Contemporary Narrative in English Research Group
Universidad de Zaragoza
The initial hypothesis of the research project led by Professor Dolores Herrero is the verification of the emergence, mainly from the eighties, of a new cultural paradigm that academics and thinkers belonging to disciplines as different as philosophy, political science, the social sciences, ecology or the arts themselves have come to call “Transmodernity.” Authors such as Enrique Dussel, Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and Irena Ateljevic, to name just a few, all agree that the unstoppable growth of globalization and digital technology have led to the emergence of a new global consciousness, which, no doubt, is generating remarkable changes in all areas of society and culture, including literature. Drawing on consolidated critical tools such as ethical criticism, Trauma and Memory studies, as well as Postcolonial studies, the team is concerned with analysing how these changes are reflected, and are both promoted and/or denounced, by contemporary fiction in English, especially but not exclusively in the postcolonial field. In this regard and more specifically, the texts that Rodríguez Magda describes as ‘narratives of the limit’ stand out, due to their ground-breaking character with respect to previous narrative forms and contents. Finally, it should be noted that this research team is part of a larger one called “Narrativa contemporánea en lengua inglesa,” a consolidated research group funded by the Government of Aragon, led by Professor Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, who is also the head of a research team on US literature.