SPA 357 - Las modernas: Spanish Women Writers Coming of Age

Given the limited archival documentation of the lives and works of women writers of Spain’s Silver Age (1898-1939), surviving life-writing texts are crucial for achieving a closer approximation to female subjectivity in twentieth-century Spain. Modern women writers (las modernas) like María Teresa León, Elena Fortún, and Concha Méndez use the genre of life-writing to reflect on and reimagine their formative years. In doing so, they attend to questions of political and social agency, bodily autonomy, their identity as a writer, and the intertwining social and aesthetic developments of Spanish modernism. They articulate their political commitments during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and routes of external and internal exile during the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) through Bildungsroman, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and other life-writing practices. We will familiarize ourselves with these diverse life-writing practices and participate in creative writing activities inspired by the lives, identities, social challenges, and aspirations of Spanish women writers. We will discuss the gendered development of the Spanish literary canon (Las Sinsombrero), female Bildungsroman, queer futures, national identity and exile, and historical reenactments (CartasVivas) and tributes. We will read well studied life-writing (María Teresa León, Concha Méndez) as well as lesser-studied works by Elena Fortún, and Amanda Junquera, among others. We will additionally work with digitized archival materials of works by Silver Age women writers and visit the Davidson College Archives as an orientation to archival research and collection practices.  

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.