War Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Novel: A Style for History?

This paper questions the relationship between the materiality of poetic language and the attempt to write the pain of history, through the case of war memory in contemporary fiction. It is based on an analysis of Marife Santiago Bolanos' La cancion de Ruth (2010), a Spanish novel about the transmission of the Spanish civil War and the Shoah. This contribution details the opportunities of meeting points between historical and literary disciplines, especially that of aesthetic approach. In the analysis of the novel, two narrative phenomena are more deeply studied, delinearization and repetition. They reveal an historical regime defined by the trauma: the past "does not pass".