Margalida Pons Jaume
Margalida Pons Jaume
Ginebre Serra Visiting Chair in Catalan Sudies
Contact:
Pigott Hall (Bldg. 260)
Room 223
Office Hours:
by appointmentOVERVIEW:
Margalida Pons is an associate professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, where she has been teaching a wide range of courses on Catalan Literature, Literary Theory, and Comparative Literature since 1996. She has written a number of studies on 20th century poetry and experimental literature. Her publications include, among others, Blai Bonet: maneres del color (1993), Els poetes insulars de postguerra (1998), Corrents de la poesia insular del segle XX (2010), and, as an editor or co-editor, (Des)aïllats: narrativa contemporània i insularitat a les Illes Balears (2004), Textualisme i subversió: formes i condicions de la narrativa experimental catalana (1970-1985) (2007), Poètiques de ruptura (2008), Literatura i cultura. Aproximacions comparatistes (2009) and Transformacions: literature i canvi sociocultural dels anys setanta ençà (2010). She has been visiting professor at Brown University. She leads the research group LiCETC (http://www.uib.es/depart/dfc/litecont/), which focuses on literary experimentation and interdiciplinarity.
Courses
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ILAC313Aut2011-12
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.
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ILAC201Aut2011-12
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.
