Eugeni d’Ors i el periodisme d’idees

Having discarded with disdain the modernists’ idea of “art for art’s sake”, Eugeni d’Ors decided at an early age to stop being a mere spectator-citizen and to become a journalist who felt both indebted to and solidarity with the society which had welcomed him. Ors attempted to define for the first time the modern intellectual in Catalonia. Neither Maragall, nor of course Alomar, Casellas, Pijoan, Brossa, Coromines or Rovira i Virgili, ever managed to even begin to intuit the movement of roles within the Catalan literary sphere which all of this entailed. Eugeni d’Ors adhered to a literature of social participation without renouncing a unique desire for style and a cultural ambition which was unprecedented in Catalonia. The novelty was that Ors tried to use his literary prestige to give credibility to a new way of writing which was intended to reverberate in public life, an extraordinary discourse in a Catalonia which was undergoing a complete political transformation.