Cold Angels: Avatars of the Killer in Hispanic 21st-Century Novels

• Main Author: Sánchez Medina, Alberto
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: Spanish
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Latin American literature
• ISBN: 9798368427799

My dissertation investigates the articulations of the fictional character of the killer as a trope for rethinking contemporary society in Latin America and Spain. Friedrich Nietzsche’s image of a “cold angel” who “sees through the whole miserable spectacle” partly inspires my approach to the social critical thinking in these figures. I examine a corpus of three contemporary novels that feature characters whose excessiveness, I argue, can be read as a response to their economic and social contexts.The first chapter consists of an introduction that maps the theoretical lines of the dissertation while examining the aesthetic changes in the character of the killer and the notion of cruelty over time. The second, third and fourth chapters carry out an in-depth analysis of each of the novels. In the second chapter I read the novel by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s Toño Ciruelo (2017) in the tradition of the coming-of-age genre and I argue that the social environment is the key that leads the character to his transformation into a killer. In the third chapter, dedicated to Argentine Alejandro Hosne’s ultraviolent satire Ningún infierno (2011), the analysis focuses on the extreme personality of the serial killer and first-person narrator in connection with the 1990s highpoint of neoliberalism in Buenos Aires. Here, I discuss in detail the connections between class, urban space and violence by closely mapping the displacements of the protagonist through the city. The third chapter studies Spaniard López Serrano’s parody novel Sacrificio: diario de un matarife (2019), whose main character, JHS -acronym of Jesus Christ-, works at a slaughterhouse. I study how the parodic character serves as an instrument for debunking the religious aspects of neoliberal society.I study these violent fictions through the analysis of the characters' reflexive discourses as well as the notions of body, space and realism. The study of these three novels allows me to explore the interactions of aestheticized cruelty (as theorized by Clément Rosset, Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard) the structural violence of today’s growing inequality.