María Custodia Sánchez Luque

María Custodia Sánchez Luque is Assistant Professor of French Philology at the Department of Foreign Philology, Translation and Interpretation at the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid. She has a PhD in French Studies, after defending her thesis, Los jardines “pintados” de Émile Zola, lugares de encuentro entre literatura y arte, at the Complutense University of Madrid. Among her lines of research are ecocriticism and the presence of non-human animals in literature. She follows a perspective that, going beyond the anthropocentric position, considers the human being as one more element of that cosmos in which everything is interconnected. According to this view, nature, far from being the simple backdrop for literary works, would be one more agent, capable of influencing the course of history. On the other hand, following researchers such as Marrero Enríquez, animal empathy leads us to re-read the texts of the past in a different light. The meaning of a literary work does not have to be unique and unalterable, but can be subject to new interpretations, which arise as human sensitivity advances. With this in mind, María Custodia Sánchez is interested in the treatment of animal empathy in French literature of the second half of the 19th century, especially in the work of Émile Zola, where the idea of contiguity between human and non-human animals is a constant. As she highlights in her analyses, the Zolian approaches in this regard vary from models, such as the one described by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Tale, namely, donor animals, adjuvants and hero helpers – this is how Zola presents them in the chapters of the Paradou of La Faute de l’abbé Mouret – to much more realistic aspects. Such is the case of the equestrian theme, present in novels such as Germinal, La Débâcle or Le Docteur Pascal. In line with this research, María Custodia Sánchez has published her work in the XXV and XXVII AFUE proceedings, in the Revista del Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarita Losa (number 38) and as part of the XXIV Selgyc Symposium proceedings.

Email: mariacustodia.luque@urjc.es