Conference Presentations by Daniel Doncel Martín
Reading Lovecraft today feels weirdly familiar. Somehow, the doomscapes he so hysterically painte... more Reading Lovecraft today feels weirdly familiar. Somehow, the doomscapes he so hysterically painted for us almost a century ago sound like an appropriate emotional expression of the mood of our time. And this is no wonder: the sensation of a world on the verge of collapse that Lovecraftian tales induce on us is very, very similar to the one we have here, in a capitalist world that cracks a bit more every day. The point of this paper is to look closer at the ways these parallel emotional reactions are so alike: Lovecraftian tales are about terrible discoveries that shake the foundations of common-sensical knowledge, a situation with serious similarities to the ideological turmoil that comes with each crisis of capitalism. The starting point will be a reading of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" as an antidetective fiction, that is, a subversion of the detective story in which some of the genre's central tenets, such as reason, logic, and science, are proven wrong by their own methods and resolutions. This process of self-refutal overlaps with that of the hegemonic, but slowly collapsing, capitalist system. Mark Fisher's books, The weird and the Eerie and Capitalist Realism will help establish the weird story as crisis narratives with affective ties to the experience of living through economic and ideological crisis, as well as to point out capitalism's self-fulfilling prophecy that cannot even fulfill itself. The collapse of a hegemonic ideology brought about by its own weight finds its parallel in the process of paradigm shift as explained by T.S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Fisher's investigation on the weird, understood as a feeling of being invaded by some external
XV Congreso de Novela y Cine Negro, Salamanca, 2020
Blade Runner es mencionada a menudo como una de las mejores películas de ciencia ficción de la Hi... more Blade Runner es mencionada a menudo como una de las mejores películas de ciencia ficción de la Historia, como una de las obras fundacionales del cyberpunk, como un hito de cine
negro y como una adaptación que hace sombra a su modelo original. Ser la secuela de una
película de este calibre es la incómoda posición en la que se encuentra Blade Runner 2049. Sin
embargo, estamos hablando de la continuación de una película con la identidad como tema
central, lo cual la pone en una situación especial. Bajo tanta presión, y a la sombra de Blade
Runner precisamente, 2049 no tiene otro remedio que ser consciente de sí misma y de sus
parecidos y diferencias con la original. Vamos a defender aquí que Blade Runner 2049
reflexiona sobre esta posición a través de dos mecanismos: primero, con una temática centrada
en la simulación y la reproducción, en referencia a su papel de secuela; segundo, el uso de Pale
Fire de Vladimir Nabokov y de la metacinematorafía como formas de hacer explícitos el
comentario y la autoconciencia de la película.
Thesis Chapters by Daniel Doncel Martín
Second language courses frequently struggle with the lack of native input. This paper aims to pro... more Second language courses frequently struggle with the lack of native input. This paper aims to provide instructors with a partial solution to that problem by having students engage with their target language through a weeks long translation project. It establishes a theoretical framework that draws from Vygotsky, Krashen, and research on motivation. Then, it applies it to a series of five lesson plans throughout which groups of students will translate a short story from their target language to their first language. The project intends to serve as a way to make students engage directly with original target language input under the form of some of its cultural products.
Drafts by Daniel Doncel Martín
This paper aims to categorize the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, by H. P. Lovecraft, as a sup... more This paper aims to categorize the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, by H. P. Lovecraft, as a supernatural antidetective story, on the basis of its seemingly detective-like structure and its genre-subversive ending. After defending the validity of this categorization, the essay links the story with the main characteristics of postmodernism, mainly its characteristically ontologic conflict. Finally, the essay points out Lovecraft‟s use of the postmodern struggle between worlds, and of the attack on positivism of the antidetective, to portray non-white social groups as irrational, as opposed to a supposedly rational WASP population.
Papers by Daniel Doncel Martín
Atlantic Studies, 2025
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is a conflict widely characterized as international in its scal... more The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is a conflict widely characterized as international in its scale and Spanish or European in its causes, without much attention given to the conflict's colonial implications. However, there are reasons to argue that the conflict, at the level of both causes and consequences, was connected to issues of Spanish imperialism in Latin America and North Africa as it was to the strictly European factors at play. In this essay, I privilege a perspective from the Global South rather than a Euro-Spanish understanding of this conflict. To that end, I write about the writings of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén during the Spanish Civil War, both through their contact with well-known Republican leaders and with each other. Through these dialogues, Hughes and Guillén theorize the possibility of a Global North antifascism that, taken to its logical conclusion, becomes coherent and allied with Global South anticolonialism.
Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, But Still Dreaming, eds. Antonio Alcalá González & Carl H. Sederholm, 2022
Reading Lovecraft today feels weirdly familiar. Somehow, the doomscapes he so hysterically painte... more Reading Lovecraft today feels weirdly familiar. Somehow, the doomscapes he so hysterically painted for us almost a century ago sound like an appropriate emotional expression of the mood of our time. And this is no wonder: the sensation of a world on the verge of collapse that Lovecraftian tales induce on us is very, very similar to the one we have here, in a capitalist world that cracks a bit more every day. The point of this chapter is to look closer at the ways these parallel emotional reactions are so alike: Lovecraftian weird tales are about terrible discoveries that shake the foundations of common-sensical knowledge, a situation with serious similarities to the ideological turmoil that comes with each crisis of capitalism.
An Eldritch Crime: Supernatural Antidetective Fiction in H.P. Lovecraft‟s “The Call of Cthulhu”
This paper aims to categorize the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, by H. P. Lovecraft, as a sup... more This paper aims to categorize the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, by H. P. Lovecraft, as a supernatural antidetective story, on the basis of its seemingly detective-like structure and its genre-subversive ending. After defending the validity of this categorization, the essay links the story with the main characteristics of postmodernism, mainly its characteristically ontologic conflict. Finally, the essay points out Lovecraft‟s use of the postmodern struggle between worlds, and of the attack on positivism of the antidetective, to portray non-white social groups as irrational, as opposed to a supposedly rational WASP population.
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Conference Presentations by Daniel Doncel Martín
negro y como una adaptación que hace sombra a su modelo original. Ser la secuela de una
película de este calibre es la incómoda posición en la que se encuentra Blade Runner 2049. Sin
embargo, estamos hablando de la continuación de una película con la identidad como tema
central, lo cual la pone en una situación especial. Bajo tanta presión, y a la sombra de Blade
Runner precisamente, 2049 no tiene otro remedio que ser consciente de sí misma y de sus
parecidos y diferencias con la original. Vamos a defender aquí que Blade Runner 2049
reflexiona sobre esta posición a través de dos mecanismos: primero, con una temática centrada
en la simulación y la reproducción, en referencia a su papel de secuela; segundo, el uso de Pale
Fire de Vladimir Nabokov y de la metacinematorafía como formas de hacer explícitos el
comentario y la autoconciencia de la película.
Thesis Chapters by Daniel Doncel Martín
Drafts by Daniel Doncel Martín
Papers by Daniel Doncel Martín