Introductory description

This module explores questions of gender and feminist thinking across different periods of Hispanic culture, focusing on the Golden Age and the Hispanic Enlightenment.

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 two sections.

Weeks 1-4: 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, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Ana Caro. This will be done by analyzing individual 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 – such ideologies are reflected in these 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 of poetry; Ana Caro, 'Valor, agravio y mujer'.

Weeks 5-9: 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 three 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 Amar y Borbón 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), and Maria Rosa Gálvez's 'Zinda', an antislavery play that explores the intersections of gender, race, and colonialism.

Week 10: Revision and Assessment Preparation (taught jointly by the two convenors)

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

Generic Reading lists can be found in Talis

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.