Gudari or Villain? Analysis of the Rhetorical Construction of the Terrorist within the Framework of the Basque Conflict

Abstract

The announcement of the cessation of armed activity by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in October 2011, and, six years later, the unilateral disarmament of the terrorist organization, marked the end of more than half a century of violent conflict in the Basque Country. This bloody period of recent Spanish history had concluded, and a new stage has been entered, with the so-called “discursive battle” (Cercas, 2017; Gascón, 2017) taking the spotlight, in which different interpretative discursive constructions of the period experienced are confronted. In this chapter, a rhetorical analysis of the discursive construction of two subjects categorized as “ETA terrorists” is carried out, based on a corpus made up of literary texts, the novel Patria by Fernando Aramburu, and journalistic texts from the newspapers El País and El Mundo. The purpose is to study two rhetorical variables: the predominant use of certain “narrative plots,” according to the proposal offered by Northrop Frye (1991), and the use of preponderant tropological structures based on Hayden White’s theory (2003, 1973). In this way, links are established between both interpretations, which allow for a better glimpse of the rhetorical bases of a hegemonic socio-discursive interpretation of the Basque conflict during the past decade.