“El silencio de la guerra is a necessary warning about the dangers of glorifying violence and the cult of heroism in times of new conflicts and their bellicose discourse. This book is especially attractive because of the connections it establishes among the different areas of art.”
Jordi Amat, El País

“An erudite reflection on how the human being has represented conflicts throughout history.”
Andrés Seoane, La Lectura

“Showing the horrors of war or hiding them is an ethical dilemma veering between vile ghoulishness and honest accounts of what really happened. This rigorous and readable book masterfully presents the issues.”
Jesús Ferrer, La Razón

“There are many highly intelligent questions troubling the chapters of El silencio de la Guerra.”
Jorge Carrión, La Vanguardia

“Monegal offers a timely work with which, thanks to the rigour of his arguments and didactic skills, the good reader will have access to a text that invites serene, well-informed reflection on the phenomenon of war, and its most important consequences.”
Turia

★The Portuguese rights has been sold.
★This book takes a new and unique perspective - that of the presentation of war in literature, the visual arts, and the mass media - to analyze how war is shaped and remembered, helping readers to be able to understand and think about war from a different perspective.
★The author takes us on a fascinating odyssey, interweaving narrative, art, and history to unravel the complexities of war as it is portrayed in literature, the visual arts, and the mass media. From the urban battlefields of Beirut to the besieged streets of Sarajevo, the author is faced with the daunting task of recreating the unreproducible, revealing the moral dilemmas and theoretical conundrums that arise when attempting to capture the essence of the conflict.
★The English translation sample is available.

There is no era that has been completely free of conflict, when war has not been part of culture. It is a burden from our past and its shadow looms threateningly over our future. But what is war for those who have not experienced it firsthand? Whence comes the flow of images and stories that feed into and shape our knowledge of this phenomenon? Would they be impartial, not obeying certain codes and purposes?

This is not a book about what wars are but about how representations of them offered in literature, the visual arts, and the mass media have become the means by which individual and collective memory are interwoven. More than a subject for research, this is an intellectual challenge: how are we to think and speak about war? Antonio Monegal explores some of the questions arising from the way war is traditionally treated, from epic to tragedy and elegy, in this attempt to find an ethics of representation that is able to do justice to the unutterable.

Antonio Monegal (Barcelona, 1957) is Professor of Literature and Comparative Literature at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. With a degree in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona, he obtained a PhD from Harvard University in 1989 and taught at Cornell University until he returned to Spain. In 2004, together with Francesc Torres and José María Ridao, he was curator of the exhibition At War in the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB). His books include Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine (Luis Buñuel from Literature to Film, 1993) and En los límites de la diferencia. Poesía e imagen en las vanguardias hispánicas (At the Limits of Difference. Poetry and Image in the Hispanic Avant-Garde, 1998), and he has edited works by García Lorca and also Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de Guerra (Politics and Po-Et(h)ics of Images of War, 2007). In 2023 he was awarded the Spanish National Essay Prize for Como el aire que respiramos (Like the Air We Breathe, Acantilado, 2022).