The body of the controversy: on the Dispute between Clarín and Prat de la Riba: On the Dispute between Clarín and Prat de la Riba

Abstract

Leopoldo Alas and Enric Prat de la Riba maintained an important controversy over the Catalan language in 1896. The characteristics of this discussion not only illustrate certain internal contradictions of Clarinian criticism about the multiculturalism of the Spanish nation, but also the recurrences of a defensive gesture that the Catalan intelligentsia decided to
show in several philological debates of the nineteenth century. Likewise, this controversy also reveals a certain metaphor of the bodily organism whose dialectic between head, heart and language comes to update the conflicts raised by the dynamic description of the national being.