De memoria: Tecnologias de la memoria en la literatura espanola entre 1989 y 1992.

by Alvaro Fernandez

At the beginning of the 21st Century, Spain embarked on a sustained review of its silenced past of war crimes and fascist repression. Writers, filmmakers and critics became involved in a process of delving into an uncomfortable past, focusing especially on the Civil War and its aftermath. In the studying the corpus of work produced in Spain on historical memory, I explore the paradoxical absence of historical and contextualized readings of the literature written in the period following the Transition from Francoism to a democratic monarchy. Analyzing a number of key narrative works published between 1989 and 1992, I reveal how literature encodes the different cultural and political processes experienced in Spain as part of the nation's willed transformation into a European country that would leave behind its past of backwardness and fascist dictatorship.;By means of a political reading of selected texts by Rafael Chirbes, Luis Landero, Juan Marse, Juan Jose Millas, Jose Maria Guelbenzu, Lourdes Ortiz, Justo Navarro, Jose Maria Merino, Paloma Diaz-Mas, Rosa Montero and Adelaida Garcia Morales, I show how Spaniards' adaptation to a new geopolitical situation entailed the production of a series of necessary fictions, recurring metaphors and motifs that express their uneasy negotiations with a silenced past: trauma, travel, orphanage, false appearances and superficial cosmopolitanism. In the last chapter I turn to the most successful novels of the two premier Spanish novelists of the period, Javier Marias and Antonio Munoz Molina, to analyze in detail their response to these processes of institutional and geopolitical change through the development of a series of literary technologies of memory.

353 pages, NOOKstudy eTextbook

About the author

Alvaro Fernandez runs SharpBrains, an independent market research firm and think tank tracking applied brain science. Named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, he has been quoted by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and more.

Alvaro considers himself a "learning microorganism," and loves public speaking. He received masters in education and business from Stanford University, and teaches at UC-Berkeley Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A native of Spain, he now lives in Washington, DC with his wife and young daughter.