Por los caminos de la palabra. Exilio republicano español y campos de concentración franceses: una historia del testimonio

Abstract

Spanish republicans who crossed the Pyrenees in 1939 escaping reprisals by Franco´s Dictatorship, subsequently interned in French concentration camps, left a trace of this experience in many testimonies that have been written and published since early on the time of the events until now. This thesis aims to draw a history of the testimony attending to a double perspective: the analysis of textual strategies witnesses developed to represent the traumatic experience and the reflection on the circumstances in which the discourse has been published and received. On the analysis, the research focuses on issues regarding the construction of a narrator, named as “yo testimonial”, his changes and displacements, as well as on the representation of space and the links between the “yo testimonial” and the subject in the text. On the circumstances, the thesis goes into a study of ways of intervention testimonies develop on the various and changing socio-historical contexts in which they have circulated. For that, the paratextual elements offer relevant meanings in order to think how these discourses have been read, and how they have been used. The hypothesis was formulated in a dialectical way: these testimonies assume a referential function –meaning with no literary intention or willingness to make fiction from the experience–providing knowledge about the past events. At the same time, political and social circumstances have influenced the narrative strategies practiced by the witnesses to represent the experience at the concentration camps.

Date of Award	11 Jul 2011
Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Supervisor	JAume Peris Blanes (Co-director) & Manuel Aznar Soler (Director)