Les raons de la crítica catalana contemporània

Abstract

The critical review, as a non-fictional literary genre and modality which is not subordinate to the literature of observation, is developing today in Catalonia with growing dynamism in response to a social demand for this type of analytical, creative and popular essay. Julià Guillamon, Ponç Puigdevall, Manel Ollé and Xavier Pla, who are strongly represented in the principal newspapers, form a group of essay writers who turn the critical review into a genre privileged by their dedication to good writing, while understanding it as an exercise in comprehension, sense and aesthetic reasoning, acid and without complexes, which abhors soulless professional rhetoric of ideological instrumentation. Followers of the legacy of Carles Riba, Gabriel Ferrater, Joan Fuster, Josep Pla and Marià Manent, they construct a coherent model which argues for clarity and concision, creativity, and pragmatism as opposed to methodological purity and enumeration focusing on qualities and defects penetrating the territory of the significant detail, with independence, loyal to the readers and rejecting the cliché of the intellectual imposter.