Columnism and metacolumnism in Antonio Muñoz Molina: “Ida y vuelta” section in Babelia

Abstract

The column is the most free and imprecise genre in journalism. By virtue of this freedom, columnists present themselves as protagonists in their own texts, and the column itself often becomes the main subject of the column. This practice gives rise to the meta-column, a journalistic rarity that has not been sufficiently studied. This analysis focuses on the writer Antonio Muñoz Molina and explores how, and with what objectives, the columnist discusses and reflects on his own work. To do this, a complete period of the writer’s contributions to the newspaper El País has been selected, specifically the texts published in the cultural supplement Babelia over 15 years. The sample analyzed consists of 731 journalistic columns published by the author from October 2007 to October 2022. The results of the study show that, for Muñoz Molina, the opinion article has been the vehicle through which he defines his own column, analyzes his evolution as a writer or columnist, enumerates his models and values, establishes the deontological limits of the genre, and even resolves conflicts with his colleagues in the profession. This has led to the topic of columnism, although far behind literature and art—the two main subjects in the sample, as they account for more than 65% of the texts—having a notable presence, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the set of columns analyzed.