Joan Ramon Resina

Josep Pla is Catalonia’s foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century’s most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature. In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer’s deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla’s forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: including time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer’s authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most underappreciated observers and writers of the twentieth-century.

Seeing the World in the Form of Articles

Josep Pla

William Viestenz

An Epistemology of Transformed Space

The New Ruralism

Christoph Wulf

Repetition is constitutive of human life. Unlike simple recall, repetition is permeated by the past and the present and is oriented toward the future. This book investigates the significance of different forms of repetition in literature, culture, and society through studies of the function and importance of an array of repetitive phenomenon.

How Cultural Renewal Works

Repetition, Recurrence, Returns

Of late the term Iberian Studies has been gaining academic currency, but its semantic scope still fluctuates. For some it is a convenient way of combining the official cultures of two states, Portugal and Spain; yet for others the term opens up disciplinary space, altering established routines. A relational approach to Iberian Studies shatters the state's epistemological frame and complexifies the field through the emergence of lines of inquiry and bodies of knowledge hitherto written off as irrelevant. This timely volume brings together contributions from leading international scholars who demonstrate the cultural and linguistic complexity of the field by reflecting on the institutional challenges to the practice of Iberian Studies. As such, the book will be required reading for all those working in the field.

A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula

Iberian Modalities

Dieter Ingenschay

Criticism on the textual and iconographic construction of the city is extensive, yet the problem of historical change in representations of "the urban" has received little attention. Believing traditional accounts are limited by their reflection of a specific historical moment, Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay focus, by contrast, on transition. In essays written for this volume, scholars of literary and visual studies, the history of architecture, cultural theory, and urban geography explore the ways perceptual or conceptual paradigms of the city supersede or replace others, while at the same time retaining the "after-image" of what went before. The writers touch on a wide variety of issues related to contemporary urban cultures as they journey through cities including New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Tijuana, Berlin, and London. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Camilo José Cela, Honoré de Balzac, and Alfred Stieglitz, their approach is broadly cultural rather than technical. After-Images of the City takes into account the intrinsic instability of the image and reveals that representations of the modern metropolis cannot be fixed in time and history.

After-images of the City

This multi-disciplinary study explores the explosion of cultural, social, linguistic, and architectural development in urban and rural settlements on and surrounding the Iberian peninsula during the 20th century.

Iberian Cities

Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by Käte Hamburger and Philippe Lejeune in the 1960s and 70s articulated distinctions and similarities between fiction and the genre of personal declaration. Especially since Foucault’s seminal essay on "Self Writing," self-production through writing has become more versatile, gaining a broader range of expression, diversifying its social function, and colonizing new media of representation. For this reason, it seems appropriate to speak of life-writing as a concept that includes but is not limited to classic autobiography. Awareness of language’s performativity permits us to read life-writing texts not as a record but as the space where the self is realized, or in some instances de-realized. Such texts can build identity, but they can also contest ascribed identity by producing alternative or disjointed scenarios of identification. And they not only relate to the present, but may also act upon the past by virtue of their retrospective effects in the confluence of narrator and witness.

Life Writing as Self-Realization

Inscribed Identities

Novela policiaca española -- Historia y crítica.

la novela criminal en la cultura del desencanto

El cadáver en la cocina

In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual.

After-Images of the City

La búsqueda del Grial

La Busqueda Del Grial

The Ghost in the Constitution offers a reflection on the political use of the concept of historical memory foregrounding the case of Spain. The book analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origins and transmission of political violence, and its endurance in the form of symbolic violence and "negationism" in the post-Franco era. Some chapters treat of specific "traumatic" phenomena such as the bombing of Guernica and the Holocaust.

Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society

The Ghost in the Constitution

Of late the term Iberian Studies has been gaining academic currency, but its semantic scope still fluctuates. For some it is a convenient way of combining the official cultures of two states, Portugal and Spain; yet for others the term opens up disciplinary space, altering established routines. A relational approach to Iberian Studies shatters the state’s epistemological frame and complexifies the field through the emergence of lines of inquiry and bodies of knowledge hitherto written off as irrelevant. This timely volume brings together contributions from leading international scholars who demonstrate the cultural and linguistic complexity of the field by reflecting on the institutional challenges to the practice of Iberian Studies. As such, the book will be required reading for all those working in the field.

Encourages a deep reading of a selection of essential Spanish films.

A Half Century of Spanish Cinema

Burning Darkness

Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity is a study of the emergence and development of the cultural image of the Iberian peninsula’s foremost modern city.

Joan Ramon Resina

Books

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