The Urbanization of Subjectivity: Ildefons Cerdà’s Urbanización and Catalan Narrative Fiction

This thesis examines the construction of ‘urbanized’ subjectivity in four works of Catalan narrative fiction. The concept of ‘urbanized’ subjectivity is assembled from the ideas of Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà as outlined in his Teoría general de la urbanización (1867), a text which is both a historical overview of how humanity has become urban and a speculative blueprint for future urbanization. The thesis identifies the implied human subject of Cerdà’s process of urbanización and explores the use of this particular take on subjectivity as a critical framework in literary studies. Discussion is structured into five chapters, the first of which analyses Cerdà’s key concepts, while the next four chapters are dedicated to analysis of the literary texts. The corpus of texts includes: Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or (1890-92), Caterina Albert’s Un film (3000 metres) (1926), Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Vida privada (1932) and the satirical novel Retorn al sol (1936), by Josep Maria Francès, with further illustration provided by Llorenç Villalonga’s Andrea Víctrix (1974). The chapters ask the following questions: does Cerdà’s concept of urbe mirror the praxis of novel writing?; to what extent does urbanización, in both its psychological and material dimensions, regulate the social order?; and how does urbanización characterize the tension between the individual and the collective? The thesis argues that placing Cerdà’s theory in dialogue with literary texts offers two substantial contributions. First, authors of fiction implicitly critique urbanización, challenging Cerdà’s claims and helping to iron out the ambiguities in his theory. Second, analysing literature using the principles of urbanización elucidates the unstable nature of the urban experience in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Barcelona, which urbanización is designed to regulate. By reading Cerdà alongside narrative fiction, the thesis finds that Cerdà’s project constitutes part of the expansion of liberalism and capitalism, which, in varying degrees, limit the successes of the implementation of urbanización.