One of the most prolific writers in contemporary Portuguese literature, Jorge de Sena is the author of extensive epistolographic writings. Seven books of correspondence have been published, while ten others are in press. This dissertation focuses on the place of epistolography in Jorge de Sena's literary corpus. The author believes that no literary form is less important than another. Every single text plays a role in the author's creative universe. The letters, as products of Sena's creativity as a writer, might be thought of as representing leitmotivs of his poetry and fiction. The act of writing resonates with the poet's mission of actively witnessing the pilgrimage of humankind. A prominent modern humanist among contemporary writers, Jorge de Sena authored an epistolographic oeuvre whose classic structure and form connote the ultimate purpose of the written text—one that signifies the struggle of humanity in its metamorphic journey towards a “paradise” lost and regained in and by each and every human being. The first chapter of the dissertation describes and explains the main topics of the correspondence of Jorge de Sena. This introductory part of the study constitutes a justification and explanation of the maps and charts contained in the appendices. The second chapter constitutes a critical approach to the aesthetics of the letters written by the author. The issues herein discussed bring us to the conclusion that Jorge de Sena, following the traditional model of letter writing, draws from its classic meanings into a contemporary significance of epistolography: the letter serves as a vehicle to a more in-depth reading of a writer's other literary works. The third chapter studies the letter as an important element of the author's humanistic poetics. A letter is primarily a carrier of a specific message to an individualized reader. In a broader literary context, however, the letter expands its meaning, and becomes a component, with the other written works, of the very own purpose of poetry, that is, to be an active witness of the human journey in this earthly reality. The chapter concludes with the analysis of the letters between Jorge de Sena and his wife, Mécia de Sena. This particular book of correspondence, bearing the meaningful subtitle “(Cartas de Amor)”, illustrates the author's fundamental beliefs that love and happiness are the utmost goals of humankind; and that art—and more specifically poetry (in verse and prose)—is a testament to our struggle to reach those goals. The fourth chapter discusses the role played by the correspondence in the emergence of the theme of exile in most of the author's works of fiction and poetry. The letters of Jorge de Sena, who considers himself to be an emigrant in a “voluntary exile”, are to be considered a key element of the metaphor of exile inherent in the very act of writing. The correspondence of Jorge de Sena belongs by nature to his literary corpus for it amplifies the meaning and the message of his other works. By expanding meaning and message, the epistolography becomes one more privileged space constantly “infected” by the humanistic nature of Jorge de Sena's poetics.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

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This dissertation analyzes the treatment of memory by four authors of the same generation—all born in the 1950's—in four novels of the late 1980's and 1990's: El jinete polaco by Antonio Muñoz Molina, El lápiz del carpintero by Manuel Rivas, Todas las almas by Javier Marías, and La lluvia amarilla by Julio Llamazares. Using Walter Benjamin's dialectics of melancholia as a framework, the first chapter studies how contemporary Spanish historiography and literature recreate recent Spanish history. The study focuses on the representation of the change from a rural country with an oral and collective memory to a society that undergoes a fast process of modernization and, almost simultaneously, postmodernization. The subsequent chapters analyze the novels using the principles of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and post-deconstructivist theories, which postulate a new understanding of the subject based on an ethical relationship with the Other. These chapters further observe a melancholic relationship with the past. This sensation of loss leads the narrators to search for their past in a series of objects which materialize the loss of meaning and the presence of the past in the present. Their narratives are a work of mourning which simultaneously recreates and listens to the voices of the dead informing the narrator's self. The dissertation points out the difference between the sense of melancholia present in the novels of Muñoz Molina, Rivas and Llamazares, which is caused by a historical trauma, and the sense of melancholia created in Marias' work, this one the effect of a transhistorical or structural trauma. Likewise, while in El jinete polaco, El lápiz del carpintero and La lluvia amarilla the work of memory is based on an ethical relationship with the past, in Todas las almas the constructive work of memory adopts a more ludic tone.

This dissertation analyzes the interplay between reality and fiction in four of Javier Marias's novels, Todas las almas, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Negra espalda del tiempo and Fiebre y lanza, and in selections from his journalistic articles. It focuses on the antirealist elements at work, such as the melding of seriousness and humor, the incongruous mixture of history and fiction, and the unreliability of the intrusive narrator. Chapter I situates Marías in the context of the post-Franco years and chronicles his rejection of the literature of social realism and his incorporation of postmodern tendencies. Chapter II analyzes different types of humor in the aforementioned novels through the application of Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque, Victor Shlovosky's theory of estrangement, Geoffrey Harpham's studies on the grotesque, and Marías's own manipulation of history. Humor functions as an expression of play, an instrument of subtle criticism, a decoding challenge, and an artistic artifact. Historical figures subjected to humor include King Juan Carlos and Francisco Franco. Chapter III analyzes the juxtaposition of fact and fiction in Negra espalda del tiempo through the application of theories formulated by Phillipe Lejeune and Brian McHale. I compare Marías's biography of Wilfred Ewart, an ill-fated English writer, with those of Ewart's other biographers and with Ewart's own autobiography. In his reconstruction of Ewart's life, Marías raises questions about authorial reliability and textual stability. Drawing attention to the subjective role of the author, he makes connections between his life and Ewart's, and employs fictive devices to illuminate reality. Chapter IV examines the postmodern characteristics of Marías's journalistic essays. Marías incorporates humoristic techniques and fictive devices to make his readers aware of cultural and political change, but unlike Larra, with the absence of a national mission.