True lies: Narrative self-consciousness in the contemporary Spanish novel.

摘要

This dissertation examines how Spanish novelists writing in the 1990s and 2000s employ metafiction as a narrative strategy. The authors that I study here—Nuria Amat, Juan José Millás, Rosa Montero, Javier Marías, Carlos Cañeque and Javier Cercas—are among the most popular and critically acknowledged novelists writing in Spain today, and they all coincide in that their most recent novels demonstrate a formal self-reflexivity through which the author draws attention either explicitly or implicitly to the complexities of writing. It is my contention that this examination of the writing process functions in different ways: to question the relationship between reality and make-believe; to examine the processes of forming personal identity; to problematize the historiographical enterprise; to evaluate critically the processes of canon formation; and to parody themselves and the poetics of self-consciousness. In other words, these authors use fiction not only to investigate the dynamics of the narrative process, but also as a way to explore the contemporary human condition.