In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 u 6 A Hispanist’s View of Changing Institutions, or About Insects and Whales Randolph D. Pope Perhaps you do not know that most of our professors live on Germany, England, the Orient, or the North like insects on a tree and like the insect they become an integral part of it, taking their worth from their subject. —Balzac’s dedication of Cousin Bette Balzac’s dedication of his 1846 novel about envy and revenge, Cousin Bette, to Michele Angelo Cajetani, Prince of Téano, comes from a generous motivation, since it wishes to celebrate a scholar, a “learned commentator of Dante” who had revealed to him “the marvelous framework of ideas on which the greatest Italian poet constructed his work” (3), so the wondrous image of professors as insects on a tree is not meant negatively, but simply as a reminder that in a realist perspective our subject confers value to our work. The French novelist noted that Italy had not received from his compatriots the attention it merited, and we in turn observe that Spain is absent from the scholarly forest he envisions, while it includes Germany, England, the Orient, and even a generic North. Not much has changed in this aspect, since the literature from Spain still is often slighted in the accounts given in other, not Peninsular, European academic circles, as well as in the United States.1 Reading that “like the insect they become an integral part of it,” I wonder about this “it” and its configuration by Balzac as a stately tree, allowing for the slow change of ages and generations, but still steady, rooted, and faithful to its designation as oak, willow, or ash. The changes in the government, political practice, and daily life in Spain, the strengthening of her diverse languages and regions, the changes in the means of production and distribution of literature, the internationalization of daily communication, the new approaches in literary theory, the reconfiguration of the offerings of academic departments in the US, and the relatively new conversion of universities into for-profit businesses, are just a few of the factors that have altered, or should have altered, not just the relation of Hispanists in the US to Spanish insti- 100 RANDOLPH D. POPE tutions—Spain being the it of which we are integral parts—but the concept itself of what constitutes an institution and how it operates. I will focus mainly on only one point of this changed nature: the increase in size of our subject matter and the strategies that have emerged to cope with it. The production of literature, even if limited to the traditional genres of the novel, poetry, drama, and essay has by far exceeded the possibility of any one person to read it. In the yearly report of cultural activities produced by the Spanish Ministerio de Cultura we read that 69,893 books received an ISBN in 2002, while in the year 2006 the number had increased to 77,330. Of these, 13,063 in 2002 and 15,162 in 2006 were classified under “Creación literaria.” If we assign a modest extension of 150 pages to each of these books for 2006 we are faced with 2,274,300 pages to enjoy reading. At an average rate of 2 minutes per page we would need 75,810 hours. Dedicating twelve hours a day to this task, it would take a conscientious critic 6,317.5 days, or over 17 years, to be able to make a statement about the creative books production of 2006, that included all the evidence, provided, of course that this critic had a portentous memory and had not dozed over a few thousand lines. Therefore, in order to practice our discipline we must arbitrarily slice away certain sectors, such as translations or science fiction. The problem, of course, is that both of those areas are a vital part of literature as it is experienced by real readers when they enter into any bookstore. As I am writing this essay in December of 2008, the website of the Casa del Libro reports that the bestsellers are two books by Stieg Larsson, three by Stephenie Meyer, and one each by John Boyne, José Saramago, Fernando Savater, Henning Mankel, and Tami Shem-Tov. Of these writers only one writes in Spanish, Savater, whose novel La hermandad de la buena suerte received the Premio Planeta 2008, but garners only three stars out of five from the six readers who have evaluated...

Share