Touching a raw nerve: battlefields as mnemotopos in the work of Aquilino Ribeiro

Abstract

Aquilino Ribeiro was one of the first Portuguese authors to reflect on the memory of the First World War. This aspect of Aquilino’s work deserves particular attention in studies of collective memory, as it is a form of double memory (a situation in which the very question of collective memory is reflected within the texts). Based on the works of A. Assmann (2018) and J. Assmann (2001), this article analyses the mnemotopos (term by J. Assmann) of battlefields in the dual configuration of reports from the travels undertaken in 1928 and the short story “Chumbo” (Caminhos errados, 1947), demonstrating the affinities at the level of the spatial configuration and, above all, at the level of the axiological dimension.