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Marquis Scholar Angela Guarino ’04 of Springfield, Pa., is collaborating with Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures, in an EXCEL project exploring female characters and gender identities in the works of Christina Fernandez Cubas, a Spanish novelist influenced by surrealism.
In Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, students assist faculty members with research while earning a stipend.
“Cubas has produced six works of prose fiction in the form of short stories, a novel, and a novella,” says Guarino, who plans to major in government and law. The work will be studied in light of the socio-historical reality of Spain after 40 years of the Franco dictatorship.
Work on the project began informally this summer when, after a brief meeting at the end of last school year, Geoffrion-Vinci completed an initial critical analysis of each of the author’s six novels and Guarino picked up some of Cubas’ short stories to familiarize herself with the novelist’s work. Although the project only received formal approval two weeks into the fall semester, Guarino’s investigation is already under way.
“Right now, I am researching the historical background of pre-Franco and post-Franco Spain — how the climate has changed and how female identities have changed,” says Guarino. In light of these changes, Geoffrion-Vinci hopes to probe Cubas’ female characters and uncover how their lives “intersect and collide with the realities of life for women in 20th-century Spain.”
“The first thing we’re hoping to generate is a scholarly article,” says Geoffrion-Vinci. “Currently, Angela is reading basically everything that has ever been written on Fernandez Cubas.” While she gathers data on the politics and history of 20th-century Spain, Guarino will also take a look at the three doctoral theses written on Cubas, “exploring those for any and all information on gender identity and the identity of women as Cubas construes it in her works,” says Geoffrion-Vinci.
More immediately, the two will select a representative sampling of Cubas’ work and analyze the stories. Geoffrion-Vinci stresses that she and Guarino will engage in that analysis together; she refers to Guarino as co-author.
Geoffrion-Vinci joined the Lafayette faculty in September 1998. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Geoffrion-Vinci specializes in the contemporary literature of Spain, applied linguistics, and language-teaching methodologies. Her current research interests include contemporary poetry and Spanish women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
“It is my pleasure to advise several senior honors theses,” says Geoffrion-Vinci, who completed her own thesis on Cubas. “As an advisor I have shared with them my own senior doctorate work I’ve always been interested in broadening my research on her (Cubas’) work.”
The prospects of having her work published are exciting for Guarino. Last year, she took two courses with Geoffrion-Vinci: Advanced Spanish and Contemporary Spain. When the professor approached her about participating in EXCEL research, she was thrilled. “It’s unbelievable,” says Guarino. “You just can’t get that opportunity anywhere else.”
Guarino sees her EXCEL research as an “opportunity to build her language and literary skills.”
“My job is to find and compile the background material,” says Guarino of her work so far. “A lot of that is for my benefit so when I jump into the literature, I have a sense of where it’s coming from.” In the next few weeks, Guarino is expected to turn in an annotated bibliography, from which she will “hand-pick which sources would be most valuable” to the research and present them.
Guarino says that Geffrion-Vinci has given her “a lot of freedom with where I want to go with this, which is really great.” In addition, Cubas is not that well known, leaving plenty of room for creative interpretation. “Because Cubas is fairly obscure, there are so many avenues of thought that you can explore,” says Guarino.
Spain’s relationship with the rest of the world changed greatly from 1930-1975, when the country came under the control of a military dictatorship and was virtually isolated from the rest of Europe. According to Geoffrion-Vinci, Franco and his government “essentially sanctioned one version of Spanish history and one way to live. At his death, writers were, for the first time, free from the yoke of censorship.” Authors have since had “the opportunity to re-evaluate their past,” Geoffrion-Vinci says, and in particular, “women can leave their more traditional role as mother and housewife” in pursuit of a career in the public arena.
“When surrealism is finally able to take hold in Spain,” Guarino says, “you see a shift in the literature; the endings aren’t always prescribed.” Literature is abrupt and abstracted and “challenges where these people are coming from.”
One of the student’s tasks is to search for feminist symbols. “When you read literature, there’s the basic superficial level and then beneath, all these layers and meanings,” she notes. Guarino confesses that her favorite novel is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Although Cubas’ surrealist literature and Austen’s romanticism may seem poles apart, “at the center, you have your female character, her social constructs and how she’s going to break them,” says Guarino. “Austen was a groundbreaker for her time just as Cubas is.”
During the January interim session between semesters, Geoffrion-Vinci will travel to Barcelona, Spain, where she plans to interview Cubas. If all goes as planned, “Angela will be involved in creating the kinds of questions that would be part of the interview.”
“Even as a sophomore, she has a tremendous capacity to read between the lines in Spanish, her second language,” Geoffrion-Vinci says of Guarino. She says that she is delighted to work with a student who is “wise before her time” and who has the “intellectual capacity to make significant contributions to this work.”
Guarino is a member of the Kirby Government and Law Society, the varsity women’s crew team, and the Residence Hall Council.
A National Leader in Undergraduate Research. Angela Guarino ’04 coauthored an article on her collaborative research with Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci, associate professor of Spanish, in Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporanea.