We have been working together as a research team since 2009, and have been involved in three previous projects, funded by the Spanish National Research Plan:
Secrecy and Community in Contemporary Fiction in English
Grant reference: FFI2016- 75589P. Duration: 01/01/2017-31/12/2019. Main researcher: María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, University of Córdoba. Financing entity: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
The aim of this project was to analyse the secret as the main narrative device used by several contemporary writers in English to articulate the relation between the individual and community. In the narratives selected, the secret works in three main ways, often in dialectical confrontation. First, as the essence or substance (purity, sacrifice/violence, the sacred, political conspiracy) upon which the exclusive and excluding character of the community is built. Second, secrecy – manifested as silence, interruption, marginality, alterity or death – emerges as the space and language of illicit social bonds, forbidden identities and peripheral voices in the face of normative and essentialised forms of community and their discursive codification. Finally, we find communities of secrecy that do not respond to traditional and conventional collective forms based upon national identity, social class, ethnicity/race, gender or sexuality. The secret articulates the disembedding from totalitarian communities, such as the patriarchal state, heteronormative relationships, the colonial empire, or the ethnically/racially pure nation, and the emergence of new relationships and spaces of freedom, based on a secret sharing of love, friendship, or other non-homogenising communitarian bonds, perpetually open to the difference of the other.
The main outcome of this project is the book Secrecy and Community in Contemporary Fiction in English, edited by Maria J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Community and Individual in Modernist Fiction in English
Grant reference: FFI2012-36765. Duration: 01/01/2013-31/12/2015. Main researcher: Paula Martín Salván, University of Córdoba. Financing entity: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.
The aim of this project was to examine the narrative work of six representative modernist novelists, namely Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence from a theoretical perspective sensitive to the interaction between the individual and community. This perspective is grounded on recent philosophical debate on community (Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Derrida, Esposito). By integrating in a single theoretical model Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work on community and the body, Alain Badiou’s meta-ontological refashioning of the idea of subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of artistic communities, we sought to reconsider the relation between interiority and exteriority in modernist fiction.
The main outcome of this project is the book New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject. Finite, Singular, Exposed, edited by María J. López, Paula Martín-Salván, Gerardo Rodriguez Salas. Routledge, 2018.
Community and Immunity in the Contemporary Novel in English
Grant reference: FFI2009-13244. Duration: 01/01/2010-31/12/2012. Main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan, University of Córdoba. Financing entity: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.
The aim of this project was to improve the heuristic potential of hermeneutic models at work in the interpretation of contemporary fiction in English. This potential improvement is seen as emerging from the comprehensive redefinition of the notions of community and immunity as theorized in continental, post-phenomenological philosophy (Derrida, Nancy, Blanchot, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Esposito, Badiou) in the interests of the interpretation of narrative discourse. This entails a reassessment of the centrality of generic and rhetorical community-building modes such as the romance or the pastoral, virtually anti-communitarian modes like irony and satire, along with the introduction of alternative tropes like the secret, the sacred, the sacrifice or apocalypse. This project aimed thus at pursuing further, along lines already broached by theorists like J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, the deconstructionist concern with ethical predicament in literary texts. Through this theoretical commitment to a re-conceptualized notion of community, we aimed to escape both from the excessive formalism of some postmodernist approaches to fiction and from the arguably jejune sociology of some postcolonial readings. The theoretical hypothesis was tested against a textual corpus made up of the novels of six representative authors: V.S. Naipaul, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Edna O'Brien and J.M. Coetzee. This corpus was then extended to include novelists from an earlier generation which may have influenced our six representative authors: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Robertson Davies, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce and Alex La Guma.
The main outcome of this project is the book Community in Twentieth Century Fiction, edited by Paula Martín Salván, Julián Jiménez Heffernan and Gerardo Rodríguez Salas. Palgrave, 2013.
