Juana Doña describes her book Desde la noche y la niebla as a novel-testimony, but not an autobiographical one. This story about her life as a militant in the communist ranks, the Spanish Civil War, and her imprisonment mark the narrative evolution that transgresses any taboo imposed by Francisco Franco’s censorship. Doña relies on her memory and her present self-awareness to remember and decide, respectively, which events are related, and which are silenced; how actions are reaffirmed, and which information is omitted; and how the narrative pronoun changes according to her own life or the collective struggle. The book functions as an individual catharsis, both for the author and the readers. I propose to analyze the writing process of this book as a promotion of justice weapon, following Kimberly Nance’s theory about the ethical decisions made by the author of the testimony and inferring a new role for the reader as a timeless agent in social struggle.

The article analyzes the literary works of Arturo Barea that deal with the experiences of his two exiles: the French and the British. In The Clash Barea evokes his sad life in Paris: great poverty and uneasiness caused by the growing resentment of the French towards the Spanish exiles on the eve of World War II. In contrast, the British exile (shown in the stories Teresa and A Spaniard in Hertfordshire) appears as a mostly positive experience, as Barea achieves a certain economic and emotional stability. Nevertheless, there are moments (reflected in his letters and his novel The Broken Root) in which the author suffers from nostalgia for his homeland and remorse for having abandoned his children in Franco’s Spain.

Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel In the Night of Time focuses on a period of life of a talented and successful architect, living in Madrid in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War. The story of the main character is just a pretext to show the hectic atmosphere of the capital and discuss the factors which led to the outbreak of the armed conflict. However, the novel presents politics and war as a purely male domain. The purpose of the article is to trace hidden females voices in the work and analyze them using the theoretical guidelines of the arachnology.

In this article we start from the following question: What differentiates the novel Entre visillos (Martín Gaite, 1957) from the analysis of Uses of love of the Spanish postwar period published by the same author as heir to her doctoral thesis Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España. One possible hypothesis is that to promote a change in perception and de-automate the perspective of the heteronorm, this imaginary “feminine” background is demystified. The cinema that appears in the novel as a drug is a clear metonymy of the function of fiction. We will structure the paper in two ways that will respond to the hypothesis raised: the first exposes the foundations of the norm and the distribution of roles for women; the second analyzes the rituals of demystification and deregulation of the norm, whose purpose is the internal or external exile that in the novel allows the anti-nationalist and performative gender argumentation.

Writing about memory involves balancing on the limits of the symbolizable and the unspeakable of trauma – individual and social – putting together puzzles in which some of the pieces do not fit and others have been lost. The aforementioned novels, both within the imaginary of disenchanted impotence in the face of the reconstructive faculty of memory in personalities devastated by state violence, share traits that connect them: both confront the difficulties of a pathological narrative by posing it from a delirious and/or dislocated discursive inquiry in which the authors sustain the literary possibility of anamnesis. The aim of this article is to explore the fragmentary, fetishizing construction of the paradoxes of memory in the aesthetic constitution of both novels as the only possible support in front of the irreparable damage produced by social subjugation. Through stylistic traits, the reconstructive, salvific viability of traumatic memory is renewed, and at the same time put into crisis.

In Entrada libre (1987), Carlos Monsiváis, ruminates about the importance of civil resistance in Mexico after decades of political instability, corruption, and violence. The cruel actions of the ‘dirty war’ left an unstable democratic system and an absent-minded population, which was still trying to understand the violent repression against left-wing groups. Under these conditions, Monsiváis questions the role of civil society in the production of mechanisms of resistance and reconciliation against a large history of abusive treatments and misuses that generated crisis in the country. This essay rethinks the representation of memory and history in the chronicles of Carlos Monsiváis. This project analyzes how the depiction of an the everyday life becomes an alternative method of expression for the a society in resistance, as well as a reevaluation of the
meaning behind “historia nacional” and memory as the foundation of the perspective of time in Mexican society.

The aim of the present study is to examine Maria Moreno’s book Oración. Carta a Vicki y otras elegías (2018). It is a work of difficult generic definition that narrates the years of the Argentine dictatorship (1976 -1983) through the death of Victoria Walsh and the disappearance of his father Rodolfo Walsh. It belongs, in some way, to the broad and diversified narrative of ‘post memory’. Beyond the historical and political data, the author expands and focuses her reflection on the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood of activists in subversive groups, and the consequences of this condition in the dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process. The initial investigation, the link between a father and a daughter and the scene of their death, opens up new and old questions, such as aesthetic value, the search for truth and its representation, the place and the voice of women, mothers and daughters

In her article, Magdalena Zdrada-Cok analyses the representation of immigration in Lilia Hassaine’s 2021 novel Soleil amer. She is concerned with argumentative and persuasive narrative strategies, the reterritorialization of immigration literature, and references to the realistic model of the novel.