Centers and Peripheries in Contemporary Catalan Culture

This seminar will deal with the concepts of center and periphery in contemporary Catalan culture. We will analyze the specificity of canon-formation processes in the Catalan literary system (e.g. the contacts and frictions with the Spanish/Iberian framework or the biased reception of the North American debate on literary canon [Bloom et al.]). Centrality and periphericity will be examined in a variety of fields and artistic productions: a) geography (insularity as condition, limit and motif in Blai Bonet's novel El mar and in Miquel Barceló's paintings and writings); b) experimental literature (objectual and visual poetry as suburbia of the lyrical genre); and c) transmediality (Ventura Pons' Amic/Amat both as a film adaptation of Josep M. Benet i Jornet's Testament and as an independent work). This course will be taught in Spanish. Written assignments can be submitted in Catalan, English or Spanish.