"Barcelona and the Challenges of Globalization"
by Brad Epps

"La urbanització contra la urbanitat"
by Xavier Rubert de Ventós

Taking his cue from diverse yet complementary quotes from José Ortega y Gasset and Eugeni d'Ors, famed philosopher and cultural critic Xavier Rubert de Ventós examines some of the ties and tensions between urbanization as a geo-architectural and political practice and urbanity as a social, even moral, practice. Offering what he presents as an archeological and etymological review of terms and concepts, and addressing the widespread perception of a crisis in civic values, the author examines the relations between the city as material and symbolic space and tact, respect, manners, conduct, and sociability.

"Al caliu de la Rosa de Foc: apropiacions insolents de l'espai públic a Barcelona (1996-2004)"
by Manuel Delgado

In contrast to the triumphant vision of Barcelona as a center of design, fashion, and tourism, the city that Manuel Delgado explores is one that is profoundly marked by the power of the street and popular movements. Drawing on collective ethnographic research on public space, Delgado considers the ties and tensions between urbanism and urbanity; the city as planned by politicians, engineers, architects, and designers and the city as practiced by its inhabitants and visitors; official monumentalizations and popular mobilizations. After an overview of the uses of the street in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (ranging from religious processions to revolutionary barricades), the focus shifts to anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, and pro-okupa demonstrations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

"The Sociolinguistic Situation of Catalan at the Turn of the 21st Century: Immigration and Intergenerational Transmission"
by Llorenç Comajoan

This article provides an overview of the Catalan sociolinguistic situation at the turn of the 21st century as well as an introduction to the so-called integrationist approach in sociolinguistics, which takes into account issues of social structure and local practice. The article identifies and discusses three main challenges for Catalan: the sociolinguistic situation of the language prior to heightened immigration in the 1990s; attitudes towards the new immigrants (largely from Africa, Latin America, and Asia), and the intergenerational transmission of Catalan. Each challenge is discussed in light of the current sociolinguistic research based on census data and surveys. The article concludes with a consideration of future prospects for the Catalan language within the changing political and social climate of Spain and Catalonia.

"Variació condicionada: aspectes qualitatius i quantitatius"
by Maria-Rosa Lloret

The goal of this paper is to show that, although variation sometimes affects a small number of items, it never is completely arbitrary. It is rather conditioned by the grammatical system of a language (qualitative factors) and the quantitative effects that this grammatical system causes when it applies to a specific lexicon. Examples are drawn primarily from the verbal system of Balearic Catalan. The analysis of the data further shows that, even though retrospectively it is possible to explain why variation occurs under certain circumstances, it does not seem possible to predict which change will inevitably take place in a given situation.

"Joan Maragall, at the Edge of Modernity (in Memory of Arthur Terry)"
by Geoffrey Ribbans

In a tribute to the renowned scholar of Catalan literature, Arthur Terry, this paper offers a reassessment of certain aspects of the poet Joan Maragall. Maragall gives the appearance in his private and public life of being a typically patriarchal figure of the Barcelona bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impression is borne out in his article on "the Spanish woman" published in 1909 in The Englishwoman, in which, in a manner most conventional, the poet limits women's activity to the home and the church. Yet Maragall also reveals less conventional concerns that may be more properly considered as modern. Showing an unusual awareness of the complex nature of the violence that plagued Barcelona, he advocates-in both verse and prose-compassion rather than revenge. He also reaches out to Castilian writers like Unamuno and Giner de los Ríos. In his poetry, he seeks a distinctive spontaneity redolent of the more concentrated aspects of German romanticism and parallel in many ways to symbolism. At the same time he expresses an intense sense of temporality that leads him in his "Cant espiritual" to reconsider Faust's pact with Mephistopheles.

"Escenaris de Barcelona: pretextos de poesia"
by Francesc Parcerisas

Starting from the proposition that modern poetry may well be unimaginable without the city, Francesc Parcerisas provides a critical overview, via Baudelaire, of the representation of Barcelona from Verdaguer's "A Barcelona" to Gabriel Ferrater's "La ciutat." Although the city is not yet the exclusive scenario of literary imagination for Verdaguer, Oller, Rusiñol, and even Maragall, it becomes so for Joan Salvat-Papasseit -the first poet to write, as it were, from the belly of Barcelona itself- and for Josep Maria de Sagarra, who takes the city as a spectacle lived from within. Josep Carner, Mercè Rodoreda, Marià Manent, Joaquim Renard, and Pere Quart, no less than a number of foreign writers from the Civil War, all contribute to reflections on the city as the paradigmatic site of the "shared" plays of anonymity, individualism, and desire, of growth, revolution, and utopia, that mark modernity.

"La gran encisera: Three Odes to Barcelona, and a Film"
by Josep Miquel Sobrer

Three odes to Barcelona, written by Jacint Verdaguer, Joan Maragall, and "Pere Quart" [Joan Oliver] respectively, make clear the changing faces of the city. For Verdaguer, Barcelona is an expansive metropolis on its way to greatness. For Maragall, Barcelona, while rocked by conflict, remains the inescapable center and "great enchantress" of Catalan life. For Pere Quart, Barcelona is the locus of a sweeping revolution aimed at bringing about a new social order -a hope promptly shattered by the Spanish war of 1936-39. The three odes roughly correspond to three generations and offer a poetic history of the city. Skipping a generation and shifting from poetry to film, the article addresses Barcelona at the turn of the twentieth century as seen by Pedro Almodóvar in his 1998 Oscar-winning film, Todo sobre mi madre. In Almodóvar's portrait, Barcelona is detached from its role as Catalan capital and becomes a globalized city for postmodern pilgrimages. As if to underscore this move, the celebrated technique known as trencadís employed by Gaudí and other modernists (and consisting of broken pieces of ceramic put together to form new ornamental compositions) serves as a symbolic backdrop to a number of characters who flock to the city to give new meaning to their fragmented selves.

"Barcelona en literatura: imatges en conflicte"
by Jordi Castellanos

This essay attempts to demonstrate the diversity of literary images that the city of Barcelona generates since the advent of modernity. The images are contradictory because, on the one hand, they showcase the well-ordered bourgeois city that attempts to dignify the old neighborhoods by turning them into museums (the "barri gòtic"), and, on the other hand, they uncover poverty, prostitution, and anarchist rebellion (the "barri xino").

"'Decrèpita i teatral'? On Literary Explorations of Barcelona"
by Enric Bou

Two novels, Montserrat Roig's El temps de les cireres (1976) and Luis Goytisolo's Recuento (1973), provide numerous examples of how walking in the city can be a particularly significant experience, profoundly marked by history and politics. This article discusses the ways that Roig and Goytisolo guide their characters and readers into an urban jungle of words with a very precise purpose: the critical interpretation of space according to the values of the writer in the present. Proffering a quasi-archeological reading of a jumble of temporal traces scrawled on the walls of old buildings, Goytisolo's narrator expresses, in a manner not unlike that of Roig's characters, a complex mise en question of the past and the present. In Roig's novel, what comes to the fore is the funereal-like theatricality of the old Ribera neighborhood, which functions not only as a space of habitation but also as a setting for cultural memory and the representation of Catalan history.

"Of Appearance and Disappearance: Theatre and Barcelona (Catalunya invisible, Part II)"
by Sharon G. Feldman

The relationship between place and stage, and between landscape and theatre, can be enormously revealing in terms of a playwright's sense of self, identity, and culture. During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, a paradoxical phenomenon occurred whereby the city of Barcelona -or Catalunya, for that matter- as an image, notion, rhetorical figure, or poetic trope seemed to have all but vanished from the contemporary Catalan stage (specifically, from the realm of text-based drama). In the new millennium, however, Barcelona is gradually becoming visible on the stage once again. The three contemporary playwrights examined here -Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Llüisa Cunillé, and Sergi Belbel- have all displayed an awareness of the aesthetic and political implications of a dialectic of visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance.

"Izas, rabizas y colipoterras: un àlbum furtiu"
by Joan Fontcuberta

This essay examines the work of Joan Colom, a Catalan photographer who has come to receive a welter of honors, including the National Prize in Photography, but whose career has been anything but easy and uninterrupted. Colom's fame derives largely from Izas, rabizas y colipoterras, a photo-book produced in collaboration with Camilo José Cela that focuses on the prostitutes of the Barri Xino of Barcelona and that quickly acquired a cult status among members of the "divine left" critical of Franco's morally smug regime. Addressing tensions between amateurism and professionalism, art and documentation, the studio and the street, and the image and the word, Fontcuberta presents Colom's work as a radiography in which the camera serves as an instrument of political critique and the vibrancy and sordidness of street life come to the fore. Inimitable as the book is, it nonetheless allows for productive comparisons with more recent, feminist inflected work on streets, streetwalkers, and sex workers from beyond Barcelona: Susan Meiselas's Carnival Strippers; Elisabeth B's Das ist ja zum Peepen; Merry Alpern's Dirty Windows, and Erika Langley's The Lusty Lady.

"Desire at the Kiosk: Publicity and Barcelona in the 1930s"
by Jordana Mendelson

Publicity in Barcelona during the 1930s generated some remarkable examples of visual modernity that at the same time function as indicators of a wide-spread cultural practice motivated by the intersection of applied psychology and photographic experimentation. One of the foremost theoreticians and practitioners of the use of photography in advertising was Pere Català-Pic, who through his involvement with the Generalitat's Institut Psicotècnic was also a leader in the rationalization and teaching of publicity. This essay examines Català-Pic's work in the light of his critical writings on the photo-technician and his central role in the transformation of commercial publicity into political propaganda during the Civil War, a process that drew upon the debates of the previous decade and that is illuminated through the study of Català-Pic's public and private correspondence with Pedro Prat-Gaballí.

"Genealogía de la arquitectura contemporánea en Cataluña: hijos del 92"
byJosep Maria Montaner and Zaida Muxí

This article, rich in detail, provides an overview of architecture in Barcelona in the wake of the 1992 Olympics and, by extension, a "recent genealogy of modernity." Although the emphasis falls on younger, less established architects and architectural teams, the authors provide a critical review-via reference to the avant-garde legacy of the GATCPAC (Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània)-of the Grup R, Oriol Bohigas and the "Escola de Barcelona," Óscar Tusquets, Albert Viaplana, Helio Piñón, and others. Centered on architecture, the article also engages concurrent developments in literature, painting, and film. In its attention to smaller works wavering between the contrasting if complementary values of seny and rauxa, it provides a critical take on the penchant for large emblematic structures by (often foreign) architectural superstars.

"Barcelona, terra de promissió: el descobriment de l'anonimat"
by Maria Barbal

The massive emigration of people from villages, towns, and small cities to the metropolis of Barcelona in the 1960s has constituted the primary motivation for my writing. In the following article, I reflect on the various meanings that movement to the Catalan capital has for the characters in three of my novels: Pedra de tartera, Càmfora, and Carrer Bolívia. The city becomes a home and a dream; it becomes a site of anonymity full of challenges and promises; it becomes, in short, a test of adaptation. There is no real return to the point of departure, only the transformation of the individual citizen and of the urban body.

"Del desert a la terra promesa: 40 anys de literatura dramàtica a Barcelona"
by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet

Celebrated playwright Josep Maria Benet i Jornet offers a personally inflected overview of the last forty years of theater in Catalonia. A strong defender of textually based productions, Benet notes that the Catalan language, marginalized under Franco, does not exactly come booming center stage once the dictator disappears. Whether in its strictly commercial or more experimental and independent forms (or in combinations thereof), theater in Catalonia appeared to have little room for Catalan authors, living or dead. By the mid-1980s, however, the situation had changed, and the authors of theatrical works (Sergi Belbel, Lluïsa Cunillé, Carles Batlle, Jordi Galzeran, Jordi Sànchez, and others) were once again in demand in alternative, private, and public venues.

"The Reason Behind Food of Love: Some Comments about Bringing, through my Catalan Eyes and a Group of Exceptional British Actors, an American Novel to the Screen"
by Ventura Pons

Ventura Pons, arguably the most important film director in the Catalan language (and one of the most important directors in European cinema in general), provides an intimate look into the inspiration, conceptualization, and realization of Food of Love. Besides being one of the director's rare ventures into the English language, Food of Love is also, as is often the case with Pons, an adaptation of a prior literary work, here David Leavitt's The Page Turner. Struck by the force of a story of love, sex, and ambition among men, Ventura Pons grapples with questions that go beyond the gay U.S. context in which the story is originally set and that bear on some of the more affective aspects of the interaction of people in the so-called Western world: questions of personal integrity and fulfillment, of desire and disillusionment, of "sentimental education" and family ties.