CATALAN LITERATURE 2 MOD.2

“Catalan Literature 2 mod. 1 / 2” is a core course for students enrolled in any of the three curricula (Literatures and Cultures; Linguistics, Philology and Language Teaching Research; International Politics) of the Bachelor's Degree Programme in Languages, Civilisation and the Science of Language, who have chosen to study Catalan Language and Literature (as language A or language B). The course can also be included in the study plan as a “relative/additional” or “chosen by the student” educational activity. In accordance with the learning outcomes of the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Languages, Civilisation and the Science of Language, the course will enable students to: deepen their knowledge of contemporary Catalan literature and culture; develop skills in the analysis of film and literary texts, and understand how they relate to their own context. This year topic will be: “Portraits of a city: Barcelona in cinema and literature”. The course will focus on works by Catalan directors and writers realised between 1888 and 2010, in order to analyse the cinematic and literary representation of the city of Barcelona.

Regular and active participation in the teaching activities offered by the course (lectures, discussions and, possibly, thematic research seminars) and in independent research activities will enable students to:

- gain a wider knowledge of Barcelona and its history, as well as of the literature and cinema surrounding it, from 1888 to the present;
- acquire a basic knowledge of the history of the contemporary city;
- become acquainted with the key elements of film language;
- use literature and cinema as tools for studying and interpreting the city;
- critically discuss, with appropriate language and argumentative rigour, the main issues related to the cinematic and literary representation of Barcelona;
- develop the ability to independently analyse and interpret films and literary texts.

No previous knowledge is required.

The course aims to explore the cinematic and literary representation of Barcelona in four key stages of its urban development: the construction of the Gran Barcelona between the second half of the 18th and the early part of the 20th centuries; the Civil War (1936-1939); the era of Francoist desarrollismo, which coincides with Porcioles’s municipal government (1957-1973), and the period that runs from the restoration of democracy until today. Through the comparative analysis of a corpus of films and literary texts made by an international group of filmmakers and writers that have portrayed the Catalan capital in the chosen periods, we will study how the image of Barcelona has evolved in relation to the deep urban, cultural and socio-economic changes experienced by the city over time. We will also highlight how cinema has participated in the construction and dissemination of the new image of post-Olympic Barcelona, thus contributing to relaunch the city as a tourist destination.

1. Cinema and the city
2. Barcelona, a cinematic city
3. The birth of a metropolis: Barcelona between the 19th and the 20th centuries
4. Cinema, bombs and anarchy: Barcelona in Spanish Civil War films
5. The Barcelona of desarrollismo: a “vampirised” city
6. From Cinderella to top model: the transformation of Barcelona
7. The Tourist City
8. The Dark Side of Barcelona

a) Film:

Barcelona en tramvia (Ricard de Baños, 1909).
Movimiento revolucionario en Barcelona (Mateo Santos, 1936).
Barcelona trabaja para el frente (Mateo Santos, 1936).
Vida en sombras (Llorenç Llobet Gràcia, 1948)
Los Tarantos (Francesc Rovira Beleta, 1963)
Umbracle (Pere Portabella, 1972)
All about my mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001)
L’auberge espagnole (Cédric Klapisch, 2002)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)
Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñarritu, 2010)

b) An anthology of literary texts will be made available to students in the "Materiali ISA" area in the university website. The anthology will include selected texts from:

L’art d’ensenyar Barcelona (Carles Soldevila, 1929)
Vida privada (Josep Maria de Sagarra, 1932)
Donde la ciudad cambia su nombre (Francesc Candel, 1957)
La plaça del Diamant (Mercè Rodoreda, 1962)
El carrer de les Camèlies (Mercè Rodoreda, 1966)
El dia que va morir Marilyn (Terenci Moix, 1969)
Mister Evasió (Blai Bonet, 1969)
Ramona, adéu (Monterrat Roig, 1972)
El temps de les cireres (Montserrat Roig, 1976)
Els plàtans de Barcelona (Víctor Mora, 1976)
Los mares del Sur (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, 1979)
La ciudad de los prodigios (Eduardo Mendoza, 1986)
Barcelones (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, 1987)

Further learning materials will be made available online during the course.

For students attending classes, evaluation will be based on:

active participation to class discussions: 25%
class presentation: 25%
oral exam: 50%

For non-attending students, evaluation will be based on an oral examination. Instead of the oral exam students can choose to write a paper which will be discussed with the professor.

Conventional lectures during which students will be required to actively participate. The teacher make extensive use of multimedia materials.

Italian

Non-attending students are invited to contact the teacher.

oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Cities, infrastructure and social capital" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development