Repensando la literatura híbrida y posmoderna: La justicia como herramienta analítica del noir histórico

Some literary scholars focus on the nature of law by using legal and judicial opinions to analyze social conflicts in literature. More generally, many other literary scholars use ideologically driven content by turning to the fields of gender studies, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to raise awareness about a more just society. In contrast, human behaviorists often use cognitive schemes which are responsible for people forming erroneous and unjust judgments about others to identify the power of literature to change human misconceptions. Very few approaches, however, turn to modern philosophical debates around social justice as a tool for literary criticism. This dissertation incorporates philosophical debates by using four leading contemporary conceptions of justice. Putting John Stuart Mills, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum and Robert Nozick in dialogue helps to reconstruct social conflicts portrayed in literature. In doing so, this approach that turns to issues from modern philosophical debates to shed light on how global problems such as corruption or religious intolerance have different manifestations according to the context in which they take place. Although justice is a constant desire, it is a social construction that changes across individuals, history, and societies. The clashes between different conceptions of justice reveal how human behavior adapts to power structures by identifying the moral dilemmas behind characters’ decisions. In this sense, analyzing literary text through the lens of philosophy effectively captures the multiplicity of layers proper of the postmodern literature and closes a gap in current literary approaches to the theme of justice. The multidisciplinary approach to literary criticism in this dissertation neither imposes an ideological point of view nor conceives literature as a means for a social change. Instead, it facilitates the understanding of social conflicts, eliciting readers to identify with the human experience of those oppressed in a different society. The development of this analytical tool also contributes to enhancing the public debate about possible solutions to common social problems by encouraging readers to think critically about their history and reality. This dissertation addresses justice and social transformations in the literature that set stories in the past and use crime to depict conflicts in societies. Specifically, it explores representations of Spanish Golden Age society as portrayed in twentieth-first century novels written in Spanish. The research focuses on Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste (1996-2011), a series of seven novels written by Arturo Pérez Reverte, La sangre de los crucificados (2007), by Félix G. Modroño, and El ritual de las doncellas (2006), by José Calvo Poyato. The dissertation makes two main contributions to criticism in Hispanic literature. First, the term historical noir is coined to classify a subgenre that is a hybrid between the historical novel and crime fiction. Second, justice is used as a tool for literary analysis that permits scholars to reconstruct the past and relate it to other times and geographies.