Two Nobel Prize-Winning Poets: Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The objective of this undergraduate seminar is to analyze the work of two Chilean Nobel Prize winning poets from the present. This means that we will reread their poetic work from the urgencies of our present to see if the poets illuminate with their aesthetics particular and universal concerns, among them sexism, racism, classism, nature and the persistent legacy of the colonial past. Both authors were misunderstood at different times. Mistral, Nobel laureate in 1945, was read as an asexual teacher/mother of the nation, silencing her rich, profound and complex poetics. The 1971 Nobel, Neruda, occasion in which he was identified as "the poet of violated human dignity", and who in life had to face many times the State for his political and ideological convictions and his love for the people, now, after his death, must face the judgment of women, part of the people he loved, but whose rights and voices were generally disregarded by patriarchal societies and their idiosyncrasy, as a sexual predator. Their poetry read from different theoretical perspectives will show us their universal voices as Latin American authors and intellectuals of the 20th century.