“Lección de Literatura del Régimen”: Literature and Politics in the Pandemic (Auto)Fiction of Cristina Morales

Abstract

The short story “Lección de Literatura del Régimen”, by the author Cristina Morales (Granada, Spain, 1985), provides a perfect opportunity to analyze how certain aspects of autofictional narratives trigger some reading mechanisms in which ethical, political, and ideological elements play a crucial role. Within an autofictional text, the complex relationship that emerges between the authorial instances and the fictional entities involved has the potential to encourage a reading process that, through its hesitations and ambiguities, helps to unveil some of the intricate network of ideological notions and material conditions from which the acts of reading and writing are carried out. The investigation concludes that, in the story analyzed in this paper, the inherent tensions of the literary are extrapolated to the inherent tensions of the political, articulating a discourse where both notions are intertwined in the text.