Resumen de The foreign countdown: Historical memory and the Spanish Civil War in contemporary Argentinian literature
Eight decades after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this article examines the ways in which the conflict continues to find its way into literature written on the other side of the Atlantic, seeking to revive the voices of the past in order to build a historical memory of the events. In this approach, investigations into the power of memory are conducted at the meeting point of two forms of ‘distance’ from the original event: temporal and spatial. The body of texts considered for this study comprises three novels: Tío Borís. Un héroe olvidado de la Guerra Civil Española (Graciela Mochkofsky, 2006), Mika (Elsa Osorio, 2012) and La abuela civil española (Andrea Stefanoni, 2014) and the play Quince moños rojos (Silvia Ramos, 2013). The analysis, which deals with the ways in which various narratives attempt to shape a memory of the defeated, is contextualized in relation to the re-emergence in Argentina of a desire for greater insight into the Spanish conflict – a trend that is observed across various disciplines, such as law and history. At a time when the possibility of intergenerational transmission is becoming progressively remote, the focus on geographically defined mechanisms for the study of the past reveals the importance of developing universal approaches to the analysis of traumatic memories.
