• Name: Secrecy and community in contemporary narrative in English" (FFI2016-75589-P)
• Duration: 30th January 2016-29th December 2019
• Main researcher: María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno
• Researchers:
  • Paula Martín Salván (UCO)
  • Juan Luis Pérez de Luque (UCO)
  • María Luisa Pascual Garrido (UCO)
  • Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (UGR)
  • Pilar Villar Argáiz (UGR)
  • Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (UGR)

Description:

The aim of this new project is to analyse the secret as the main narrative device used by seven 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.

In order to do so, we are drawing on the role played by the secret in the communitarian thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, the three of whom have argued against immanent communities, through an ethico-political gesture that puts the emphasis on collective forms characterised by irreducible singularity, secrecy and otherness. Our primary corpus is constituted by the following writers: Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Zoë Wicomb, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera, Anne Enright and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This project is a continuation of two previous ones: "Community and Immunity in Contemporary Fiction in English" (FFI2009-13244) (2010-2012, main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan) and "Community and the Individual in Modernist Fiction in English (FFI2012-36765) (2013-2015, main researcher: Paula Martín Salván)

Main Publications:

• Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Paula Martín Salván & María J. López, ed. New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.
• Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas & Julián Jiménez Heffernan, ed. Community in 20th Century Fiction. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2013.