This advanced-level course will focus on speaking and writing skills through the study of a wide variety of contemporary texts and audiovisual materials. It will provide students with a better understanding of contemporary Catalan society. Students will review problematic grammatical structures, write a number of essays, and participate in multiple class debates.

This course provides a survey of major authors, works, and trends in Catalan literature from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We study works representing various literary genres (novel, poetry, short story) and analyze the most important cultural debates of the period.

Despite many proclamations about its imminent death, the novel has managed until now to survive as a literary genre, often by interrogating the limits of the fictional and engaging at the same time the imaginary and the factual, or (as Bakhtin would put it) by embracing, absorbing, imitating or parodying a wide variety of discourses. This seminar will study a number of works of contemporary Iberian literatures (Basque, Catalan, and Spanish) that question and explore the various boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between the generic conventions of the novel and short stories, between original and translation. Primary readings will include works by Bernardo Atxaga, Jaume Cabré, Javier Cercas, Paloma Díaz Mas, Miren Agur Meabe, Josep Pla, Adrià Pujol Cruells & Rubén Martín Giráldez, and Kirmen Uribe.

This course will be focusing on Catalan culture and translation in order to address different aspects of translation history, ethics and practice in relation to minority and minoritized languages, identities and communities. The classes would seek to explore and analyze what happens to Catalan literature, film, theatre and performance in translation into other languages (in particular in the Anglophone world), as well as reflect on changing approaches to and affordances of translation within, between and beyond the Catalan-speaking territories in diverse situations of language contact and intercultural encounter involving Catalan-speaking individuals and communities. The course will be structured in four parts: Catalonia in-translation; invisible landscapes; traumatic translations; and cartographies of desire.