SPAN315

This four-credit course, entirely conducted in Spanish, offers an exploration of the literary and artistic production of women in the Hispanic Americas since the 17th century. We will read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works by renowned women writers, as well as critical essays on gender and women’s writing. We will also consider films and documentaries by and on women, as well as analyze popular songs for clues about the strategies that women in Latin America and the Latino U.S. have embraced in order to challenge multiple structures of power. From Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in colonial Mexico to well-known storytellers in post-dictatorial Chile, women have explicitly or implicitly upheld the power of literature and the arts to question colonial legacies and creatively reimagine their lives. A modern-day Scheherazade, Isabel Allende’s emblematic protagonist in “Dos palabras” (Two Words) deploys words in order to tame a feared general and save her people from strife and violence, reinventing and decolonizing their world. Exploring how such notions as gender, sex, maternal instincts, and female eroticism are discursively constructed helps to envision a social and cultural project that empowers women and, by extension, our students. This is not to say that all Latina women share the same concerns and the same goals. The course will also grapple with intersectionality, showing how the writers’ and artists’ racial, ethnic, and social background shape variable sites of contestation.
General Education: This course fulfills a requirement in the culture and creativity distribution category.