The novel of totalitarianism. An approach to an unexplored subgenre from the notion of genericity proposed by Jean-Marie Schaeffer

This This article studies a novelistic corpus whose poetics is configured through a political consciousness that conceives the phenomenon of totalitarianism as its central subject. Although they do not coincide chronologically and geographically, these novels manifest, on the one hand, common intratextual features, especially with regard to the development of their characters in totalitarian contexts; and, on the other hand, they share the fact that their authors personally lived through totalitarian experiences during the 20th century. Thus, these works make up a novel subgenre that we call the Novel of Totalitarianism, a category not contemplated until now and proposed from the notion of genericity formulated by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, who presents the genre as a serie of texts that share repeated, imitated or interchanged elements, which would not make them ideal texts (as is usually understood in genre theories), but linked exemplary texts, a perspective that makes the limits of the given genre more flexible and diversifies.