"Circulante y actuante: Female Authorship and Transnationality in the Ibero-American Area (1910-1940)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Annette Paatz
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 530279761

In the first decades of the 20th century, women writers in Spain and Latin America obtained new areas of experience and options for professionalization. In an androcentric literary field, the authors use the emergence of aesthetic modernism in a variety of ways to integrate the condition féminine into literary discourse, thereby questioning conventional registers of Modernismo and the avant-gardes. This experience of modernity goes hand in hand with a high degree of continental and transatlantic mobility, whereby there seems to be a causal connection between the intensive transnational contacts among the authors and the dynamics of exclusion and hegemony in their immediate environment. The project therefore aims to open up perspectives on the literary practice of Ibero-American women writers that go beyond androcentric and eurocentric hegemonies. In the context of New Modernist Studies, the inventory of both the transnational relationships and the literary production that emerged during the period under study contributes to the revision of the canon: the positioning of the authors is conceived as a process characterized by social, ethnic, sexual and ideological components, which becomes visible as a transcultural experience of a contra-hegemonic female modernity. The aim is to construct an Ibero-American literary field that, going beyond the tracing of existing relationships, should lead to an analysis of literary productions with regard to thematic and formal correspondences and intertextual references. Female authorship is understood as a construction that is dependent on sociocultural factors and thus undermines the traditionally male coding of authorship. The corpus includes both canonized representatives of Ibero-American modernism and authors who have so far received little attention. Given the geographic scope of the Ibero-American region, two scenarios have been identified: 1) a group of Ibero-American women writers in Cono Sur and the Andean region, and 2) Ibero-American transnationality around the Madrid Lyceum Club Femenino and its "Sección Hispanoamericana". As part of the project, the creation of two sets of data (1. bibliography on works and editions, 2. personal data on the writers) and an international workshop are planned.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants