Tue, October 7, 2025 | HIB 135 @ 11 AM
“Transgresiones del orden patriarcal en la narrativa de María Luisa Bombal ”
Keynote Speaker: Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese.
This lecture will focus on the subversive content of María Luisa Bombal’s work both at the social level of gender subordination and the philosophical notions of reality, identity, and death. Using magical realism and the aesthetics of the fantastic, Bombal creates a scenario where women become Subjects and not Objects of sexual desire, subalterns who reject the identity imposed by patriarchal regulations to find their roots in the primordial. At the philosophical level, Bombal cancels the notion of Absolute Truth created by a masculine hegemony by contradicting the dogma of Eternal Life, the “real”, and the mystified images of the “feminine.”
This event is supported by SPAN 101B: Intro to Latin American Literature, taught by Professor Viviane Mahieux.
This talk will be delivered in Spanish.
Lucía Guerra-Cunningham
Lucía Guerra was born in Santiago, Chile, and she is an Emerita Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Irvine. As a critic, she specializes in Critical Theory, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. Her article entitled “Cutural Identity and the Dilemma of Self in Latin American Women’s Literature“ won the Plural Essay Award in 1987. Her book La mujer fragmentada: Historias de un signo was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1994. She has published about seventy critical essays in scholarly magazines in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S.A. In 1979, Lucía Guerra won the Annual Translation Award sponsored by Columbia University and the Council of the Arts, for her book New Islands, a translation of María Luisa Bombal’s work which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1981.
As a fiction writer, Lucía Guerra intends to give voice to women’s silenced experiences; in her writing, she denounces social subordination and explores the subversive power of female eroticism. In 1989, her short story entitled “The Virgin’s Passion“ obtained the first Prize in the international contest sponsored by the magazine Plural in Mexico. Her collection of short stories entitled Frutos Extraños, obtained in 1991 the Premio Letras de Oro sponsored by the University of Miami and the government of Spain. In 1992, Frutos Extraños also won the Municipal Prize of Literature in Chile. In 1997, Lucía Guerra received the Gabriela Mistral Award (Coté-femmes éditions in Paris) for the outstanding quality of her novel Más allá de las máscaras (1984).