Dr. Susan Divine, Associate Professor, Department of Hispanic Studies, College of Charleston
Presentation: Sabbatical talk on theme of “ ‘Historical Debt and Cultural Capital’ in Two Novels by Rafael Reig” (LIT/CULT)
Abstract: “Spanish narrative is still in the wake of a “boom” of fictional and documentary narrations about the civil war, 40-year Dictatorship and Transition to democracy, and, therefore a corresponding boom of scholarship on this cultural production. Spanish novelist Rafael Reig’s 2011 Todo está perdonado and 2018 Para morir iguales both center on the final breaths of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. Published seven years apart at different points of the worst economic crisis to hit Spain and the Western world in the 20th and 21st centuries, the novels diagnose debt – personal, economic, historic – as the greatest impediment to a future that is any different from the past. And while they have similar reasons as to why crisis has paralyzed Spanish economy and identity, the seven years in-between provide telling differences. Greatly reduced: in Todo está perdonado, the action of the novel leads to an attempt to violently overthrow the government. In Para morir iguales, the protagonist chooses beatus ille, an escape from the city to the rural to reflect and redirect his life.”
Bio: Susan Divine is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston. Her research focuses on contemporary Spain.