Medios, imágenes y memoria: el Valle de los Caídos

Since the first decade of the 21st century, the Valley of the Fallen has been established as an object of controversy related to the new policies of memory. In recent years the "Historical Memory" has been a recurring concept in the mass media. While it is true that since 2011 this issue has been overshadowed in the political agenda, even today we continue to access information that refers to our recent past, from perspectives that demand actions of ethic, symbolic, political or economic repair. Many of these reports could be framed within a broader discourse, akin to a concept of "historical memory". These media texts are part of a larger problem that is troubling modern western societies and that has presented a remarkable recovery since the late nineties: debates or polemics on memory. In this paper we propose to study the nature of these media texts. We assume that the mass media configure their texts from frameworks or pre-existing frames. For this research, we propose an analysis of content based on the theory of framing to identify what is the typical journalistic discourse and the modalities of interpretive general framework applied in a number of texts and broadcasts about the Valley of the Fallen...

Aspectos cognitivos en torno a la novela y el cine de la memoria histórica: "La voz dormida" de Dulce Chacón y su adaptación fílmica

Culture, history, and biology are inseparable. Cultural manifestations are necessarily immersed in a context, originate in the embodied minds that create them, and are directed to the embodied minds that receive them and recreate them within their contexts (individual and collective). The novel and the film of historical memory in Spain aim to connect their audiences with a problem that has not been solved, as the Civil War, the postwar, and the pact of forgetfulness left a wide sector of the Spanish society voiceless. During the last few years, a series of initiatives coming from the arts, as well as other realms such as the legal, have sought to reexamine the unhealed wound that still haunts Spanish subjects. La voz dormida [The Sleeping Voice] is one of those initiatives. It begins as testimony, develops into a hybrid and intertextual novel, and later becomes a film. It constitutes an inclusive project, one of offering an alternative version to the “official history”, while incorporating the marginal voices of women that had been left out of the memory of the war and the dictatorship. Objective and Results By examining both the literary and the cinematic versions of Chacón’s work I aimed to evidence the connections that exist between the artistic portrayal of the postwar repression (particularly how it affects women) and the current movement of recovery of historical memory in Spain. Specifically, I was interested in showing how both the novel and the film employ a series of narrative strategies that emphasize the body and intentionality, with the purpose of creating in readers and spectators an empathetic response that may lead to prosocial behavior. In order to carry out this interdisciplinary study, which relates fiction, mind, and socio-historical context, I draw on cognitive theories of literature and film, as well as theories from social and developmental psychology, such as the Richard Gerrig’s theory of narrative experience, Keith Oatley’s psychology of fiction, Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy, and the empathy-altruism hypothesis, derived form the ideas of Jean Decety, among others...