“El anverso de lo cotidiano: percepción woolfiana en la cuentística de Rodoreda, Roig, Alós y Riera”

Conventional understandings of perception have long undergirded traditional readings of Modernist texts in adopting a predominantly subject-centred perspective that separates subject from object in a vertical and hierarchical relationship. I argue that a consideration of Virginia Woolf’s short stories in dialogue with four generations of twentieth-century Catalan women writers who followed her work closely suggests an entirely different epistemological framework of perception in which subject and object are fluidly and horizontally organised. Mercè Rodoreda, Concha Alós, Montserrat Roig and Carme Riera establish a horizontal fictional dialogue that constitutes a return to the object that decentres the subject, resulting in an alternative understanding of quotidian reality in which objects acquire a life and agency proper to subjects. I draw an evolutionary thought line between these stories and current feminist New Materialisms that propose precisely the dissolution of constructed binomial limits between perceiving and perceived, human and non-human, and nature and materiality as a liberating new way of conceiving our world because it redefines social power along a horizontal axis.  I thus locate Woolf and her Catalan counterparts on an epistemological continuum—and an intergenerational theoretical genealogy—with theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Sarah Ahmed and Samantha Frost, whose collective new materialist thinking ideates a salutary shift toward care economies and democratised social dynamics.

"Las voces de Irene Solà y Maria Arnal y Marcel Bagés: relaciones alternativas con el Antropoceno”. Repensar los cuidados en el Antropoceno: aspectos sociales, comunitarios y medioambientales. II Jornadas Virtuales ALCESXXI. Julio 2021

"Vuelta a la materia: epistemologías liberadoras en la cuentística de Mercè Rodoreda”. Biannual forum Nuestro Rumbo: Rutas de investigación en Hispanic Studies. University of Kentucky. February 2021.

"Reescribiendo a la mujer desde la tragedia: La Novia de Paula Ortiz”. Cine-Lit 9: Mujer y Género. University of Oregon, Portland State University, and Oregon State University. March 2019.

“Metamorfosis de lo cotidiano: percepción en La meva Cristina i altres contes de Rodoreda”. Asociación de Licenciados y Doctores Españoles en Estados Unidos (ALDEEU), “Thomas Jefferson y el universo hispano (1818-2018).” University of Virginia. June 2018.

Publishing reader certificate, Cursiva, Penguin Random House, Spain, 2020.

Reader of the editorial board for the 6^th volume of Nomenclatura: aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos, University of Kentucky Department of Hispanic Studies, 2018.