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Joan Ramón Resina
Identity in the Market. The Catalan Writer and the Ideology of «xarneguisme» (I) [JOAN RAMON RESINA] To this date Juan Marsé's El amante bilingüe, a novel published in 1990, remains the most explicit literary intervention in Catalonia's language conflict. Although essentially a send up of political figures and institutions of the first post-Franco Catalan government, the novel focuses on the social polarization around language triggered by the first steps towards the rehabilitation of Catalan after Spain's transition to a constitutional regime in 1978. More concretely, this novel is the first literary reaction to the Language Normalization Law, approved in 1983 with the support of all political parties. At first sight, then, this work deploys precise temporal and spatial coordinates. Yet this very specificity occludes a thick historical soil and, the author argues, a complex sociological background, which must be brought into the interpretative purview inasmuch as the
