Diálogos metaficcionales e intermediales (II) entre Agustín Fernández Mallo y Enrique Vila-Matas

Abstract

The essay, dedicated to Darío Villanueva, one of the most important Spanish specialists in literary theory and comparative literature of the 20th century, explores in the first part his contribution to the research on metaliterature and metafiction in the Spanish contemporary novel of the decades of 1980-1990. His works establish the relationships of these concepts with postmodernity theories and with umberto Eco’s thesis in Il nome della rosa, Postille and other relevant essays of the Italian author. In the second part of the text, the aim is to apply these concepts of literary self-consciousness and reflexivity in the novel as a story-telling device in the work of one of the most relevant Spanish young writers of the 21st Century, Agustín Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Lab. In this sense, we will focus the ending sequence, written (and designed) in form of a comic book or graphic novel, in which the young author puts himself beside the more recognized Enrique Vila-Matas, as an allegoric and fictional reflection of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories about the literary field.