Workshop "Childhoods at the Edge: Orality, Voice, and Language Variability in Contemporary Canarian Narrative"
Meeting ID: 890 8083 4724
Passcode: 518982
Organizer:
Department of Health and Social Work
Lecturer:
Assoc. prof. Mónica María Martínez Sariego, PhD
Moderator:
Assoc. prof. Polina Mihova, PhD
Participants:
students and teachers
This lecture analyses two contemporary novels rooted in the Canary Islands — Las niñas prodigio (Sabina Urraca, 2017) and Panza de burro (Andrea Abreu, 2020) — that portray childhood not as a nostalgic refuge but as a symbolic zone of conflict. In both texts, childhood is mediated through body, voice and language, as well as through territory: an insular, peripheral space that functions as threshold and fissure with respect to dominant metropolitan discourses.
From the standpoint of speech and language therapy, the lecture pays particular attention to how orality, accent, non-standard varieties and silence become markers of identity, vulnerability and resistance in girlhood. In Las niñas prodigio, a fragmentary, autofictional narrative subverts the idealised image of precocious intelligence, foregrounding a hyper-aware child subject whose voice is shaped by surveillance, corporality and trauma. In Panza de burro, Canarian orality is both an aesthetic and political axis: it anchors the story in the misty north of Tenerife while dismantling the normativity of Peninsular Spanish and giving space to a girl’s voice that observes, desires and fears from the margins.
The protagonists thus embody a condition of “edge”: girls who do not fully “fit” into linguistic, social or affective norms. The lecture explores how these narratives can inform broader reflections on inclusion, language variation, and the ways in which children’s voices — especially those at the periphery — are heard, normed or silenced across literature, culture and educational practices.
Mónica María Martínez Sariego is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She holds degrees in Spanish Philology, English Philology, and Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. She has conducted research stays at institutions such as Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, Universität zu Köln, University of California, University of Geneva, and Università di Roma La Sapienza.
Her research focuses on Spanish literature from the early modern period to the present, with a special interest in literary thematics, classical reception, feminist criticism, and the dynamics of marginality in cultural systems. She has worked extensively on the role of literary topoi in the configuration of meaning and has developed comparative approaches that intersect with cultural studies and poetics of the periphery. Her recent publications explore issues such as the representation of the body, femininity, and childhood in contemporary fiction, as well as the narrative strategies through which literature articulates resistance, dislocation, and symbolic conflict.
She is the editor of several academic volumes and contributes regularly to international conferences and scholarly journals. Her work advocates for a conception of literature as a situated practice, capable of revealing tensions between center and periphery, norm and deviation, canon and dissidence. From the Atlantic border of the European Union, she explores the Canary Islands as a narrative and symbolic space from which to rethink literary production beyond metropolitan paradigms.