Narrating Class in Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature: From Class in Itself to Class for Itself

• Autores: David Becerra Mayor
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 474-486
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In twentieth-century Spain it is possible to locate a literature starring different collectivities that, through their struggles, were constructing themselves as a class for itself. This chapter shows these narratives emerged in two crucial moments of contemporary Spanish history: (1) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the 1936 coup d’état that marks the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and (2) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the economy of the Franco dictatorship was liberalized to allow the development of capitalist productive forces through the activation of the Stabilization Plan in 1959. In these two historical moments it is possible to trace the transformation of class in itself into a class for itself. It is a three-phase process: (1) the struggle for wages, (2) the constitution of a class organization with which to confront the ruling class and (3) the design of a revolutionary tactic and strategy. This chapter discusses the way in which some literary texts narrate the constitution of class according to this trajectory. This chapter does so through the analysis of three different novels, belonging to the two previously mentioned periods, each one of which narrates class conflict from three different economic sectors: The primary sector (Campesinos, 1931, by Joaquín Arderíus), the secondary sector (La mina, 1959, by Armando López Salinas) and the service sector (Tea rooms: Mujeres obreras, 1934, by Luisa Carnés).