Places Beyond Memory

Abstract

This study highlights a heretofore-unexplored narrative device in Bernardo Atxaga’s fiction by highlighting how the author’s representation of spaces surrounding Reno and the Great Basin in Días de Nevada models what Berberich et al. (2016) call affective landscapes. The approach contributes to, and looks beyond, the traditional focus on memory in criticism of Atxaga, and it illustrates the story’s engagement with the emotional experiences of populations in the North American West that are not explored or rarely treated in the author’s other works. Finally, this paper contributes a new conceptual model to studies like Elena Delgado et al. (2016) that have used affect and the emotions as categories of historical analysis in the study of national and transnational relations between Europe and the Americas.