Forms, Fragments and Fractures in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing: Spain, Portugal, and Italy

Fragmented Autobiographies (1900-1936)

Ursula Fanning (University College Dublin): ‘Sibilla Aleramo: Fracturing Forms, Negotiating Self-Representations’
Xon de Ros (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford): ‘Filiation through Affiliation: Mother-Daughter Bond in C20th Women's Autobiography’
Christina Bezari (Université Libre de Bruxelles): ‘Fractured Lives: Women’s Biographies in Iberian Avant-Garde Periodicals (1915–1936)’

Ursula Fanning (University College Dublin), ‘Sibilla Aleramo: Fracturing Forms, Negotiating Self-Representations’
Aleramo’s Una donna (A Woman), published in 1906, is a truly germinal text; it is challenging in terms of both form and content. Its timing is also crucial – it appears in the context of intense post-Unification discourses around women, around women’s place in Italian society and around motherhood in particular. It is very early in both European and Anglophone contexts for such a provocative work (provocative especially in relation to issues around the maternal and mothering), but also around the limits of what is sayable in narrative. Aleramo is clearly trying to tease out issues about self-representation, about how much is too much in relation to narrating elements from her own life and about women's roles (especially within the family); she is also at pains to define this work as a novel. This paper will investigate questions of form, reception and categorisation in relation to Una donna and will tease out the difficult process of representing a self/selves which is charted in the text. The groundbreaking paradigms offered by Aleramo’s work, as well as the difficulties laid bare for later women writers who take themselves as subject, will be considered.

Xon de Ros (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford), ‘Filiation through Affiliation: Mother-Daughter Bond in C20th Women's Autobiography’
This paper offers a discussion of the mother-daughter relationship in the work of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Maria Zambrano (1904-1991), focusing on her autobiography Delirio y Destino [Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in her Twenties, 1999], and also considering how this dynamic is played out in the reception of her legacy. The silencing of the mother within the symbolic economy depicted in Zambrano’s account of her intellectual development corresponds to the model of psychic matricide formulated in accounts of feminine subjectivity within psychoanalytic feminism. Zambrano also records the catastrophic psychic consequences involved in the rupture of the mother-daughter bond, suggesting a subsequent shift from the figure of the Oedipal father to the pre-Oedipal mother as a primary object identification.  An examination of the psychic structure underlying some of Zambrano’s philosophical writings in the light of her treatment of the Homeric myth of Demeter and Persephone reveals a strategy to recover a feminine genealogy through the recasting of mythic feminine figures in an effort to reconnect with the generative power symbolized in the maternal bond. Zambrano’s project shows affinities with Luce Irigaray’s account of female psychosexual development which has been criticised for perpetuating binaries, casting doubts on the efficacy of her model for social and psychic transformation. The risk of the same dynamic being established around the figure of the philosopher and her legacy could be averted by fostering a more dialogic and relational approach instead of the symbiotic exegesis, which has been a dominant tendency in Zambrano’s academic reception.

Christina Bezari (Université Libre de Bruxelles), ‘Fractured Lives: Women’s Biographies in Iberian Avant-Garde Periodicals (1915–1936)’
This paper undertakes a critical examination of women’s biographical representations within the avant-garde periodicals La Gaceta Literaria (Spain, 1927–1932), Alfar (Spain, 1919–1936), Presença (Portugal, 1927–1940), and Orpheu (Portugal, 1915). These periodicals, integral to the development and dissemination of Iberian avant-garde movements, served as dynamic sites for the articulation of experimental literary practices and intellectual innovation. Notably, they engaged with and documented the lives, works, and cultural contributions of women writers, poets, and intellectuals, highlighting their roles within the broader framework of avant-garde aesthetics and cultural discourse. By analyzing biographical sketches, editorials and critical essays on women’s lives published in these periodicals, this paper explores the tensions between avant-garde ideals of transgression and the often-peripheral position of Spanish and Portuguese women within these movements. It also examines broader debates on the gendered dynamics of modernism and the avant-garde, showing how they functioned as sites of negotiation where women’s achievements were both celebrated and constrained by contemporary socio-political norms. Comparing the approaches across Spanish and Portuguese contexts, this paper illuminates the shared and divergent strategies employed to narrate women’s lives, contributing to a transnational understanding of life writing in avant-garde circles.

All are welcome to attend this seminar, held online via zoom at 4.30pm GMT/5.30pm CET . Please register in advance to receive the booking link, by clicking Book Now at the top of this page.

Series convenors: 
Raquel Fernández Menéndez (University of Salamanca)
Hannie Lawlor (University of Oxford) 

This series explores the diverse forms that women’s life writing has taken in the shifting socio-political contexts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Southern Europe. It draws into dialogue works from three countries that remain underrepresented in Anglophone discussions and theorisations of life writing and whose twentieth-century history is marked by dictatorship: Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Taking a comparative approach, the series seeks to demonstrate the richness and importance of these autobiographical practices and to explore the relationship between formal choices and contextual challenges. Through the focus on ‘forms’, ‘fractures’ and ‘fragments’, it considers the evolution of life-writing practices alongside socio-political developments and investigates how the slippages, divergences, and obfuscations that have contributed to the underrepresentation of these literatures in autobiography theory to date might in fact broaden the methodological and theoretical frameworks for the analysis of life-writing across different national and cultural contexts. Proceeding chronologically, the five sessions move from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, considering representations of the self across memoirs and magazines, diaries and autofictional experiments. By comparing contexts and case studies between as well as within sessions, the series considers how women’s narratives of the self are transformed by the changing constraints on and new possibilities of expression across the period, and the alternative perspectives that these self-representations offer, in turn, on what we recognise as and understand by life writing today.   
 
The series builds on the success of previous comparative initiatives developed at the CCWW, such as Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: Crises/Critique/Grammars of Resistance, and on the interest in French- and English-language autobiographical writing at past CCWW conferences and events. In making Spain and Portugal a central focus, as well as Italy, it turns the spotlight on languages and contexts that have featured less or not at all in seminar series to date. It also dedicates one session to women’s life writing in minority and minoritised languages in Spain, showcasing the importance these literatures hold for international discussions of autobiographical practices and gender theory. 
  

PROGRAMME
6 March 2025
Fragmented Autobiographies (1900-1936)
Ursula Fanning (University College Dublin): ‘Sibilla Aleramo: Fracturing Forms, Negotiating Self-Representations’
Xon de Ros (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford): ‘Filiation through Affiliation: Mother-Daughter Bond in C20th Women's Autobiography’
Christina Bezari (Université Libre de Bruxelles): ‘Fractured Lives: Women’s Biographies in Iberian Avant-Garde Periodicals (1915–1936)’

13 March 2025
Fractured Autobiographies (1936-1975)
Cláudia Pazos Alonso (University of Oxford): ‘Life-writing as Funambulism during the Portuguese Dictatorship’
Mara Josi (University College Dublin): ‘Multifaceted, Fractured, and Torn Selves: Autobiographies of Lives in Hiding during the German Occupation of Italy’
Raquel Fernández Menéndez (University of Salamanca): ‘The Ethics of Diary Keeping: Narcissism and Vulnerability in Rosa Chacel’s Alcancía’

20 March 2025
Postmodern Autobiographies (1975-2000)
Álvaro González Montero (University of Leeds): ‘Cristina de Areilza’s Diario de una rebeldía: “writing the inner Monster”’
Maria Pereira Branco (University of Oxford): “Revolution Within and Without: The Transformative Power of Life-Writing in Natália Correia’s Não Percas a Rosa”
Vilma de Gasperin (University of Oxford): ‘Autobiography as Invention of the Self in Anna Maria Ortese: 1930s-1950s and Beyond’

27 March 2025
Minorities, Minorization and Autobiography
Maria Àngels Francés-Díez (University of Alicante): ‘Women’s Life Writing as a Reflective Surface: The Case of Four 20th-Century Catalan Women Writers’
Iker González-Allende (University of Nebraska-Lincoln): ‘Men’s Violence, Heteropatriarchal Vampirism and Feminist Community in the Memoirs of Itziar Ziga’
María Xesús Lama (Universitat de Barcelona): ‘Rosalía de Castro in Revolutionary Road. Lives that are Exploding’

3 April 2025
Twenty-First-Century Autofictions 
Maite Usoz de la Fuente (University of Leicester): ‘From Singular to Collective: Cristina Fallarás’ A la puta calle (2013) and Ahora contamos nosotras (2019)’
Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Durham University): ‘Lost Diasporic Archives: Narrating Transgenerational Trauma in Igiaba Scego’s Autofiction’
Olivia Glaze (University of Exeter): ‘Trauma Autofiction and Self-Camouflage: Remembering the End of the Portuguese Empire’
 
 
Image: Depósito comodato Colección Telefónica. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Fotografía: Fernando Maquieira