Rebel Women! Artists, Writers, and Musicians from Hispanoamerica

During our seminar, we’ll read and talk about a number of women writers and the artists and musicians that worked aside them. These writers have little in common. They come from wildly different times, places, backgrounds, cultures. Their social and political positions differed dramatically: nuns, revolutionaries, saints, rebels, generals, heads of state, feminists, traditionalists, wealthy aristocrats, teachers, journalists… Their literary output took wildly differing forms: novels, poems, essays, memoirs, manifestos, plans, diaries, letters, testimonies and recipes books. One was a Nobel Prize winner, others never got recognition; some have been erased from literary history, their legacies forgotten, when not distorted, while others lives and works have been thoroughly scrutinized and highly praised. We will explore the creative tension between these women writers “womanhood” and their respective times social codes or laws, through an examination of their texts and biographies – and, their rebellion against gender roles and social injustices. Our seminar will be in fact a conversation among us. Our main goal should be to evaluate these authors as the key players on the Spanish language literary history–when most are seen as marginal–understand their contributions to their moments, and what is their actuality. Doing so, we would contribute to the rewrite of the Canon of “La Literatura” an “Las Artes” in both sides of the ocean.