Since May 2011, the Spanish 15-M Movement (commonly referred as los indignados [the outraged]) has become a major player in the domestic political scenario. Public opinion data reveal that there is a cross-sectional support for the 15-M among the general population in Spain, affecting people of different ages, genders, employment situations and levels of urbanization. The data present a “movement of dissent” and confirm the crisis of the consensual culture of the Spanish political transition from Franco's regime to democracy. The 15-M challenges previous consensus and expresses the need to reform or to overcome the close-knitted institutional map designed by the elites driving the transition. The outraged movement advances and leads a new political culture based on widespread social dissent. Our data suggest an imbalance between the cultural and the political impact of the 15-M, and how this tension will be a central element of cultural and civic life in the next decades in Spain.

El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973-1993)

The Spanish 15-M Movement: a consensual dissent?

A substantial number of literary works elaborated and published in contemporary Spain features the memory of the Spanish Civil War and successive Francoist dictatorship as a recurring topic within its plots. Brought forward by authors who are unable to resort to a biographical connection with the events they tell about, this kind of narrative tackles the literary explicitation of painful events which still appear to retain a traumatic and conflictive nature.
This thesis aims at investigating the features through which the memory of the 1936-1939 conflict is still reflected in peninsular narrative written by the second and third generation. The main focus of the research therein presented is to define the modalities, strategies and main objectives intrinsic in transgenerational representation of the war and its mnemonic consequences, with a specific interest for the notion of inherited historical trauma, interacting with the suggestions coming from the socio-political debate taking place in Spain in the last two decades. In the first place, this work discusses the blurred notion of ‘memory’ from a semiotic and multidisciplinary perspective, specifically focusing on the controversial concept of ‘historical memory’ and attempting a multifaceted definition through the convergence of neurological, psychoanalytic, sociological and historical considerations. It then approaches the memory of the conflict as a diachronically differentiated emotional evolution, focusing on the diverse dominant discourses which, throughout the past seventy-five years, have recreated their own version of the war from its conclusion to present days (in particular , Francoism, the transitional period and the democratic state). The central core of the argument proposed in my work is a series of considerations related to the mnemonic persistence of the conflict in contemporary fiction, along with a specific interest for the generational factor (to address which reference has been made to Marianne Hirsch’s theories on postmemory); the influence of the market and the ‘hauntological’ motif in the recent super-production of mnemo-conscious fiction; the review of the main formal labels currently applied to the corpus which has been analyzed; the peculiar representational scheme of ‘the past seen from the present’; and, lastly, the fictionalization of violence.
The work is completed by a specific commentary on four novels which have been judged particularly exemplificative, i.e. La voz dormida by Dulce Chacon (2002); iOtra maldita novela sobre la guerra civil! by Isaac Rosa (2007); El corazon helado by Almudena grandes (2007) and Ayer no mas by Andres Trapiello (2012).

La memoria transgeneracional : Presencia y persistencia de la guerra civil en la narrativa española contemporánea

This thesis explores representations of menstruation in contemporary literature produced by Latin American and Spanish women writers The study is motivated by the need to open up the subject of menstruation, in both literary studies and wider terms, and analyses works in which authors decouple menstruation from traditional, patriarchal conceptualisations in which periods are limited to the ambit of reproduction and defined negatively, as shameful, an embarrassment or a burden
This study identifies contemporary works from across Spanish-speaking countries that engage with menstruation as well as detecting and analysing trends and approaches to menstruation and recurrent images associated with periods This shows that menstruation, despite its taboo status, is a subject widely explored in women’s literature in Spanish
The four main content chapters explore the alternative imaginaries that question traditional representations, whether by displaying overtly subversive representations or through a more muted approach These chapters are structured thematically around the axes of eroticism, trauma, transitions and rape, and demonstrate that menstruation can be conceptualised from a plurality of perspectives which avoid the traditional association with fertility Moreover, the study demonstrates that menstruation plays a significant role within these texts Therefore, this study also creates a corpus of ‘menstrual texts’, a term coined to refer to works which not only make menstruation visible but also make use of it aesthetically and assign to menstruation an important role within the narrative, including as a main theme, image or motif, plot trigger, and/or as a narrative device The comparative chapters analyse a number of selected texts, namely: Diamela Eltit’s Vaca sagrada (1991), Andrea Jeftanovic’s Escenario de guerra (2000), Solitario de amor (1988) and other works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Marta Sanz’s Daniela Astor y la caja negra (2013), Esther Tusquets’ El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978) and Ana Clavel’s Las Violetas son flores del deseo (2007)

Creative Encounters with Menstruation in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Women’s Writing

and essays on contemporary Spanish literature and culture. This essay is part of a book in progress on the reUtionship between capital culture and urban identity in Ute 20th century Madrid. My goal in this paper is to offer some com ments about the telationship between cul tural production and economic and political transformation at a particularly important juncture in Spain's recent past. I will use a major component of Spain's built environment, architecture and the urban planning that surrounds it,1 as an example to study this relationship since it represents a particularly significant narrative informed by this transformation. I do not intend to reduce architecture, or any cultural artifact, to a manifestation of language, as has so often been the case in assessments that attempt to gain access to culture from the peispective of postmodern critical theories.2 We must always keep in mind the role of Marx's silent hand of history in shaping the nature of the relationship between culture and socioeconomic forces. Only in this way can any of our approaches to culture be contributions to a truly context-based cultural studies anchored in the material

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/2579853.pdf

From Planning to Design: The Culture of Flexible Accumulation in Post-Cambio Madrid

Past Law, Present Histories

/pdf/el-mono-del-desencanto-una-critica-cultural-de-la-transicion-2uy7y906mm.pdf

El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973-1993)

Citations

The Spanish 15-M Movement: a consensual dissent?

La memoria transgeneracional : Presencia y persistencia de la guerra civil en la narrativa española contemporánea

Creative Encounters with Menstruation in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Women’s Writing

From Planning to Design: The Culture of Flexible Accumulation in Post-Cambio Madrid

Past Law, Present Histories

Related Papers (5)

El mono del desencanto: una critica cultural de la transicion espanola.Por Teresa Vilarós. Madrid: Siglo xxi, 1998. 285 paginas.

Cultura herida : literatura y cine en la España democrática

Disremembering The Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy.

Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la transición

El precio de la Transición