Friday, April 21, 2023: Writers and literary branding - Barcelona, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

• 11h. Lecture by prof. Enrique Santos Unamuno (Universidad de Extremadura):
• Miguel de Unamuno and Literary Branding: From Cultural Saint to Celebrity (in Spanish). Room 40.047A (building Roger de Llúria). Hibrid format. Sign up.
• 12:30h. Seminar with ESCORE members and guests about CALIBRAM project (Literatura&Cía: Canon, mediación y cultural branding en los sistemas (pos) literarios ibéricos,ss. XX-XXI). Room 40.047A (building Roger de Llúria).
• 16h. Meeting of ESCORE project members. Room 40.249 (building Roger de Llúria).

On April 21, 2023 we welcomed at UPF Professor Enrique Santos Unamuno (U Extremadura), who presented a case-study in posliterary celebrity. Jaume Subirana introduced the lecture suggesting that the study of cultural saints expands traditional imagology to include an updated understanding of the interactions between authorship, literature and culture. Professor Santos explained Miguel de Unamuno's fame, torn between two opposite political visions while alive and once dead, that of the españolazo and that of the eternal rebel, yet he argued that the figure of the Intellectual doesn't fully account for Unamuno's impact in Spanish culture because such definition of a writer entails a foreign separation of spheres within the cultural field, inherited from French theory. Professor Santos proposed instead to examine appropriations of Unamuno in contemporary Spain under mass capitalism and offered a model-theory to account for the different layers of canonical preservation and posliterary permanence that are characteristic of the Iberian literary system.

This lecture was followed by a seminar introducing CALIBRAN Project from U Extremadura. Professor Santos described how they are developing a database of posliterary examples based on individual case-studies of writers or literary characters alive in popular imagination, whether highbrow or lowbrow.