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.

Taught in English.

Catalonia can be considered a unique laboratory for studying the complexity of present-day identity politics. On the one hand, Catalan society is marked by pronounced levels of cultural diversity, and it is a remarkably multilingual and multicultural society that has managed to incorporate successive waves of immigration without significant strife. On the other hand, Catalonia is strongly shaped by the resilience of patterns of collective belonging based on a shared historical trajectory — in spite of their lacking operative institutional structures for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Catalans have been remarkably successful in reclaiming and readopting a singular tradition as a people. The most significant recent chapter in this trajectory has been the rising claim to sovereignty, which reflects the continuity and strength of a common identity project, even if this project has not remained uncontested.

The course will focus on Catalonia’s complex diversity and on the intricacies that underlie its political articulation. From a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, it will offer the methodological orientation that is required for interpreting the interplay of culture and politics on a thick, contextually informed basis. The Catalan experience offers evidence of how the tension between the “communitarian” rootedness and the “cosmopolitan” openness of shared civic identities can be tackled in productive ways that point beyond hegemonic nation-state narratives.

Knowledge of Catalan and Spanish will be helpful, but not required.