There was a time, not so long ago… Accounts and Aesthetics of Memory and Ideology of Reconciliation in Spain

Abstract

In the last decade new cultural styles have taken hold in Spain with which to represent the recent past, closely related to the emergence of the debates on the so-called historical memory and to the contemporary development of the cultural industries. Those styles havecaused a series of composition procedures and textual effects to become standardized and allow for the public to identify them with the aesthetics of memory. Testimony, as a paraliterary form and civic discourse, has reached an exceptional place in that standardization process of the aesthetics of memory, but its mechanical use has privileged its dramatic profitability over its potential for criticism.

Keywords

• Memory effect
• Cinema and literature in Spain
• CIvil War
• Francoism
• Testimony