JOSE MARIA POZUELO YVANCOS
Since 1983, he has been Professor of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Murcia, of whose Faculty of Letters he has been Dean. He has been President of the Spanish Association of Semiotics between 1994 and 1998, President of the Association of Theory of Literature (2004-2009) and Member of the Board of the International Association of Hispanists. Since 2021, he has been a Corresponding Academic of the Royal Spanish Academy. and since 1999 literary critic for the Cultural supplement of the newspaper ABC. He has been a guest professor and lecturer at universities in eighteen countries. He has published twenty-six books and 240 studies.
Among the books they stand out. Teoria del lenguaje liteario (Catedra. ninth edition in 2018), Poetica de la ficcion (Sintesis, 1993), Teoria del canon y literatura española (with Rosa Aradra). Catedra, 2000). De la autobiografia. (Critica, 2006). Poeticas de poetas Biblioteca Nueva, 2010.; Novela española del siglo XXI (Catedra, 2017). Ensayos de historiografia literaria (in collaboration) (Gredos, 2022)
Spain is experiencing a literary moment that could be described as excellent, with some outstanding authors who deserve to stand out on the international scene. This healthy situation is due to the fact that three generations of writers coexist. I will limit myself to those who are alive, but it must be said that three recently deceased novelists, such as Rafael Chirbes, Javier Marías, and Almudena Grandes, have a strong presence in the literary scene of our country. The figure of Javier Marías is being recognized, a year after his death, as everyone in Spain acknowledges his great stature, something that began to be known before the German, Italian, or French public. Rafael Chirbes is now receiving new attention with the posthumous publication of his Diarios, which enlarges his literary class by testimony and authenticating strength. Almudena Grandes is seeing how some of her novels, such as the closing of the Cycle of Episodes of an endless war, La madre de Frankenstein, have been adapted to the theater.
This generation of acclaimed authors includes Eduardo Mendoza, who has seen the closure of his work with the recent publication of a trilogy grouped under the title Las leyes del movimiento, in which he executes a metamorphosed fabulation of his own memory, very useful to understand European and American culture of the seventies and eighties. Arturo Pérez-Reverte publishes novels of intrigue with great success, built on a historical background. In his latest work, entitled El problema final, he pays tribute to Sherlock Holmes. Luis Landero continues the Cervantine lineage in Juegos de la edad tardía, to which he adds the fabulation of personal memory in El balcón en invierno. Also, focusing on the memory of rural Spain and the landscape of the human soul, Luis Mateo Díez built the novels of El reino de Celama. Enrique Vila Matas is continuously immersing himself in the world of metaliterature.
About the following generation, both Rosa Montero and Elvira Lindo, with very different proposals, are developing well-constructed narratives. The former alternates science fiction with realism, while the latter recovers the memory of a woman in successive stages of the Spanish transition. To these two, we can add the work of the authors best placed on the international literary scene: Antonio Muñoz Molina, Fernando Aramburu, and Javier Cercas. The first, early consecrated with El jinete polaco, develops a work in which individual and collective memory are intertwined. Aramburu, with Patria, explores the atmosphere created by ETA in the Basque Country, and Javier Cercas, successful with Soldados de Salamina and Anatomía de un instante, has now ventured into the genre of criminal intrigue against the backdrop of the political struggle in his trilogy Terra Alta.
From the generation of young narrators, several stand out. I will list some of those who make up the most representative picture of different directions: Sara Mesa (unusual situations that reveal power relations between people, as in Un amor), Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro (the fabulation of personal memory in El dolor de los demás), Pilar Adón (utopias on the social place of the individual and art, as in De bestias y aves), Lara Moreno (the author of an anti-utopian work Por si se va la luz), Menchu Gutiérrez (the author who has turned spaces into eloquent signs, such as La mitad de la casa), and Sergio del Molino, both in his elegiac dimension (La hora violeta) and in his social diagnostic essay (La España vacía).
The genre of lyric poetry in Spain has always been very important due to the weight of the inheritance received by the generation of Claudio Rodriguez (the 50’s) or the Novísimos. Among the latter, the one who has developed the most interesting poetic work has been Guillermo Carnero, as shown in his tetralogy gathered in the volume Jardín concluso, which continues his cultured aesthetics deconstructed with increasingly passionate irony. The poetic work of Luis Alberto de Cuenca also brings together irony and culture. Among the heirs of Jaime Gil de Biedma, who has built a leading work in the movement known as another sentimentality, is Luis García Montero, with his work collected in the volume Poesía Completa (1980-2015). On the opposite aesthetic side, we can place, in a culturalist dimension, both Cesar Antonio Molina (El rumor del tiempo) and Olvido García Valdés and Chantal Maillard. Among the last generation, the works of Eloy Sánchez Rosillo, an elegiac poet whose work has been gathered in Las cosas como fueron, stand out, as does Aurora Luque, a representative of the current reading of classical lyric poetry, which was previously seen in the singular poetry of Juan Antonio González Iglesias.
On the theatrical stage, Juan Mayorga’s drama, rich and incessant, undoubtedly has a capital place in the Spanish theater scene. From the same generation are the voices of José Ramón Fernández, Diana M. de Paco, Itzíar Pascual, Luisa Cunillé, or Borja Ortiz de Gondra, who continue to resonate with renewed force since their irruption in the nineties until today. The post-dramatic turn is evident in the figures of Rodrigo García and Angélica Liddell, whose vertiginous writings border on the poetic. Among the new dramaturgies that have burst onto the contemporary scene in the last decades, we can place the scenic thriller of Paco Bezerra, the celebratory formula of Alfredo Sanzol, the autofictional and metatheatrical poetics of Pablo Remón, or the inquiry into the problems of the present offered by the texts of Lucía Carballal.
