desencanto constructs a critique of the equivocal place held in our modern age by feelings that were, in another time, so noble and persistent, such as grief, fear, guilt, and compassion.

While other specialists who study the transition today agree in denouncing the ominous persistence of Francoism and the postwar ethos, Santiago Morales sees a deeply ironic formula in the black humor of melancholy: a catalyst in the creative and moral growth of Spanish narrative and a fundamental critical tool to change contemporary sentimental education.

Written entirely in Spanish.

Tras la derrota de los soixante-huitards, el colapso del comunismo europeo y la caída también en torno a 1989 de varias dictaduras y revoluciones en América Latina, el acercamiento sentimental a la historia vuelve a cosechar éxitos entre las humanidades y las ciencias sociales y políticas. En el ámbito hispánico, este “giro afectivo” lleva camino de reproducir otro fin de siècle como el que ya protagonizaron los intelectuales de 1898. Un siglo después, tanto en las universidades españolas como en las...