teaching merce rodoreda to freshmen

i chose to teach, as an example of the short novel, la placa del diamante, by merce rodoreda. it is a decent length for a survey literature course; it is a fairly stylistically digestible modernist novel by a woman writer (i love virginia woolf; however, i am loathe to spend too little time on to the lighthouse. perhaps my thought that it is too complex to pass over quickly is shaped by  my enormous admiration of woolf’s ability to compress such  complex  associations into smooth prose. rodoreda is fun to teach. i’ll write more on it later; my student’s comments are worth sharing. my secondary reason for teaching this novel is that i discovered rodoreda while i was briefly living in barcelona and was surprised to see so little about her in english language criticism, and to find that few literature professors had heard of her. maybe next time i’ll teach mirall trencat.