"Learning to Be? Narratives of Formation in the Literatures of the Spanish State after 2008"
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the literatures of the Spanish State have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Bildungsroman-inflected narratives, testimonial accounts, and coming-of-age fictions that fundamentally interrogate received models of subjectivity, identity formation, and social progress. This international congress invites critical engagement with a corpus of works — spanning authors such as Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Belén Gopegui, and Alana S. Portero — that contest hegemonic discourses of selfhood and becoming from positions of social, gendered, and cultural marginality.
Drawing on frameworks from narrative theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and queer theory, and the sociology of literature, the congress aims to theorize the transformations undergone by the Bildungsroman genre and its adjacent forms in a period marked by austerity, political disenchantment, and accelerated social precarity.
We hope the congress will serve as a space to explore and interrogate the following questions. What do post-2008 Bildungsromane and narratives of formation in the literatures of the Spanish State...
- ...inscribe in terms of dissidence and contestation? What forms of counter-subjectivity, non-normative becoming, and ideological refusal do these texts stage, and through what narrative and rhetorical strategies?
- ...articulate in terms of temporality? How do these narratives configure relations to the past and the future — foreclosed inheritance, arrested teleology, utopian projection, or the affective textures of precarity and waiting?
- ...open up in terms of more-than-human landscapes and relations? How do they inscribe new ecologies, posthuman entanglements, and reconfigurations of the boundary between the human and the nonhuman?
- ...reveal about their relationship to institutionalized education? How do schools, institutos, and universities function in these narratives — as sites of discipline and normalization, of aspiration and disappointment, of resistance and critical formation?
- ...frame the access to reading and writing? Within what social, economic, and symbolic conditions is literacy — broadly understood — represented as acquired, denied, or transformed into a practice of self-making?
- ...negotiate the ideological and political dimensions of literary form? How do these texts assume, foreground, or work through the political stakes of their own fictionality and constructedness?
- ...engage with the formal ideology of the Bildungsroman as a genre? How do they inherit, subvert, or dismantle the normative grammar of self-cultivation and bourgeois subject-formation consolidated since the nineteenth century?
EXTENDED DEADLINE 10 of June 2026
City: Barcelona Country: Spain Start date: Wednesday, 18 November 2026 End date: Friday, 20 November 2026 Address: Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, Eixample, 08007 Barcelona Call for papers here: https://web.ub.edu/es/web/projecte-recerca-discursos-socials/congres-2026