Reading War: Soldiers' Experience in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film

Reading War examines the ways in which war and its aftermath have persisted in contemporary Spanish cultural production. It operates on the hypothesis that the repercussions of Spain's war past are omnipresent in Spanish cultural life, and that the traumatic consequences of war and its aftermath are still actively evolving in today's political, historical, cultural, and artistic scene. This project explores the dialogical relation between cultural production, politics, and national historiography and investigates how texts and images shape attitudes about the war and the past. It offers a close reading of texts and films by Julio Llamazares, Javier Cercas, Alfons Cervera, Fernando Vadillo, Dionisio Ridruejo, Alfonso Domingo, Guillermo del Toro, Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Javier Rioyo, and Pedro Caravajal. In diverse ways these authors and filmmakers seek to vindicate the historical experiences and discourses of soldiers and excombatants that have been shut out of the public sphere.;The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is, without question, the most significant Spanish conflict of the 20 th century. Many Spaniards, however, did not stop fighting in April 1939, and remained engaged in armed combat in Spain and abroad during the 1940s and later. While the Spanish Civil War has received much attention as the subject of cultural production and critical academic inquiry; the continued involvement of Spaniards in other local and international conflicts during the World War II period has not. This study seeks to extend this frame and contribute to a new critical examination of this part of Spanish history. The interpretation of soldiers' experience raises many questions concerning the development and place of their experience within the socio-political circumstances of war and non-conciliatory postwar periods. Thus, by examining texts and films that represent episodes of soldiers' experience, the dissertation offers new insight into these episodes of war, which I consider to be continuations of the Spanish Civil War in a different form.;Chapters One, Two, and Three focus on the literary, documentary, and cinematic representations of the Spanish soldier during World War II in various manifestations: the antifascist guerrilla resistance (maquis), the Republican volunteer in the French Resistance, and the Falangist volunteer for the Russian campaign (divisionario). The fourth chapter focuses on Cercas's Soldados de Salamina and La velocidad de la luz to explore tropes of trauma, testimony, and the legacy of war inherited by Spain's postmemorial generation.;This study of fiction, poetry, and film draws from the fields of political and social history, memory studies, and gender studies. It follows a theoretical framework that understands cultural production and history as intersecting discursive practices, and traces out the ways in which intellectual, political, biographical, and national history is re-inscribed and worked over by texts and films that offer aesthetic articulations of new perspectives.