Topic
A Feminist Reading of the Basque Urban Novel: Options and Limitations of the Contemporary Flâneuse
This presentation argues that Basque urban literature traces an alternative trajectory within the broader framework of Western urban literature. To this end, it analyzes the representation of the city in the modern Basque novel from a feminist perspective through the study of five works that depart from a hegemonic urban imaginary. In this way, the paper presents the main conclusions of the PhD dissertation entitled A Feminist Reading of the Basque Urban Novel: Options and Limitations of the Contemporary Flâneuse (Majuelo, 2023).
The corpus consists of five novels published between 1969 and 2018: Egunero hasten delako (Ramón Saizarbitoria, 1969), Zergatik panpox (Arantxa Urretabizkaia, 1979), Ugerra eta kedarra (Sonia Gonzalez, 2003), Jenisjoplin (Uxue Alberdi, 2017), and Neguko argiak (Irati Elorrieta, 2018). These works share three key features: they belong to a period in which the city acquires thematic centrality (from the first urban representations of the 1960s to the contemporary global city), they assign the urban space a decisive structural and symbolic function, and they feature women as protagonists, thus enabling the urban experience to be reconsidered from non-hegemonic perspectives.
The analysis is structured around the figure of the flâneuse and its contemporary conceptualization. The novels portray both the limitations imposed by the patriarchal order on women in public space and the strategies of transgression and reappropriation they develop. In this sense, these works construct a distinctive urban imaginary, providing Basque literature with an alternative urban model. The main conclusions indicate, first, that the Basque urban novel emerges later than dominant Western models and displays distinctive features; second, that the imaginary of the city in this literary tradition has been articulated from a female perspective from its very beginnings; and finally, that the flâneuse appears as a conflictive and deviant figure whose urban experience necessarily entails confrontation and transgression.
Irati Majuelo Itoiz (University of the Basque Country)
Irati Majuelo Itoiz holds a PhD in Literary Studies and Comparative Literature and she is currently a professor at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), in the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies. In her PhD dissertation, she studied the Basque urban novel from a feminist perspective, through the figure of the contemporary flâneuse. This research was carried out thanks to the PIF18/083 grant from the EHU. During that period, she did visiting research stays at the University of Barcelona and at the LEGS laboratory at the University of Paris 8. I am a member of the research group Hariak. Feminist Research on Literature and the Arts. Her research focuses on feminist criticism, gender studies and spatial studies, always focusing on Basque literature and culture. She also writes book reviews for the newspaper Berria.