Tracing the Self in Three Peninsular Languages: Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. The Exemplary Cases of Josep Pla, Xavier Alcalá, and Juan Goytisolo

Speakers): Randolph Pope (University of Virginia)

Among the many challenges of autobiographical writing is language itself, imposing its precedence to the writer and its endless and deeply rooted connections. How different are the task and the result of autobiographical writing in three different languages as revealed by an examination of three major works of relatively contemporary literature? I consider Josep Pla's El quadern gris (published in 1966, but written 1918–1919), Xavier Alcalá’s A nosa cinza (1980), and Juan Goytisolo’s  Coto vedado (1985) and En los reinos de taifa (1986), texts that have rapidly become canonical in their own languages and are well known in translations, in spite of (or because of) illuminating in diverse ways a stressful, restless, and uncomfortable relation to their respective languages and cultures.