El mañana, by Luisa Valenzuela: From Spaces of Oppression to Spaces of Resistance
Subject Area
Spanish American Studies
Abstract
I would like to present a paper on El mañana, by Luisa Valenzuela. The structuring principle of my essay will be Luisa Valenzuela’s consideration within El mañana of women’s relationship to language. I will focus on Valenzuela’s technique of exposing connections, while still recognizing differences, between people, ideas, and concepts that we have generally come to view as not reconcilable. In so doing, she manages to create a language that allows for inclusion and, in turn, a worldview that suggests uniting with the Other as a possible path to awareness. Some of the antitheses presented in the novel that my essay will explore are the relationships between Jews and Arabs, men and women, Europe and the Americas, a 19th century illiterate woman warrior and a 21rst century female novelist, and the realities of the bourgeois and the homeless. As well, I will study the spaces that these groups inhabit throughout the novel, and how Valenzuela’s presentation of these spaces relates to the work’s overall theme. I will conclude by relating El mañana to the rest of Valenzuela’s fiction, and suggest that in El mañana she begins to suggest how society might approach some of its most serious problems, a departure from her practice of only exposing issues and leaving the answers up to her readers.
Location
Room 210
Presentation Year
2017
Start Date
3-24-2017 5:15 PM
Embargo
11-18-2016
Recommended Citation
Cook, Alyce, "El mañana, by Luisa Valenzuela: From Spaces of Oppression to Spaces of Resistance" (2017). South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL). 74.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2017/2017/74
El mañana, by Luisa Valenzuela: From Spaces of Oppression to Spaces of Resistance
Room 210
I would like to present a paper on El mañana, by Luisa Valenzuela. The structuring principle of my essay will be Luisa Valenzuela’s consideration within El mañana of women’s relationship to language. I will focus on Valenzuela’s technique of exposing connections, while still recognizing differences, between people, ideas, and concepts that we have generally come to view as not reconcilable. In so doing, she manages to create a language that allows for inclusion and, in turn, a worldview that suggests uniting with the Other as a possible path to awareness. Some of the antitheses presented in the novel that my essay will explore are the relationships between Jews and Arabs, men and women, Europe and the Americas, a 19th century illiterate woman warrior and a 21rst century female novelist, and the realities of the bourgeois and the homeless. As well, I will study the spaces that these groups inhabit throughout the novel, and how Valenzuela’s presentation of these spaces relates to the work’s overall theme. I will conclude by relating El mañana to the rest of Valenzuela’s fiction, and suggest that in El mañana she begins to suggest how society might approach some of its most serious problems, a departure from her practice of only exposing issues and leaving the answers up to her readers.
