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...

Luis Bello: vida y época. Su producción periodística y literaria

Taking into account the cultural and literary wealth of the first third of the twentieth century in Spain, this doctoral dissertation aims to increase our knowledge of literary journalism during that period through a monographic study of one of its greatest champions, the journalist and writer Luis Bello Trompeta (1872-1935). Although Bello enjoyed noteworthy success and popularity in life, he has since fallen into an almost complete yet unjustifiable oblivion. Bello’s lifetime coincided with a brilliant period of Spanish culture, one that is almost unanimously considered not simply a Silver Age but a veritable golden age of journalism in Spain. Nevertheless, the period is often unjustly reduced to a short list of names and works of extremely well known and well studied writers. There is a tendency to forget that such writers emerged within a vast, influential context comprising numerous cultural products, writers, and works that need to be recovered. More specifically, the general inclination to privilege the book as a period’s sole bearer of literary or testimonial significance often deprives us of richly complementary journalistic sources such as the chronicle or the newspaper report. Indeed, together with the book, such articles can help us achieve a broader understanding of both literary history and the personality of individual writers or the course of historical events. The fact that authors like Luis Bello are practically unknown today is likely related to the time-sensitive, intrinsically ephemeral nature of journalism, the print medium in which Bello published most of his work. Yet in spite of its passing nature, the press witnessed remarkable developments in Spain at the time, undergoing a transformative process of consolidation...

Miguel Sawa y la Revista "Don Quijote" (1892-1903)

In late 19th century and early 20th coexisted in time in Spain a lot of writers, many of them well known today, but many others who haven’t been rescued yet. This stage has been called the Silver Age of Spanish literature. Among the best known and most representative of Madrid’s bohemian characters were the Sawa brothers: Manuel, Alejandro, Miguel and Enrique. All of them had related to the literature or journalism, in greater or lesser extent, and were very significant figures in their time. Alejandro, who reached a high literary level, has recently been subject of various studies and biographies which have located him in his place as a outstanding writer, rescuing him from forgetting where he remained sunk until a few decades ago. But it has not happened the same with the rest of the brothers, especially with Miguel, who was also a writer. The object of the first part of this thesis is to recover the figure of the Miguel Sawa, rebuilding his biography and both journalistic and literary career. Miguel Sawa, belonging to the so-called generation of literarian bohemia, born in Seville in 1866. After moving with his family to Málaga, where he spent his childhood, settled definitively in Madrid in 1880. In Madrid lived the atmosphere of the newspapers offices and the literarian gatherings of the “cafes”. He was a friend of Valle Inclán, the Machado brothers, the Baroja brothers, and belonged to the “Gente Nueva” and to the Germinal generation. In 1901 he married María Palacio, with whom he had a son, Emilio, who died before completing one year of life, and a daughter, Carmen, who had five years when Sawa died. After spending a season in La Coruña, as director of the newspaper La Voz de Galicia, returned to Madrid at the beginning of 1910, ready to continue his literary career, but died suddenly on 1 October of that same year because of a fulminant pneumonia...