Echoing Julia Kristeva’s key concept of the abject, Adrienne Rich writes that “our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers’ and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.” Taking Rich’s words as a starting point, in this course we will expose and dissect –figurative scalpel in hand—, the ways in which the oftentimes challenging and/or dysfunctional relationship between mothers and daughters is articulated in four literary texts from around the globe. We’ll begin with the classic Spanish play The House of Bernarda Alba and the domineering mother with an iron fist who controls her five daughters, then move on to the jaded young daughter who (mis)communicates with her mother non-verbally in the Japanese novel Breasts and Eggs. Finally, we’ll analyze the novel Zenzele: A Letter for my Daughter, where the melancholy of a traditionalist Zimbabwean mother is crystallized into letters to a daughter who decides to study in the U.S., as well as Elena Ferrante’s poignant tale of an Italian mother who abandons her two young daughters in The Lost Daughter. Rather than rely on binary categorizations of the figure of the mother as either “despotic” or “angelic,” we will engage deeply with ideas of the self and the (m)other; matriarchal systems; female honour and virginity; “unnatural” mothers; desire and oppression, among others, as they are foregrounded in diverse cultural contexts.