Gender, Body, Nation, & the Interpretation of Contemporary Catalan Literature & Art

The notions of gender, body, and nation are adequate interpretive tools in order to read the otherization processes that affect Catalan cultural identity as portrayed in contemporary literature and art. In this seminar we will review, in the first place, a number of critical contributions dealing with Post-Franco cultural identity construction, such as Josep-Anton Fernàndez's Another Country and his contributions to Calçasses, gallines i maricons, which link sexual and national subordination; Katryn Crameri's Language, the Novelist and National Identity in Post-Franco Catalonia, which explores the ties between language and national identity; and Stewart King and Irene Boada's essays on the possibility of using postcolonial criticism in reading the Catalan scenario. Secondly, in light of the concepts of body, gender, and nation, we will analize a number of literary and artistic productions belonging to different fields: a) prose (a selection of short stories by Carme Riera and Quim Monzó), b) poetry (a choice of poems by women writers from the 20th and 21th centuries), c) art (the rewriting of the body in conceptual performance and body-art), and d) cinema (Ventura Pons' film Ocaña, retrat intermitent will be our starting point). Ultimately, the aim of this seminar is to explore how these counter-identities become instruments of cultural resistance that reshape the borders of Catalan literary and artistic system. This course will be taught in Spanish. Written assignments can be submitted in Catalan, English or Spanish.