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By amputating entire cultures from its purview, Hispanism skews the historical picture and misrepresents the contemporary system of relevance. Iberianism seeks to create propitious institutional conditions to incorporate to a pre-existing Humanities framework cultural realities that run against the grain of traditional disciplinary monolingualism. Such a model cannot be established without incorporating awareness that the various cultures’ relative positions in the Iberian system are the outcome of a militancy that has encouraged the negation of the other, to the point of forcing the silenced players into an institutional imperceptibility that has immediate effects on the marketplace. From an Iberian studies perspective, culture appears as a modality of being or, better yet, a transitional stage in the historical relations among social agents in peninsular space. Iberianism arose from the understanding that the deep-seated commonality of Iberian life manifests itself authentically only in modalities which cannot be identified with the subjacent unity without attacking its very essence.

This chapter proposes a revision of Dionyýz Ďurišin's concept of interliterary community and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of Field, in order to explain the possibilities of an inner comparative frame in Catalonia, in the context of Iberian peninsula. The main reflection by Ďurišin is a good framework to understand the place of Catalan literature within European literature in the twentieth century. But it is necessary to consider that interliterariness is deeply conditioned by tensions between the political, intellectual and literary fields. Catalonia develops a double interliterary process: on one hand, it belongs to the Iberian interliterary community, but on the other hand it relates to literatures written in Spanish in Catalonia and to an increasing number of works written in other languages there. In addition, Catalan literature has always been in functional proximity to European and American literatures. So a new definition of interliterary community from a Catalan point of view must take cognizance of the fact that Catalan literature relates to other literatures both outside and inside its nominal space, in a double dimension almost unique in Europe. In this respect, Catalan literature may play a key role in the contemporary redefinition of European cultural identity.