Content area
This dissertation explores the ways in which representations of illness in Peninsular poetry and visual material produced during the post dictatorship foster understandings of temporality beyond historical time. Through examining depictions of mental and contagious diseases, such as addiction, schizophrenia, and HIV, this dissertation reads illness as disruptive to the filial, historical ordering of time, in contrast to prevalent allegorical readings that interpret illness merely as a reflection of a climate of disenchantment. This project discusses primary sources that depict illness to access models of temporality that disjoin the present and affirm a hospitality toward a traumatic past in the wake of the Francoist dictatorship. Throughout, this project offers readings of an archive that includes poetry by writers from across the Iberian Peninsula, such as Eduardo Haro Ibars, Clara Janés, Aníbal Núñez, Leopoldo María Panero, Lois Pereiro, and Francisco Zamora Loboch. It also engages with films and other visual material by Pepe Espaliú, Joaquim Jordà and Núria Villazán, Iván Zulueta, and the patients of the Santa Águeda Psychiatric Hospital in Arrasate-Mondragón. Through techniques of close readings, this dissertation encounters in these “texts” what Jacques Lacan deems the symptom, or the unique, poetic means through which an individual engages with the homogenizing effects of language. Theorizing the poetics of the symptom allows this work to move beyond pathologizing, paternalistic discourses that encounter in illness some sort of deficiency, or a reflection of a nation’s “growing pains” in its path toward democratic governance and historical reconciliation. Instead, these texts rely on illness to advocate for intimate and plural operations of remembrance that engage with multifaceted experiences of time’s passing within the fluctuating political and cultural terrains of the Spanish transition.