Teresa Vallès, lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at UIC Barcelona, presented a paper at the Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature “Le Jeu: Gaming, Gambling and Play in Literature”, which took place at the Sorbonne University (Paris) from 2 to 6 September. Her speech, entitled “La literatura como juego: la novela como juego con la tradición, con la autorialidad y con el lector” [Literature as play: the novel as a play with tradition, with authorship and with the reader], explored this link from the perspective of fictional authors who support poetics inspired by the hermeneutics of the game.
Dr Vallès led a panel at the congress on the influence of Cervantes’ vision of “literature as a game” on contemporary literature. “We are three professors who have worked together on the Carlos Pujol research project that we have been carrying out at UIC Barcelona in recent years. This panel, however, is the first activity of a new research project that deals precisely with literature as a game in 20th-century writers,” explained the researcher.
The panel aimed to explore Cervantes' legacy of the poetics of literature as play, analysing the dialogue with this legacy in the explicit poetics of 20th century Spanish novelists such as Fernando Savater, Javier Marías and Carlos Pujol, as well as Milan Kundera's theory of the novel. The panel featured Dr Iris Llop, University of Barcelona, and Dr Santiago Bertrán, University of Warwick (United Kingdom).
