Pere Calders: Life, Exile, and Literary Recognition

Pere Calders: A Brief Biography

Pere Calders was born in Barcelona in 1912. He spent his childhood on a farm in the Vallès region. He went to study in Barcelona when his family moved there permanently. His father, Cinto, and the school stimulated his interest in literature. Since then, he never stopped writing.

His first book, The First Harlequin, was a collection of stories published just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After the war, he was forced into exile. After 15 years living in Mexico, he was able to publish a new collection of stories: Chronicles of the Hidden Truth.

After 23 years of exile, he returned to Catalonia. His work was not recognized until 1978, when he published stories, including Subtle Invasion, and when the show Antaviana premiered at the theater. In 1994, he died in the city where he was born.

Company: Dagoll Dagom.

Magic Realism

Magic Realism presents normal, everyday life events alongside a series of abnormal, unusual, extraordinary, or supernatural occurrences.

Theater Vocabulary

• Gallery: Circular tiers on the first-floor room.
• Dressing Rooms: Rooms where actors get dressed or change costumes.
• Stage: The part of the theater where decorations are placed and the dramatic action takes place.
• Coop: Floor plus the height of the room.
• Boxes: Compartments of the closed room with a small number of seats.
• Orchestra: Space in front of the stage where the musicians play.
• Orchestra Seats (Stalls): Ground floor of the hall.
• Proscenium: The front of the stage, between the stage and the orchestra.
• Lobby: Entrance that gives access to the interior parts of the building.

Linguistic Coreference

Coreferent linguistic elements: The relationship of meaning that exists in the same paragraph, where there may be several linguistic elements that refer to the same referent.

Mechanisms of Coreference:

1. Repetition of the same word.
2. Substitution by a synonym, hypernym, or hyponym (lexical substitution).
3. Substitution by a strong pronoun, demonstrative, or decisive.
4. Substitution by a weak pronoun (pronominal substitution).
5. Suppression of an element that can be interpreted from the context.

Related Concepts

• Synonym: A word that has the same meaning as another. Example: arid, dry.
• Hypernym: A word that has a wider, more general meaning than another. Example: furniture (includes) table.
• Hyponym: A word that has a more specific meaning than another. Example: Dove (is a type of) bird.
• Elision: The omission of one or more words (normally the subject) when the context allows for its interpretation.