Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (review)

In 2006 and 2007, the exhibition Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí visited Cleveland and New York as the first comprehensive survey of its kind available to an American public. This major exhibition on Catalan modernism, along with its accompanying catalog of the same title, unleashed Barcelona from ties with Spain demanding a greater recognition of the city's artistic achievements. Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity appears shortly after the exhibition further proclaiming that the city is a fascinating subject in and of itself. This book spans the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century in a thorough analysis of the formation of the modern image of Barcelona. By using "image" to refer to the "representational configuration in the social imaginary" (5), this book highlights Barcelona's determination to distinguish itself within Spain while defending that its quest for modernity has surpassed that of any other part of the country. In doing so, Resina situates the Mediterranean city among its major international counterparts such as Berlin, Paris, New York, and London. This book does not contain a history of modern Barcelona nor is it a survey of the literature that has been written about the city. Rather, this study weaves crucial moments in Barcelona's modern history with literary texts and cultural issues that have strongly impacted its urban image.

The book's "Introduction: The City as Social Form" addresses the subject of the city in general and stresses that "literature has been and remains a major source for understanding the modern city" (5). These first pages provide acute details of how a city holds on to an image and sets forth transformations of Barcelona's image, identity, and sense of self throughout modernity. The following six chapters revolve around topics including, but not limited to, Barcelona's growth and development, the Spanish Civil War, the Post-Franco period, language, immigration, and the relationship between the Catalan capital and Catalonia. In order to demonstrate the significance of these moments in Barcelonans' reality at a given time, Resina offers careful readings of narrative works like Narcís Oller's La febre d'or (The Gold Rush, 1889–1892), Mercé Rodoreda's La plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves, 1962). Juan Marsé's El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover, 1990), and Eduardo Mendoza's The City of Marvels (La ciudad de los prodigios, 1986). As Resina examines the role of Barcelona in these novels, he also explains the meaning of certain city spaces—Eixample, Liceu, Sagrada Família, Gràcia, Walden 7—to Barcelona's modernity. Chapter 3, "Like Moths to a Lamp: Foreigners in Barcelona's Red-Light District," is particularly vibrant as it marks the entrance into the twentieth century with an examination of the colorful accounts of the city's Barrio Chino, or Fifth District, in a variety of texts by both local and foreign writers. Just as Resina insists on Barcelona as a singular place, he treats these literary works in the same way. Although the majority of the titles studied in this book are not unfamiliar to scholars, Resina does not emphasize their relationship to Catalan or Spanish literary canons. Rather, his focus is to study Barcelona as their protagonist.

The closing chapter, "From the Olympic Torch to the Universal Forum of Cultures: The After-Image of Barcelona's Modernity," is somewhat detached from the rest of the book as it lacks literary examples. However, Resina warns of this absence in the introduction as he states that "since 1992 Barcelona as changed so rapidly that it will take literature some time to catch up" (9). Instead, this chapter, raising awareness of the more recent debates regarding the city's politics, focuses on how the 1992 Olympics and the Universal Forum of Cultures in 2004 shaped Barcelona's image. Resina incorporates his previously coined term "after-image" in order to discuss, in each case, how "the event itself was...