Mario Santana

My research and teaching concentrate on contemporary Iberian literatures, with particular emphasis on narrative, visual culture (film and television), and translation.  I am also interested in literary historiography, critical theory (hermeneutics and reception, gender studies, narratology, systemic and institutional approaches to literature) and cultural studies. 

In my view, the critical analysis of individual cultural objects is not at odds with attention to larger historical and social phenomena, although I am also convinced that the tasks of the literary scholar are not identical to those of the historian or the social scientist.  Thus, my teaching emphasizes the rigorous analysis of materials and issues from a perspective that is both informed by interdisciplinarity and engaged in the examination of the epistemological and methodological tools proper to our own discipline.

Within the field of Iberian Studies, I see the need to question the paradigm of national literature (traditionally centered on the autochthonous cultural production in the official State language) in order to account for the internal complexity of multilingual cultural realities in the Iberian peninsula, as well as the interliterary relations (with both continuities and disruptions, consonances and resistances) between Iberia and Latin America. It is in this vein that in Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962-1974 (Bucknell UP, 2000) I charted the course of Hispanic interliterary relations during the sixties and seventies through the analysis of the reception of the Latin American Boom Novel as the leading model for fictional writing in Spain. 

I have also written essays on media and memory in Catalan and Spanish television, the role of translation in Iberian interliterary relations, the fiction of Jaume Cabré, the novel of historical memory, the impact of translation in the Spanish literary system, and the institutionalization of Iberian Studies in the United States.

I am the faculty coordinator for the programs of Basque and Catalan Studies at the University of Chicago, and the current president of the North American Catalan Society (NACS).