Guerrilla Narratives in Spanish Contemporary Culture.
Arroyo-Rodriguez, Daniel
2010
Abstract
Guerrilla Narratives in Spanish Contemporary Culture This dissertation challenges the historicity of war and peace that was first opened up by General Francisco Franco’s unilateral declaration of the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939. Th...e consensus has been that this war lasted from 1936 to 1939. But when we examine the historical and political through the prism of culture we can see that the hostilities persisted until the early 1960’s. Central to this reevaluation is the scarcely studied figure of the maquis. This term refers both to the guerrilla warfare and to the individual combatants who continued to fight until the early 1960’s. As a point of departure, my first chapter explores how the cultural discourse promoted by Franco’s regime in the 1940’s and 1950’s dehumanizes the maquis and deprives them of all rights so that they can be easily killed, as exemplified in the novel La sierra en llamas (1953) by Ángel Ruíz Ayúcar. In the second chapter I study the combatants’ self-perception as revolutionary militants in the novels Cumbres de Extremadura (1938) by José Herrera Petere, and Juan Caballero (1956) by Luisa Carnés. Moving from literature to cinema, in ¬¬-the third chapter I study the depiction of the maquis during the democratic transition that takes place in the second half of the 1970’s. Due to the ideological nature of these characters, their representation at this time is incompatible with the consensual discourse promoted by the overriding need for peaceful democratization. For this reason, the history and legacy of the maquis are displaced by official democratic discourse, as I discuss in relation to the film El corazón del bosque (1979) by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón. I complement this analysis in my fourth and final chapter, in which I explore marginal literary representations of these combatants in the 1990’s as part of the movement for the recuperation of historical memory. In this chapter, I analyze how the novel Maquis (1996) by Alfons Cervera reevaluates these characters as potentially transformational figures that can help us understand political power during Franco’s regime and in democratic Spain. [more]Subjects
Spanish Civil War Guerrilla Warfare Maquis 20th Century Spanish Peninsular Literature Spanish Historical Memory 20th Century Spanish History
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