Introductory description

This module explores questions of gender and feminist thinking across different periods of Hispanic culture, from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

The module will be divided into three sections.

Weeks 1-3: Gender and Knowledge in the Golden Age. This section will explore the presentation of established gender roles in early modern writing and the criticisms of the status quo voiced by María de Zayas and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This will be done by analyzing both writers’ ideological positions, which take the issue of women’s access to education as a starting point for a defence of female equality more broadly, before assessing how – and how completely – those ideologies are reflected in both authors’ literary output, and what challenges they pose to the unquestioned privileging of the male self in early modern culture.
Texts: María de Zayas, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, Desengaños amorosos (extracts); Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Respuesta a la muy ilustre sor Filotea de la Cruz’ and short accompanying dossier.

Weeks 4-7: Gender and Knowledge in the Hispanic Enlightenment. This section will focus on how gender discourse in eighteenth-century Spain introduced new ideas about the role and education of women, but also continued previous intellectual debates (introduced in the first section of the module) that had been current since the fifteenth century. We will study two crucial and controversial texts which highlight the rational equality debate carried out at the heart of the Spanish empire: Benedictine friar Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s ‘Defensa de las mujeres’ (1726) and erudite writer Josefa Amar y Borbón’s ‘Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres’ (1786). The former asserted women’s rational equality with men and defended their intellectual capacity, while the latter stoutly defended women’s right to receive an education and to participate practically in the public sphere. Finally, we will look at women’s experience in society, family, education, love and marriage through Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s play El sí de las niñas (1806).

Weeks 8-10: Gender and Knowledge in the Long Nineteenth Century. In this section we will analyse the evolution of women's demands in nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on three Galician women writers and philosophers often considered as pioneers of the so-called First Wave of Spanish Feminism. The first session will explore Rosalía de Castro's insightful account of the discrimination faced by women writers at the time. This will be followed by two sessions focused on Concepción Arenal's and Emilia Pardo Bazán's contributions to feminist thinking in Spain, touching topics such as access to education and labour market, gay marriage, violence against women, inclusive language and women's suffrage.
Texts: Rosalía de Castro, La hija del mar (extracts) and Las literatas. Carta a Eduarda; Concepción Arenal, La mujer del porvenir; Emilia Pardo Bazán, La mujer española y otros escritos (extracts) and short accompanying dossier.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• An awareness of contemporary debates about gender and the role of women in different historical periods
• An ability to produce detailed close readings of complex texts, with reference to their context and analysis of stylistic features
• Intercultural awareness, understanding and competence
• Refined knowledge of language varieties, register, genre, nuances of meaning and language use
• Ability to access, read, and critically analyze primary and secondary source materials in the target language
• Familiarity with the methodologies and approaches appropriate to the discipline

Indicative reading list

Section one:
Primary texts:
Zayas y Sotomayor, María de, Honesto entretenimiento y sarao, ed. Julián Olivares, 2 vols. (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2017). [Extracts]
Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, The Answer/La respuesta, ed. and tr. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (New York: Feminist Press, City University of New York, 1994)
Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, Poesía lírica, ed. José Carlos González Boixo, Letras Hispánicas 351 (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001). [Extracts]

Secondary reading:
Albers, Irene, and Uta Felten, eds., Escenas de transgresión: María de Zayas en su contexto literario-cultural (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2009).
Archer, Robert, The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005).
Berg, Sander, The Marvellous and the Miraculous in María de Zayas, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 40 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019).
Bergmann, Emilie, ‘The Exclusion of the Femenine in the Cultural Discourse of the Golden Age: Juan Luis Vives and Fray Luis de León’, in Alain Saens-Saint, ed., Religion, Body, and Gender in Early Modern Spain (San Francisco: Mellen Research UP, 1991), pp. 124-36.
Brooke, Alice, ‘“Las ciencias curiosas”: Curiosity, Studiousness, and the New Philosophy in the Carta de Sor Filotea de la Cruz and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94.7 (2017), 697-713.
Brownlee, Marina S., The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
Dopico Black, Georgina, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2001).
Foa, Sandra M., Feminismo y forma narrativa: Estudio del tema y las técnicas de María de Zayas y Sotomayor (Valencia: Albatros Hispanófila Ediciones, 1979).
Franco, Jean, ‘Sor Juana explores space’, in Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), pp. 23-54.
Greer, Margaret Rich., María de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
Griswold, Susan C., ‘Topoi and Rhetorical Distance: The “Feminism” of María de Zayas’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 14.2 (1980), 97-116.
Howe, Elizabeth Teresa, Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), especially pp. 157-86.
Jed, Stephanie, ‘Gender, Rationality, and the Marketing of Knowledge’, in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 195-208.
Langle de Paz, Teresa, ‘Beyond the Canon: New Documents on the Feminist Debate in Early Modern Spain’, Hispanic Review 70.3 (2002), 393-420.
Merrim, Stephanie, Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999).
Merrim, Stephanie, ed., Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
Myers, Kathleen, ‘Sor Juana’s Respuesta: Rewriting the Vitae’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14 (1990), 459-71.
O’Brien, Eavan, Women in the Prose of María de Zayas (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010).
Paz, Octavio, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o las trampas de la fe, 2nd ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994).
Perelmuter Pérez, Rosa, ‘La estructura retórica de la Respuesta a Sor Filotea’, Hispanic Review 51.2 (1983), 147-58.
Powell, Amanda, ‘Revisiting the Querelle in María de San José Salazar and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Inciting Disturbances of Patriarchy’, Letras Femeninas 35.1 (2009), 211-32.
Rhodes, Elizabeth, Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in Zayas’s ‘Desengaños’ (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
Scott, Nina M., ‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: “Let your women keep silence in the churches…”’, Women’s Studies International Forum 8 (1985), 511-19.
Scott, Nina M., ‘“If you are not pleased to favor me, put me out of your mind…”: gender and authority in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the translation of her letter to the Reverend Father Maestro Antonio Núñez of the Society of Jesus’, Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1988), 429-38.
Simerka, Barbara, ‘Feminist Epistemology and Premodern Patriarchy, East and West: The Kagero Diary by Michitsuna’s Mother and the Novellas of María de Zayas’, Letras Femeninas 35.1 (2009), 149-67.
Terry, Arthur, ‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: the end of a tradition’, in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The power of artifice (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 238-55.
Vollendorf, Lisa, Reclaiming the Body: María de Zayas’s Early Modern Feminism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Vollendorf, Lisa, ed., Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001), especially pp. 88-102, 103-20.
Welles, Marcia L., ‘María de Zayas y Sotomayor and her novela cortesana: a re-evaluation’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 55.4 (1978), 301-09.
Willis, Angela L., ‘Fleeing the Model Home: María de Zayas Rewrites the Rules of Feminine Sensuality and Honra in the Boccaccesca Novela Cortesana’, Letras Femeninas 35.2 (2009), 65-89.

Primary texts:
Feijoo, Benito Jerónimo, 'Defensa de las mujeres', in Teatro Crítico Universal, ed. by Ángel Raimundo Fernández González (Madrid: Cátedra, 2006).
Amar y Borbón, Josefa, Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (1790) [extracts], translated in Barker, Joanna M., In Defence of Women, MHRA New Translations, Vol. 14 (Cambridge: MHRA, 2018).
Joyés y Blake, Inés, Apología de las mujeres (1798) [extracts] Translated in Barker, Joanna M., In Defence of Women, MHRA New Translations, Vol. 14 (Cambridge: MHRA, 2018).
Fernández de Moratín, Leandro, El sí de las niñas, ed. by Emilio Martínez Mata (Madrid: Cátedra, 2010).

Secondary reading:
Bolufer Peruga, Mónica, Mujeres e Ilustración: la construcción de la feminidad en la Ilustración española (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnánim, 1998).
Bolufer Peruga, Mónica, Mujeres e ilustración: una perspectiva europea, Cuadernos de historia moderna, 6 (2007), 181-201.
Bolufer Peruga, Mónica, La vida y escritura en el siglo XVIII: Inés Joyés: Apología de las Mujeres (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia. Servei de publicacions, 2008).
Franklin Lewis, Elizabeth and Catherine M. Jaffe (eds.), Eve's Enlightenment: Women's Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839 (LSU Press, 2019).
Franklin Lewis, Elizabeth, Mónica Bolufer Peruga and Catherine M. Jaffe (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2020).
Kitts, Sally-Ann, The Debate on the Nature, Role and Influence of Woman in Eighteenth-Century Spain (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995).
Kitts, Sally-Ann, Power, Opposition and Enlightenment in Moratín's 'El sí de las niñas'', Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 86 (2009), 193-212.
Lehner, Ulrich L. (ed.), Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism. A Transnational Biographical History (London: Routledge, 2017).
Palacios Fernández, Emilio, La mujer y las letras en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2002)
Pao, Maria T., 'Educating Paquita: The Maid and Moratín', Dieciocho, 37 (2014), 81-103.
Smith, Theresa Ann, The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Smith, Theresa Ann, 'Writing out of the Margins: Women, Translation, and the Spanish Enlightenment', Journal of Women's History, 15.1 (2003), 116-43.

Section three:
Primary texts
Arenal, Concepción. 1869. La mujer del porvenir. La educación en la mujer. (2019 edition by Publisher E-Litterae).
Castro, Rosalía de. 1859. La hija del mar. (2005 edition by Akal Publishers)
Castro, Rosalía de. 1866. Las literatas. Carta a Eduarda. Almanaque de Galicia. (2010 edition by Edwin Meller, with English translation, prepared by Aileen Dever & John Dever, in The Poetry and Prose of Rosalia de Castro).
Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1916. La mujer española y otros escritos. (2018 edition by Catedra & Universitat de Valencia).

Secondary texts
Bermúdez, Silvia and Roberta Johnson (eds). 2018. A New History of Iberian Feminisms. Toronto: Toronto UP.
Cabezas, Juan Antonio. 1942. Concepción Arenal o el sentido romántico de la justicia. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Cabrera Bosch, María Isabel. 1988. Las mujeres que lucharon solas: Concepción Arenal y Emilia Pardo Bazán. In Folguera, ed. El feminismo en España: Dos siglos de historia. Madrid: Pablo Iglesias, 29–50.
Davies, Catherine. 1983. Rosalia de Castro, Criticism 1950-1980: the Need for a New Approach. Hispanic Studies 60(3), 211-220.
Davies, Catherine. 1998. Spanish Women’s Writing, 1849–1996. London: Athlone.
González Fernández, Helena and María do Cebreiro Rábade (eds). 2012.Canon y subversión: La obra narrativa de Rosalía de Castro. Barcelona: Icaria.
González Herrán, José Manuel. 2008. La emancipación de una mujer de letras: Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1889–1892. In Fernández, Pura, and Marie-Linda Ortega, eds. La mujer de letras o la letra herida: Textos y representaciones sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 345–363.
Irizarry, Estelle. 1998. Concepción Arenal and the Essay of Advocacy: ‘The Medium Is the Message.’ In Glenn, Kathleen M., and Mercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez. eds. Spanish Women Writers and the Essay: Gender, Politics, and the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 6–24.
Herrero Figueroa, Araceli. 2010–11. Emilia Pardo Bazán. ‘Feminista’: Desigualdad. intergenérica y maltrato doméstico. La Tribuna: Cadernos de Estudos da Casa-Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán 8: 57–70.
Lacalzada de Mateo, María José. 2012. Concepción Arenal: Mentalidad y proyección social. Saragossa: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.
Núñez Paredes, Juan. 1992. El feminismo de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 40 (105): 303–213.
Miguélez-Carballeira, Helena. 2014. Rosalía de Castro: Life, Text and Afterlife. In Helena Miguélez-Carballeira (ed.), A Companion to Galician Culture, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 175–193.
Scanlon, Geraldine M. 1986. La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea, 1868–1974. 2nd ed. Translated by Rafael Mazarrasa. Madrid: Akal.
Scanlon, Geraldine M. 1990. Class and Gender in Pardo Bazán's 'La Tribuna'.Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 67(2): 137-150.
Smith, Jennifer. 2009. La violencia de género en dos cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán. In González Herrán, José Manuel, Cristina Patiño Eirín, and Ermitas Penas Varela (eds) La literatura de Emilia Pardo Bazán. A Coruña: Fundación Caixa Galicia, 697–705.
Simón Palmer, María del Carmen. 2014. La mirada social en la prensa: Concepción Arenal. Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 190 (767): 1–8.
Zavala, Iris M. and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz. 1993. Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana). Madrid: Anthropos.

International

All modules delivered in SMLC are necessarily international. Students engage with themes and ideas from a culture other than that of the UK and employ their linguistic skills in the analysis of primary materials from a non-Anglophone context. Students will also be encouraged to draw on the experiences of visiting exchange students in the classroom and will frequently engage with theoretical and critical frameworks from across the world.

Subject specific skills

This module will develop students’ linguistic skills through engaging with primary materials in the target language. It will build students’ capacity to engage with aspects of Hispanic culture through analysis of this primary material and through seminar discussion aimed at deeper critical thinking. In particular, students’ awareness of discourses of gender in different periods, and of literary works which respond to or challenge contemporary thinking on the subject, will be enhanced through lectures and seminars which engage with scholarship in the field.

Transferable skills

All SMLC culture modules demand critical and analytical engagement with artefacts from target-language cultures. In the course of independent study, class work and assessment students will develop the following skills: written and oral communication, creative and critical thinking, problem solving and analysis, time management and organisation, independent research in both English and their target language(s), intercultural understanding and the ability to mediate between languages and cultures, ICT literacy in both English and the target language(s), personal responsibility and the exercise of initiative.