Josep Pla: Seeing the World in the Form of Articles

Description

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. Cover Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface 1 Journalism as Literary Praxis 2 Journalism on the High End 3 The Gray Notebook : Between Chronicle and Memoir 4 Difficulty of the Novel 5 Rural Roots of Catalan Modernity 6 The Catalan Landscape Seen as a Painting 7 Remembering the Region 8 Shipwrecks with Monsters 9 A Sui Generis Liberal 10 Of Women and Days 11 Encroaching Death Works Cited Index