Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The end goal of this intervention is to analyze the novel Nocilla Dream by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo through the lenses of Altermodernism as proposed by the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. The label Altermodernism was coined at the beginning of the 21st century by the art critic in order to signify a new mode of art and culture characterized by an spatial and ideological fluidity in which the subject moves toward a “radicant” identity - “caught between the need for a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalization and singularity” (Bourriaud). In this new altermodern paradigm, the practices of mobility, hypercommunication and globalization, according to the critic, could become guarantee of a new, positive identity politics in the framework of the interrelationships among different artistic particularisms and lead to the reconstruction of the too familiar fragmentation and nihilism of the postmodern subject. In this paper I demonstrate the ways in which the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo is explicitly influenced by Bourriaud and conceptually constructs his novel Nocilla Dream (Editorial Candaya, 2006; in English by Fitzcarraldo editions, 2015) around such an altermodern paradigm.