Abstract

ENNIS, Juan Antonio. Exhumación y montaje: memoria e imagen en la narrativa española reciente. Cuad.Sur, Let. [online]. 2010, n.40, pp. 53-73. ISSN 1668-7426.

When looking for a common denomi- nator for the various expressions of Spanish narrative in recent years, one is forced to notice the repeated use of the 20^th century's traumatic past in the emplotment of fiction. This "obsession with the past" in turn generates the subsequent controversy about the ways in which literature has a share on the politics of memory -as well as the debate on literature's current sta- tus vis à vis other cultural practices. The aim of the following paper is to give an account of some particularly successful "fictions of memory" in contemporary Spanish narrative. This research is based on the detection of some frequent topics that create a dialogue among these fictions and other discourses and contemporary events: the image of the (dis)appeared and the exhumation of bodies and documents of a traumatic past, which can have a disrupting effect on the given order of representation. In an era in which horror memory ends up frequently as mere merchandise, we try to observe in this corpus different ways of taking part in or resisting the influence and aftermath of this "memorial boom", shaping a theoretical framework in which concepts such as image, montage and postmemory play a key role.

Keywords : Narrative; Memory; Image.