Gender and History in Nineteenth-Century Latin america: The Didactic Discourses of Soledad Acosta de Samper
Faced with the task of articulating the relationships among national identity, citizenship, and the individual at a time when the idea of "nation" itself was still in flux, nineteenth-century Latin American authors frequently turned towards historiography and historical narratives as appropriate and useful vehicles for their statements about the process by which (semi)arbitrary geographical boundaries could come to signify nations with distinct identities. Many nineteenth-century authors decisively rejected the Spanish colonial past and envisioned the post-Independence period as a new epoch of history whose existence depended on the violent and complete break with Spain represented by the Wars of Independence (1810-1824).1 But other authors, while recognizing the importance of the rupture with Spain and with the colonial past, created historical narratives about the Conquest, about colonial Latin America, and about the Wars of Independence in order to justify their ideas about national identities, to comment upon contemporary political and social situations, and to elucidate the historical roots of current problems. They explored the past in order to make the present comprehensible to themselves and to their readers, who were meant to learn how to be exemplary citizens of the new Latin American nations through their consumption of these narratives. The historical novel afforded authors the opportunity to explore questions about nationality and identity in a popular format and to reach a wider potential audience. The deployment of the genre, however, was a problematic device for the majority of historical novelists in nineteenth-century Latin America, since they had to contend with a conflicted attitude towards
La in-validez del cuerpo de la letrada: la metáfora patológica
El trabajo hace un analisis de la breve novela Dolores (1869) de la escritora colombiana Soledad Acosta de Samper, que desarrollo a lo largo de su no corta vida una extensa e intensa actividad intelectual. En este texto se problematiza la relacion implicita que hay entre la mujer como sujeto intelectual y su cuerpo enfermo como alegorizacion de una subjetividad incomoda para la comunidad letrada masculina, que reconvierte esa disonancia en metafora del cuerpo patologico (en este caso, un cuerpo leproso que se desintegra monstruosamente) como sinonimo de mujer letrada. Tambien, por tanto, la escritura de ese cuerpo enfermo puede contagiar a otros a traves de la escritura de unas letras fuera del canon; de aqui el genero epistolar, intimo, que contagia la integridad generica de la republica de las letras
Soledad Acosta de Samper
En el periodo de transicion que va de la independencia al establecimiento del orden democratico en la Nueva Granada, se encuentra un nuevo modelo de mujeres, diferente del tiempo de las de la Gran Colombia, que sin desinteresarse de la vida civil -o acaso por eso mismo- comienzan a interesarse por las letras.