Societies, Cultures and Modern Languages

A "writing workshop" with the author and 15 LLCER students (bachelor and master), conceived as a sharing of experiences and a visit to an author's "kitchen". Miguel Ángel Hernández led a workshop in which, paradoxically, nobody wrote anything. He insisted on the long time required for literary writing, so that students would understand that a workshop should be used to "think" about writing, not to write in a few hours. He therefore emphasized the importance of long time and the distance necessary for writing to become literature. The concept of literature was at the heart of the discussion.
The students particularly appreciated the opportunity to meet an author they had been working on, and were able to ask questions related to debates we had had in class, or to their own questions. Thanks to the collaboration of an M2 student, we were able to produce a podcast with the "on-the-spot" reactions of a few students after the meeting.

The second part of the meeting consisted of a dialogue with the author, moderated by the event's organizer. The audience was broader (students, teachers, with a French translation for non-Hispanists provided by an ILCEA4 contract PhD student who teaches in the Spanish subsection). Some of the students present were able to ask the questions they had prepared in connection with the work they had done in class, leading to some particularly profound exchanges.

Inviting this author was a real opportunity for the students to think about literature in a different way.