Sediments of Religion in Contemporary Spanish Fiction

Sediments of Religion analyzes the intersections between literary and cinematic fictions and the discourse of religion in post 1950's Spain. At the heart of this research lies a discussion between contemporary Spanish novels and films, and ongoing broader debates in Western thought, such as the critique of the Enlightenment as a secular project, the ethical turn, and the return of religion in postmodern thought. In contrast with religion as a disabling and oppressive force that ceased to be relevant with the arrival of modernity, my work offers an enabling view of religious representations through the analysis of fictions by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Juan Benet, Camilo Jose Cela, Miguel Delibes, Alberto Mendez, Manuel Rivas, Jose Luis Cuerda, and Alex de la Iglesia. My enquiry argues that, parallel to Spain's transition to a post-religious context marked by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and, later, the configuration of a non-confessional state after Franco's death (1975), Spanish literature and cinema started to incorporate religion and spirituality in ways quite different from what was traditionally understood.;Chapter 1 analyzes the novela experimental of the 1970's and 1980's and illustrates how the literary and the religious sphere intersected in different ways during a time of both political and religious transformation. I argue that growing formalist approaches to the text led to an idea of the novel as a supreme generator of meaning and, therefore, an instrument to transcend reality infused with supernatural qualities. When this discourse exhausted itself, some of its main representatives resorted to religious narratives like the Apocalypse (Fragmentos de apocalipsis), biblical myth (Saul ante Samuel), or liturgical text ( Cristo versus Arizona) both to expose and dismantle its transcendental aspirations.;The turn to a clearer and more narrative fiction in the 1980's coincided with the need for a replenishment of ethical values through religious narratives. The work by Miguel Delibes, whom I discuss in Chapter 2, epitomizes this ethical tendency with an unexpected turn to the historical genre in the author's last novel El hereje. I maintain that Delibes's view of the history of the Protestant Reformation in Spain works as a counter-gesture against the traditional identification of Catholic belief with pure "Spanishness", allowing him to represent and subvert the link between faith and violence.;Little attention has been paid to the role of religion in fictions about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its commemoration. Chapter 3 aims at revealing the interest in religion that some contemporary writers have developed in their approaches to historical and cultural memory. The novels Los girasoles ciegos and El lapiz del carpintero are presented as good examples of how fiction narratives about the conflict make meaning of the Catholic Church's role in the conflict while simultaneously resorting to images of pain, writing and the body deeply-rooted in Catholicism to consecrate a memory of the war and its aftermath.;In Chapter 4, I conclude with two filmic parodies of the Apocalypse to suggest that laughter does not always aim at religion, but can also spring from it. Asi en el cielo como en la tierra and El dia de la bestia offer critical approaches to traditional Catholicism in Spain, but at the same time incorporate religion as a tool to reflect on their own cinematic poetics as well as to ridicule Hollywood's representational excesses.