Thinking in the Province: New Ruralism in Post-Urban Modernity
A two-day workshop beginning on March 13; all events are in Building 460, the Terrace Room. Sponsored by the New Ruralism project in the DLCL Research Unit.
ʰDz:
Session 1 (Friday, March 13th 3:15-6:00):
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (ý), "Silicon Valley's Natural Environment: Northern California Land and Seascapes"
Robert Davidson (U. of Toronto), "Barcelona's Markets & Urban Terroir
Colleen Culleton (SUNY-Buffalo), "Endurida de pluges: Moving Water, Making Metaphors, and Imagining the Rural in Catalonia"
Marília Librandi Rocha (ý), "'Deus é grande, mas o mato é maior': A representacão do sertão na literatura brasileira"
Session 2 (Saturday, March 14th 9:00-12:00):
Xavier Pla (U. of Girona): "Leaving the City on Foot: Three Observations on Walking, Thinking and Writing in Contemporary Catalan Literature"
William Viestenz (ý): "De mots a terra: Linguistic Ruin in Francesc Serès's L'arbre sense tronc"
Enric Bou (Brown University): "A Catalan Peasant: Dalí's Renewal of Surrealism"
Joan Ramon Resina (ý): "Does One Need the Country to Think a Country? Josep Pla As Precursor"
Session 3 (Saturday, March 14th 2:00-5:00)
Pere Salabert (U. of Barcelona): "A semi-Peircean essay on New Ruralismby means of Nature"
Perejaume: "El prepaisatge"
Sebastià Alzamora: "El món rural mallorquí com a territori mític"
Pinpointing precisely when the urban milieu became the de rigueur setting for both literary production and its corresponding criticism is a difficult task. A good place to start, however, is the industrial revolution due to the manner in which the rearticulation of socio-economic conditions results in an emptying out of the countryside and endemic overpopulation throughout the urban landscape. This demographic shift has consequences for literature, as Benjamin succinctly notes: "The crowd—no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers" (166). This seems irrefutable when thinking of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens or Benito Pérez Galdós. Many nineteenth-century writers, however, rebuff the overflowing city and nostalgically return to nature and to the rural, either symbolically or literally, the latter no more apparent than in Thomas Hardy's disavowal of London in favor of the more tranquil Dorset, far from the "maddening" crowd. Romanticist and Naturalist writers also turn to the rural not simply for nostalgic reasons but for spiritual renewal and as an allegorical backdrop for a recuperation of originary mythologies and an unadulterated essence of the nation, a phenomenon keenly apparent in the Catalan renaixença where in many works one finds a reconstruction of an agrarian or Pyrenean locale, often by authors firmly situated in Barcelona.
From a standpoint of classification the damage is done. Whether provincial, regional, rural or natural; the looming presence of the industrializing city reduces all cultural production conceived outside of the urbs to a new category: the non-urban. The withering away of the 19th Century gives way to the cultural and aesthetic conventions of Modernism, a movement whose most celebrated works reinforce the preference for the urban. One may point to Joyce’s Dublin, Kafka’s Prague, Proust’s Paris or Italo Calvino’s invisible cities. While not disregarding the validity of Urban Studies, our proposed project sees the sustained focus on the city within literary studies in the past century as an endeavor grown tiresome. At the onset of the 21st century, an avant garde of writers and literary critics focusing on regionalist discourse, provincial settings and other decidedly “non-urban” realities has appeared and raised the question as to whether the rural remains a worthwhile research category. Our project, therefore, seeks to answer this and discover why this new cultural paradigm persists.
For more information contact viestenz [at] stanford.edu (William Viestenz).