"Andando se hace el camino". Calle y prácticas formativas del sujeto marginal en la novela española moderna (1881-1933)

Abstract

My dissertation examines the fundamental role of the street in the structuring of the narrative action and in the configuration of the characters' subjectivities in a number of Spanish texts from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Along with the instrumental and expressive functions that urban theory attributes to the street according to which the street facilitates the travelling between spaces and the communication between passers-by, this dissertation explores how the presence of the street in the literary text is not merely coincidental but has a number of implications that transcend the textual space.

To this end, I will analyze narrative works by Galdós, Baroja, Blasco Ibáñez, Díaz Fernández, Benavides, and Sender, which have either been neglected or studied with other concerns in mind. I will explore how the selected works construct a "Madrid movible," (a changing Madrid) not just in its streets -those "transit-places" where nothing and nobody is fated to stay, often transformed into a space by the action of the wanderer--but also in the characters' movements through these spaces, at a time when Madrid was undergoing profound social transformations as it struggled to establish itself as a modern capital. Special attention is paid to the formative role of the street on marginal subjects--women, anarchists, lower classes, the masses. The interest in these individuals lies in the fact that not only do they try to survive in a hostile urban environment, but they also fight to invade, conquer and appropriate the city. With their movements through the streets, these subjects transgress geographical limits and develop an awareness of the social, political, and gender-related constrictions that determine their station in life, as well as their future.

In this way, my research is in line with the burgeoning field of urban studies, but it offers a different perspective by illuminating the relationship between the urban street and the dissident urban character in terms of new formative practices and resistant attitudes that will call for new disciplinary discourses, all of which is initiated and dynamically developed by the characters' movements through the urban space.

Additionally, I explore how the texts under study become symbolic spaces for a discussion of Spanish society in terms of power, oppression and submission, but also resistance, deviation, and protest, and how the writers use both the central and the marginal street as the stage where social, political and economic tensions and concerns are expressed, debated, or fought over.