Memories of ‘Basque Violence’ political violence, conflict, and reconciliation in the perspective of cultural narratology: a transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm?
Abstract
The article analyzes the ‘Basque violence’ as a case study of the transdisciplinary investigation approach of cultural narratology. The phenomenon of violence, complex in both social and psychological terms, requires symbolization and linguistic-narrative forms, tobecome a socially and culturally significant reality. Departing of this idea and starting from a reconstruction of the basic theoretical-methodological assumptions of cultural narratology, the article explores images and narratives, which represent the violent past of the Basque conflict. While the debate about the violent past associated with the activity of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) is full of controversies, there can be observed at the same time a strongpresence of the subject of violent past in literary and filmic narratives. The article reconstructs different lines of the historical interpretation of this so-called ‘boom of memory’, focusing the aesthetic, mediatic and narratological dimensions.