Nos encontramos ante un panorama sin ninguna esperanza y sin un futuro que nos incite a vivir tranquil@s y poder dedicarnos a lo que nos gusta a cada un@"-Comunicado de los detenidos de la manifestación del 15 mayo de 2011 "Es necesaria una Revolución Ética"-Manifiesto <
This article centers on the paternal and creative crises that afflict the protagonist of Leopoldo Alas’s second novel Su único hijo (1891). Scrutinizing Clarín’s literary and ideological output from the era, I argue that the novel’s obsession with procreation and production articulates concerns for the state of Spanish narrative in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For Bonifacio Reyes, the failure to compose a literary masterwork portends the paternal illegibility that dominates the novel’s final moments as Emma Valcárcel’s son is left with two possible fathers instead of one. For Alas, who spent the latter half of the 1880s sifting through the wreckage of romanticism, realism, and naturalism in an effort to craft a hybrid aesthetic form that could serve as an avatar for a new wave of Spanish novelists (and solidify the success of La Regenta , 1884-85), Su único hijo evinces an attempt to revive national narrative in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, if the son (as text) represents a symbolic asset for the expectant father/author, both in terms of socio-economic capital and the consolidation of familial lineage, the ironic promise made by the novel’s title ensures a world in which all signs of paternity and authority are effectively destabilized.
Efforts to memorialise Spain's Transition and the ratification of the 1978 Constitution took centre stage in the fall of 2018, as a number of public and private institutions launched exhibitions looking back at four decades of democratic rule. Whereas state-governed spaces in both the Congress and Senate enacted commemorative gestures, signalling the history of democracy as seen through visual art from the late 1970s to the present, 1 cultural bodies such as Madrid's Museo Reina Sofía and Barcelona's Arxiu Municipal offered room for critique. Examining 'contraimágenes de la Transición' and 'la memòria d'uns anys decisius de mobilitzacions veïnals i laborals' respectively, 2 these institutions elucidated the complexities of commemoration by refusing to paper over the political and identitarian contradictions that underpinned the shift to a post-Francoist regime. "Out of the Gutter" posits a similar platform from which to reconsider the Transition in juxtaposition with the financial crisis of 2008, generating a dialogue between both historical intervals to open up a space to discuss the power of visual print media (VPM) and contest cultural frontiers during times of political and economic uncertainty. This dossier interrogates evolving discourses on the Transition, elucidating Spain's problematic democratic heritage and how visual artists have contested its legitimacy from 1975 to the present. Accordingly, the project seeks to draw further attention to visual materials from post-Francoist Spain, foregrounding their status as vehicles of dissensual expression and disruptive creativity against a backdrop of political tumult.The question of memory subtends a number of debates engaged here, particularly given artists and activists' recent attempts to revisit and rewrite Spain's democratic past in the context of the financial crash of 2007-2008. Indeed, a number of the critical interventions in what follows query the ways in which the past is made present, or the ways in which memory functions as a form of social labour in contemporary Spain. While there is not sufficient space for examining this issue in the depth that it merits in the Introduction, a number of publications have recently examined the state of memory studies in contemporary Spain. 3 Understood here as a chain of 'spiralling interactions' between seemingly discrete historical intervals, 4 memory-and the labour it entails-helps elucidate the connections between history, artistic representation and political expression. Our efforts, therefore, to analyse the 'dynamic transfers' between the Transition and the financial crisis in each half of the dossier, 5 therefore, are illustrative of what 1 The Congress of Deputies hosted 'Constituciones (1812-1978)' and 'El poder del Arte', which was split into two separate exhibits, the second half of which was displayed at the Senate until March 2019. 2 https://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/poeticas-democracia (Accessed 10 March 2019); https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/ca/quaranta-anys-dajuntaments-democr...
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