Nation, Gender and Social Justice in Isabel-Clara Simó's Newspaper Columns

Abstract

This article reviews the newspaper contributions by Isabel-Clara Simo, one of the most prestigious Catalan intellectuals today. Little has been discussed by critics about this part of Simo's writing and thus the primary focus of this article is to give a first overview of this production. Over the last few years opinion columns and articles have become a favorite topic for analysis in Spanish and Catalan studies. Publishing houses have also started publishing collections of newspaper articles, traditionally regarded as subordinate to fiction. The theoretical framework used is, on one hand, a contemporary argumentation theory —to examine columns as a persuasive genre— and, on the other, studies on discourse and power. Readings by Foucault and recent research on critical discourse analysis prove highly useful to understand Simo's political columns as an example of resistance discourse, which is characteristic of minority groups and ideologies and confronts the discourse of power or the social elite. It is o...