Poderoso caballero es don Dinero. Las metáforas del simulacro y desengaño en auxilio de los actuales discursos españoles de la crisis
Poderoso caballero es don Dinero. The Metaphors of the Delusion and the Disillusion in Aid of the Contemporary Spanish Discourses of the Crisis

Summary/Abstract: The Spanish economic crisis already counts with a complex literary bibliography that encompasses both novels, essays and poetic volumes. Our analysis is based on one novel (Crematorio by Chirbes), one essay (Todo lo que era sólido by Muñoz Molina) and a poetic book (Dinero by García Casado). We open the analysis recalling the key economic data. Later we present what seems to be the most frequent question, that is, the corruption triggered by the boom in the construction sector. Finally, we observe two metaphors that dominate in the literature of the crisis, which are the metaphor of the delusion and the metaphor of the disillusion. Both metaphors were also very frequent in Spanish Baroque culture, and constitute an inverse proportionality. In addition to that, the reason for the disillusion was manifested in the Baroque with the image of vanitas that adopted, among others, the form of a still life or a soap bubble. Also contemporary authors of the literature of the crisis describe the disappeared natural landscape and the (real estate) bubble that, just like the soap bubble, swells easily, but is pricked unexpectedly. What predominates among both the poets of the seventeenth century and the writers of the crisis, is the feeling of an era coming to an end, but no one knows what comes after it.

• Details
• Contents