El diálogo entre los perros de Miguel de Cervantes y las perras de Rosario Ferré

In 1990, the Puertorrican writer Rosario Ferre published El coloquio de las perras, a collection of nine articles and a short story. Its title directly alludes to The Dialogue of the Dogs, the short novel that Miguel de Cervantes included as part of his Exemplary Novels in 1613. If in Cervantes' work the two dogs, Cipriano and Berganza, find themselves surprised not just of talking, but of talking rationally, in Ferre's text Fina and Franca are two female dogs, a writer and a literary critic, who discuss, without any wonder, about the female condition in relation to creative writing and literary criticism. This paper wishes to reflect upon the intertextual dialogue established between Cervantes' and Ferre's pieces of writing, taking as point of departure the explicit link between the title and a text where animals talk like humans. It also wishes to inquire whether a 20th Century Latin American text like Ferre's subverts, through irony and parody, the ethic and aesthetic proposals presented by Cervantes in the XVII Century through Cipriano and Berganza's dialogue.