Daniel Arrieta    Department   Kyoto University of Foreign Studies  Department of Hispanic Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies    Position   Associate Professor
Date	2023/10/15
Presentation Theme	Autofiction and immigration in Munir Hachemi's hard-boiled novel
Conference	69th Conferences of the Japanese Association of Hispanists
Conference Type	Domestic
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Country	Japan
Venue	Chuo University
Details	Madrid-born writer of Algerian origin Munir Hachemi wrote “Cosas vivas” in 2018, a novel set in the French countryside. In the novel, four young Spaniards move to the south of France to work in the poultry industry, where mainly North African immigrants are systematically exploited at work, and where apparently violent deaths occur. The novel adheres to the noir genre through aspects such as the existence of a crime; strong social criticism, which includes a complaint against animal abuse; episodic structure that leads to an explanation of the mystery; and a hopeless view of the world. All this with the particularity that the identity of the detective-narrator coincides with that of the author of the novel, at least in the name and biographical data. Likewise, through a diary interspersed in the novel, the narrator shares his metanarrative reflections on the literary construction of the lived experience and on the impossibility of a perfect referentiality, which causes doubts in the reader about the veracity of the facts or its fictionality, forcing an alternation in the reading process between fiction and non-fiction beyond the traditional narrative pact. Within the theoretical framework of autofiction –Doubrovski, Colonna, Lejeune, Alberca– we will study how the generic elements of the novel are intertwined with autofictional characteristics around the immigrant origin of the author's family, creating an interesting duplicity of perspectives that affects the processing of information on the part of the reader. We will also examine the numerous intertextual elements that constitute marks of the self in writing in the novel, and which Prado, Picazo and Bravo (1994: 298) explain as “echoes of a world of readings” that allude to an ideological and aesthetic positioning, integrated organically in this novel and enriching the narrative identity of Munir Hachemi as a character.
URL for researchmap	https://www.canela.org.es/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/15.05.2023-PROGRAMA-XXXV-Congreso-CANELA.pdf