Queen Mary Catalan seminar by Dr. Guillem Colom-Montero

Quim Monzó and the Changing Cultural Politics in Catalonia: Normalisation, Postmodernism and the Post-2011 Paradigm.

Quim Monzó is one of Catalonia’s most celebrated and influential authors in the post-Franco period, with a career that spans over forty-five years since he published his first press articles in the early 1970s. This seminar will revisit Monzó’s trajectory as a literary writer and public intellectual with a view to analysing the dynamic and contradictory interrelations between his work and the main cultural paradigms in Catalonia from the mid-1970s until the present day. In the first part of the seminar, I will examine the ways in which Monzó’s hugely popular intellectual project has deftly navigated the shifting values and possibilities offered by the Catalan cultural field in the autonomic period. More specifically, I will illustrate how Monzó’s public trajectory has brought to the fore some of the contradictions in the discourses of Catalan cultural normalisation vis-à-vis postmodernist attitudes towards the symbolic role of culture and the public intellectual. In the second part, I will interrogate how Monzó’s work and public persona have responded to, and interacted with, the cultural transformations emerging after the 15 May 2011 protests and the Catalan government’s pro-independence agenda. In order to illustrate all this, the seminar will look at different examples of Monzó’s cultural production over the last five decades, including political cartoons, literary texts, opinion pieces, TV appearances and the much-acclaimed short-story collection Guadalajara(1996).
Organised by Centre for Catalan Studies at QMUL with the support of IRLL