The Sexual Meanings of Language Conflict and the Paradoxes of Enjoyment: Daniel O’Hara and Marta Rojals

Josep-Anton Fernàndez

(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

 

Thursday, April 13th, 2023 

5:30 pm - Emerson Hall 210

 

This talk explores some of the ways in which contemporary Catalan narrative represents linguistic and social conflict by reference to sexuality and subjectivity; or to be more precise, the ways in which language and social conflicts, as they are represented in Catalan fiction, are sources of, interact with, and are mediated by psychic conflict. Drawing on political theories inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis, most notably Yannis Stavrakakis’s concepts of enjoyment and post-democracy, two recent Catalan novels are analyzed in this lecture: Daniel O’Hara’s Dependent ben plantat per a hereu sobiranista (Good-looking shop assistant for independentist heir, 2012) and Marta Rojals’s L’altra (The other woman, 2014). Far from portraying a harmonious, self-identical Catalan society made of well-adjusted individuals, these texts present a Catalonia divided and traversed by unsolvable antagonisms that have to do with identity, language, and social, economic, and symbolic power. These antagonisms are inextricably linked to psychic dynamics such as identification and disidentification, anxieties, fantasies, symptoms, enjoyment, and the passions. The two novels examined here are analyzed against the background of the “cultural normalization” process in Catalonia, seen as an attempt to constitute a post-democratic order in the cultural sphere built on a fragile consensus, especially around language policy. In this lecture I argue that the critical reception of these novels reveals the symptomatic nature of their linguistic and cultural conditions of production and shows the persistence of the attachment of the actors of Catalan culture to one of the main fantasies of cultural normalization: the fantasy of a literary language that could offer a full representation of Catalan society. 

The event will be in English, and will be followed by Q&A. 

 

Josep-Anton Fernàndez holds a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in Catalan Language and Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Until 2006 he was a senior lecturer of Catalan Language and Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where he founded and directed the Centre for Catalan Studies. Between 2015 and 2018 he was director of the department of Language and Universities at Institut Ramon Llull. Since 2007 he has taught Catalan Studies at the UOC Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He specializes in 20th and 21st century Catalan literature and culture, with an emphasis on subjectivity, identity, and representation. His approach is interdisciplinary, drawing from cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic criticism.

He has published the books El malestar en la cultura catalana: La cultura de la normalització 1976-1999 (2008) and Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction (2000); he is the editor of El gai saber: Introducció als estudis gais i lèsbics (2000) and co-editor of the following volumes: Calçasses, gallines i maricons: Homes contra la masculinitat hegemònica (2004, with Adrià Chavarria), Funcions del passat en la cultura catalana contemporània: Institucionalització, representacions i identitat (2015, with Jaume Subirana), and Narratives of Violence (2021, with Teresa Iribarren and Roger Canadell). He is currently preparing a collective book on the representations of immigration in Catalan literature (for University of Wales Press). As a poet, he has published L'animal que parla (2021), which won the Ausiàs March de Gandia 2020 poetry prize.

For more information, please contact: aobismonne@fas.harvard.edu