Belén Gopegui (1963) et Isaac Rosa (1974) sont deux romanciers espagnols connus pour leur engagement politique avec la gauche radicale. Après avoir situé les deux auteurs sur l’échiquier culturel espagnol, nous étudierons leur oeuvre romanesque en l’inscrivant dans la lignée du réalisme combatif défendue par Bertold Brecht. Les chapitres centraux de la thèse s’articulent autour de trois questions: quelles histoires racontent Gopegui et Rosa et dans quel but ?; quelles sont les formes narratives qu’ils privilégient ? ; quelle est la nature véritable du pacte qu’ils ont établi avec le lecteur ? La première interrogation permettra de voir que les auteurs remettent en question les récits dominants, en particulier, celui de la transition à la démocratie. La seconde permettra d’étudier l’évolution conceptuelle des deux auteurs et de préciser ce qui différencie leur style. L’analyse du pacte de lecture permettra finalement de mettre en évidence les moyens axiologiques mis en oeuvre par les auteurs afin de guider le lecteur. Chercher à comprendre leur engagement à la lumière des développements socio-historiques et culturels du pays et des avatars de la gauche sera l’objet de la conclusion / Belén Gopegui and Isaac Rosa are two Spanish novelists famous for their radical left-wing engagement. I study their novels to determine how their political ideas are expressed esthetically. After placing them within the Spanish narrative context, I analyse their novels as a continuation of Bertolt Brecht's combative realism. In the two main chapters, I answer three questions: What stories do Gopegui and Rosa tell and with what aim?; What narrative forms do they favour?; and What kind of relationship do they build with the reader? The first will show how both authors question dominant tales, especially those of the transition to democracy. The second one will emphasize stylistic differences and the evolution of their styles. Finally, we will see how Gopegui and Rosa beg for a critical reading while setting up an axiological system to channels it. I end by examining their political engagement in relation to the socio-historical and cultural developments of Spain and the avatars of institutional left-wing movements and parties

On prétend éprouver dans cette étude l'hypothèse suivante : le retour, dans le roman espagnol récent, d'un courant défendant ouvertement la puissance critique et politique de l'écriture littéraire. Saisie à la fois comme discours social et comme forme du savoir, la littérature serait dès lors porteuse de dissensus et potentiellement transformatrice. Cette tendance à contre-Courant, si elle reste minoritaire, n'en est pas moins profondément significative. Au plan esthétique, la revendication des notions de responsabilité, d'intentionnalité et de politicité de l'écriture n'implique pas de recourir à la transparence et au monologisme du roman à thèse. Elle induit plutôt un réinvestissement paradoxal des formes brisées du postmodernisme littéraire, situant la fiction politique du côté de la problématisation des canons et des normes, de la dénaturalisation, de la désidentification et du décentrement, de la critique des partages établis ou de la perturbation des places, plutôt que dans la certitude monolithe et l'imposition autoritaire du message. Sur cette inscription générique paradoxale s'articule un nouveau réalisme critique, qui problématise à l'envie l'injonction mimétique tout en revendiquant l'héritage du grand roman social. Au plan théorique et rhétorique, l'adoption d'une posture maximaliste où se donnent à lire les fondements conceptuels de l'engagement classique – interventionnisme, historicisme, injonction au positionnement, projet de dévoilement – s'accompagne d'un rejet de la catégorie d'écriture engagée, à laquelle les auteurs préfèrent d'autres vocables – écriture résistante, révolutionnaire ou responsable. À la croisée du roman mémoriel et de la fiction politique – deux tendances dont on analysera les jeux de recouvrement –, notre corpus d'étude se compose de treize romans de trois écrivains représentatifs de ce courant : Alfons Cervera, Belén Gopegui et Isaac Rosa, trois romanciers dont l'œuvre semble indiquer l'émergence d'un nouveau paradigme esthétique dont on se propose d'analyser les enjeux formels, théoriques et institutionnels. / I intend to verify in this study the following hypothesis : the resurgence, in the recent Spanish novel, of a trend openly defending the critical and political power of literary writing. Seen both as a social discourse and as a form of knowledge, literature would therefore be the bearer of dissent and would be potentially transformative. This tendency against the current, while remaining minor, is nevertheless profoundly significant. As far as aesthetics is concerned, the claim of notions such as responsibility, intentionality and politicality of writing does not imply a resort to the transparency and monologism of the thesis novel. This new trend rather implies a paradoxical reinvestment of the shattered forms of literary postmodernism; it sets political fiction along with problematizing canons and norms, denaturalizing, de-Identifying, decentralizing, and criticizing the established categories or reregulating all representations of places. This trend does not allude to a monolithic conviction or an authoritative imposition of a message. From this paradoxical and generic inscription emerges a new critical realism, which problematizes over and over again the mimetic injunction while claiming the heritage of the great social novel. From a theoretical and rhetorical point of view, the adoption of a maximalist position in which one can read the conceptual foundations of classical engagement – interventionism, historicism, the injunction to take a stand, the project of unveiling – goes along with the rejection of the category of engaged literature, to which the authors prefer other terms – resistance, revolutionary or responsible writing. At the crossroads of the memorial novel and political fiction – two tendencies which I shall analyze for movements of coincidence – the corpus of my study is composed of thirteen novels by three writers representative of this new current : Alfons Cervera, Belén Gopegui and Isaac Rosa, three novelists whose works seem to indicate the emergence of a new aesthetic paradigm of political and literary engagement in today's Spanish novel which I shall analyze the formal, theoretical and institutional stakes.

This dissertation adds to the discussion of historical memory in Spain regarding the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship by examining three texts published between 2000 and 2004: Las esquinas del aire: En busca de Ana María Martínez Sagi (2000) by Juan Manuel de Prada; Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas; and El vano ayer (2004) by Isaac Rosa. I argue that these texts exemplify a unique tendency in the literature of historical memory that articulates the act of remembering through new narrative and ethical postures born of what I term journalistic affect. This dissertation identifies the tendency beginning in the early 2000s for fiction to articulate the act of remembering through the compilation and examination of truth objects. Not only do the truth objects shape the narrative of these novels, endowing the act of remembering with real-world consequences, but also the truths are embodied in objects thereby locating them outside the framework of contestable speech acts. Moreover, the search for and collection of these objects operate within a journalistic epistemological framework in that the authors or protagonists use the truth(s) embodied in one object to locate another, resulting in the act of assembling a constellation of embodied truths and the shaping of a more holistic understanding of the individual that is the aim of the search. The protagonists in these novels have to search for the modernizing discourses that never took root in a Francoist Spain that never entirely faded away, never had an overt counter-revolution, and never proved itself completely criminal on the public stage the way other nationalist dictatorships in Europe and Latin America had. They show us a Spain that has to catch up with discourses about ethnicity, gender (homosexuality), rural/urban spaces in modernization, and an historical iconography for nationhood that had not essentially been renovated since the mid 1960s. As such, the individuals in these works see an inherent lack in the Europeanized Spain that has been culturally colonized by the continent, a situation that engenders a need to reevaluate a national subject position largely frozen since 1939. / text