Title
Remembering the thirteen roses: thinking between history and memory.
Abstract
Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking between History and Memory
examines the execution of thirteen young, communist women, named the Thirteen
Roses, on August 5, 1939, to show how Spaniards in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries have assigned meaning to and represented the memories of those who opposed
Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Through the analysis of poetry, fiction,
journalism, theater, and film, my dissertation documents the ways the Roses’ memory
has been recycled and transformed over time from the remembrance of a historical
event to a polysemic literary and cultural trope. This trope, in the postwar years,
embodied communist political ideals but, with the passing of time, was converted into a
symbol for democracy and, later, into a depoliticized tale of human suffering.
The development of the Roses trope alerts us to the mechanics of collective
memory, a concept coined by Maurice Halbwachs to explain how ‘memory’ is a
socially constructed notion that is experienced within a group. The recollection of the
women’s execution serves as a case study for how society manipulates and assigns
different meanings to collective memories over time, highlighting the manner in which
collective memory is both a cultural and discursive construct. Memories, like that of the
Roses, intersect and negotiate specific political, historical, social, and cultural objectives
in a social context. Remembering the Thirteen Roses combines history, memory studies,
and literary scholarship to deepen our understanding of Spain’s recent social and
political movements in favor of the recuperation of historical memory of the Spanish
Civil War, as it is reflected in the ever-evolving representations of one tragic event.
Description
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2010. Major: Hispanic and Luso Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics. Advisor: Ofelia Ferrán.1 computer file (PDF); iv, 312 pages, appendix A.
Suggested Citation
Larson, Kajsa C..
(2010).
Remembering the thirteen roses: thinking between history and memory..
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/92225.