Isaac Rosa y los lectores: narrar y leer el pasado con responsabilidad

Abstract

In this essay, Isaac Rosa's El vano ayer and ¡Otra maldita novela sobre la guerra civil! will be analyzed as illustrations of a new novelistic approach to the Spanish civil war, dictatorship and the transition to democracy. In these novels, Rosa is critical of dominant narratives and discourses about Spanish recent past. Rosa shows that many of them manipulate the past in order to build and secure a non-conflicting present or resort to sentimentalism or nostalgia and so falsify the readers' historical memory. Due to its unusual and clear political stance, Rosa's narration of the past could be thought to be authoritarian as in the thesis novel. An analysis of the author-reader relationship reveals, nonetheless, that Rosa invites the reader to become "impertinent and rebellious", an attitude which is opposed to the paternalism of the thesis novel.

Keywords

• Isaac Rosa
• hegemonic versus emergent memory
• reader
• axiological position