La utopía banal: la urbanización, la globalización y lo anti-bucólico en últimas noticias del paraíso

One of the consequences of globalization in Spain has been the import of the so-called Anglo suburban culture coming from the western world. The development of this culture comes from pastoral roots, in that humans seek to live peacefully with each other as well as with non-humans. Nevertheless, as it has come into contact with capitalism, this pastoral culture has failed because it is commodified like any other consumer product. The Spanish residential communities that have inherited this cultural history in part are known as urbanizaciones. In Clara Sanchez's novel, últimas noticias del paraíso, these communities reveal themselves as places built to bring together humanity and nature but that, from the perspective of a coming-of-age adolescent, in actuality are centers of artificiality condemned to banality. What this current work proposes is that últimas noticias del paraíso presents itself as an anti-pastoral and in this way underlines the problems that the globalization of capitalistic culture brings with it by spreading alienation and ambivalence on the part of humanity when confronted with the natural world, even while maintaining a pastoral mask.