Reading the ghost: Toward a theory of haunting in contemporary Spanish culture.

This dissertation examines the ways in which different cultural productions that emerged during the Franco dictatorship (1939--1975) and after offer critical insight into Spain's fascist past as a persisting spectral element in the present. Focusing on the intersection between history, violence, memory, and temporality, this work studies the cultural phenomenon of spectrality in contemporary Spain, asking the driving questions: How does culture materialize the ghost? Or, how do different literary and filmic genres reveal a culture bound to and haunted by its traumatic past? The first chapter outlines the project's theoretical framework and draws particularly on the work of Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon. The second chapter explores the triangular relationship between spectacle, spectrality, and totalitarian optics by studying images from state-sponsored newsreels and documentaries (NO-DO: Noticiarios y documentales) from 1940--1960 directed for propagating Francoist ideology. Analysis of the newsreels is complemented in the third chapter with close readings of four films by renowned director Carlos Saura, whose political engagement and critique of Francoist ideology arises within the framework of Spanish new wave cinema. Reflecting on notions of untimeliness, impossible return, and loss, the films studied are Los golfos (1959), La caza (1965), El jardin de las delicias (1970), and La prima Angelica (1973). Moving from cinema to literature, the fourth chapter focuses on the narratives of Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Ignacio Martinez de Pison, and Julio Llamazares---El angulo del horror (1990), Alguien te observa en secreto (1985), and Escenas de cine mudo (1994), respectively---and argues that these post-dictatorship fictions reveal the continued presence of an unseen, spectral logic characteristic of Francoism's fascist discourse. These fictional accounts testify to dominant forms of cultural haunting in the Spanish transition to democracy, particularly as ghosts circulate in the space of the uncanny home, the dysfunctional family, and the abandoned city. Linking literature back to the visual arts, the fifth chapter looks at the works of three contemporary Galician photographers (1990--2000s), Fran Herbello (A imaxe e semellanza), Xurxo Lobato (A paisaxe intervida), and Manuel Sendon (Casas doentes), which portray cultural trauma through images of wounded and sutured bodies, fragmented landscapes, and decaying houses.PhDCommunication and the ArtsComparative literatureFilm studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127058/2/3328862.pd