Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity

Rise and Decline of an Urban Image

Joan Ramon Resina

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780804758321
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804787505
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's "coming of age" in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, Resina draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the "post-historical" city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION - The City as Social Form
• CHAPTER ONE - The Bourgeois City
• CHAPTER TWO - Imagined City
• CHAPTER THREE - Like Moths to a Lamp
• CHAPTER FOUR - A Sojourn with the Dead
• CHAPTER FIVE - The Divided City and the Divided Self
• CHAPTER SIX - The City of Eternal Returns
• CHAPTER SEVEN - From the Olympic Torch to the Universal Forum of Cultures The After-Image of Barcelona’s Modernity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index