La función de las unidades fraseológicas en la novela española de posguerrauna herramienta hermenéutica, un recurso para la resistencia

Abstract

The Spanish post-war novel has been traditionally neglected by literary criticism due to its political instrumentalisation. While it is true that Spanish post-war narrative played a political function during Francoist dictatorship, this does not necessarily mean its literary quality was less. On the contrary, authors from this period had to dig deep into their creativity in order to find new alternatives of expression to convey what they wanted to say in a way blurred or hidden enough to pass Francoist censorship. This new discourse that was created for and through the post-war narrative was mainly composed of a wide and rich phraseology that, used as a stylistic or literary technique, contributed to reach the ultimate aim of these novels: criticising Francoist regime. Thus, vindicating the literary quality of Spanish post-war novels by analysing them through the phraseological approach is the main motivation of this doctoral thesis. The perspective of this study is phraseological because phraseological units (PU) enable the analysis to be focused on the linguistic features that characterised the narrator and the characters of the novels and provide much information about what their role is in the plot development. This thesis presents, therefore, a multidisciplinary approach since two different fields are constantly addressed: literature, on the one hand, focused specifically on Spanish post-war narrative; and phraseology, discipline that provides us with the necessary tools to perform the hermeneutic analysis of literary texts. The aim of this doctoral thesis is, likewise, twofold. On the one hand, a literary corpus composed of three representative novels of the Spanish post-war period was explored aiming to discover if the writers of this period used phraseology intentionally within them with a particular purpose. The first two hypotheses of this thesis are, therefore, "phraseology was used intentionally as a literary technique in the Spanish post-war novels chosen" and "the particular use of phraseology within these novels is intimately related to the communicative objective of the novel (that is to say, criticising Francoist regime). On the other hand, the phraseological approach of this thesis aims to prove that PU can be used as a hermeneutic tool to interpret the meaning of literary texts in a more reliable (empirical) way. The last hypothesis of this thesis comes, precisely, from this idea: the novels' communicative objective can be grasped through the phraseological-hermeneutic study of the text. In order to do so, a methodology was designed ad hoc to analyse phraseology inserted in the literary text using it as a hermeneutic tool. Hence, first of all, the literary corpus was settled upon. It is composed of La colmena, by C. J. Cela, Entre visillos, by C. Martin Gaite, and Cinco horas con Mario, by M. Delibes. Next, all the PU in the novels were located and extracted, documented with specific lexicographical and phraseographical works, classified, and collected in a phraseological corpus together with other data. Subsequently, a series of 7 studies were performed: three quantitative studies, carried out through descriptive statistics, one mixed method, and three qualitative studies, which implemented case studies. Results confirm the existence of an intentional use of phraseology as a literary technique within the novels analysed aiming to pursue the communicative objective of the Spanish post-war novel (criticising Francoist regime). In addition, phraseology has proven itself, in combination with hermeneutics, an empirical tool that enables textual analysis through a more reliable process and offers a brand new perspective not only for literature or phraseology fields, but also for many other disciplines such as discourse analysis.