110210 SE Literature Seminar (MA) - Spanish (2025S)

Emilia Pardo Bazán is considered an innovative writer who critically observed the discourses of her time and an initiator of cultural self-reflection in Spain. She successfully established a space for writing in the male-dominated social, political and literary discourse of late 19th-century Spain by staging herself with other women writers. Along with Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Emilia Pardo Bazán is one of the few women of the 19th century who were nominated as honorary members of the Real Academia Española, but ultimately not elected. Like her Cuban-Spanish colleague, Pardo Bazán managed to channel her experiences of social injustice and the resulting anger into her writing, creating literary and cultural criticism as well as literary works. In this seminar, we will focus on her essayistic critical work, starting with her Apuntes autobiográficos, which were published in 1886 and prefaced her novel Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886). In the tradition of her male colleagues, Pardo Bazán purposefully uses selected biographical details to write a female writer's career that moves beyond 'typically female genres' such as love poetry or the sentimental novel. Her productive engagement with the social injustices she experienced is particularly evident in “Cuestión académica”, the fictional public letter A Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (en los campos Elíseos) (1889), which Pardo Bazán writes to the deceased writer in response to her unsuccessful election as a member of the Real Academia. In addition, Pardo Bazán's cultural-critical essays and lectures, such as La Mujer española (1890), La Educación del hombre y de la mujer (1892) or Concepción Arenal y sus ideas acerca de la mujer (1893), collected and edited with further essays by Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer, address the social and legal differences between the sexes. Pardo Bazán's critique of the social disadvantage of women in society is constructive, as the texts present potential models for dealing constructively with discrimination.
The aim of the seminar is to deepen literary skills, to develop an understanding of the interaction between cultural forms of address and writing styles from a gender perspective, and to provide insights into selected aspects of Pardo Bazán's work. After an introduction to the life and work of the author and to the literary and cultural studies research into female writing in the Spanish-speaking world of the 19th century by the seminar instructor, we will discuss selected essays, situating them within their cultural context and thus reconstructing facets of Pardo Bazán's self-image as an intellectual writer over the course of the semester. Compulsory reading of the works mentioned.