Disremembering the dictatorship : the politics of memory in the Spanish transition to democracy / edited by Joan Ramon Resina.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Resina, Joan Ramon.

Series:

Portada hispánica ; 8.

Portada Hispánica ; 8

Language:

English

Spanish

Subjects (All):

Memory--Social aspects.

Memory.

History.

Historiography.

Spain--History--1939-1975--Historiography.

Spain.

Memory--Social aspects--Spain.

Spanish literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Spanish literature.

Physical Description:

248 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Atlanta, GA : Rodopi, 2000.

Summary:

Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform. As one of the essays in this volume puts it, the "pact of oblivion, " which characterized the Spanish transition to democracy, curtailed any serious attempt to address the legacies of authoritarianism that the new democracy inherited from the Franco era. As a result, those legacies pervaded public discourse even in newly created organs of opinion. As another contributor argues, the Transition was based on the erasure of memory and the invention of a new political tradition. On the other hand, memory and its etiolation have been an object of reflection for a number of film directors and fiction writers, who have probed the return of the repressed under spectral conditions. Above all, this book strives to present memory as a performative exercise of democratic agents and an open field for encounters with different, possibly divergent, and necessarily fragmented recollections. The pact of the Transition could not entirely disguise the naturalization of a society made of winners and losers, nor could it ensure the consolidation of amnesia by political agents and by the tools that create hegemony by shaping opinion. Spanish society is haunted by the specters of a past it has tried to surmount by denying it. It seems unlikely that it can rid itself of its ghosts without in the process undermining the democracy it sought to legitimate through the erasure of memories and the drowning of witnesses' voices in the cacaphony of triumphant modernization.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Politics and the Invention of Memory. For a Sociology of the Transition to Democracy in Spain / Salvador Cardus i Ros 17

Chapter 2 Memoria colectiva y lieux de memoire en la Espana de la Transicion / Christina Duplaa 29

Chapter 3 "Malditos pueblos!": Apuntes sobre los vascos al final del siglo XX / Philip W. Silver 43

Chapter 4 History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period / Jo Labanyi 65

Chapter 5 Short of Memory: the Reclamation of the Past Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy / Joan Ramon Resina 83

Chapter 6 Oblivion and Remembrance: the Double Desire of Munoz Molina's El jinete polaco / David K. Herzberger 127

Chapter 7 El tabu del franquismo vivido en la narrativa de Mendoza, Marias y Munoz Molina / Maarten Steenmeijer 139

Chapter 8 Identidad homosexual y procesamiento del franquismo en el discurso literario de Espana desde la transicion / Dieter Ingenschay 157

Chapter 9 Memory and Forgetting, Resistance and Noise in the Spanish Transition: Semprun and Vazquez Montalban / Ofelia Ferran 191

Chapter 10 Autobiografia del General Franco: Un problema linguistico / Manuel Vazquez Montalban 225.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9042013524

OCLC:

46848815