Antithetical Landscapes in Spanish and Catalan Nationalism By Prof. Joan Ramon Resina – Stanford University

Landscape is sometimes considered the product of human relations and economic activity. But it can also be an exercise in projection, the formation of what the psychological literature knows as a construct. Landscape can, in other words, serve as a screen to represent an abstract or ideological conception of the society that begets it. Such projections can turn an actual landscape into an idea, or they can idealize social relations in representations of the landscape. This lecture will examine the role of the landscape in the formalization of the two major ideas of nation in the Iberian Peninsula at the turn of the XIXth century, namely the myth of Castile created by the writers of the Generation of ’98 and the ideal of a classic Catalan country theorized by noucentisme’s primary spokesman Eugeni d’Ors.