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The Discipline of Spanish
- Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
- University of Arizona
- Volume 3, 1999
- pp. 243-249
- 10.1353/hcs.2011.0328
- Article
- Additional Information
The Discipline of Spanish V. Daniel Rogers is a Byron K. Trippet Professor of Spanish at Wabash College. His research interests include die reUtionship between cultural institutions and literature, contemporary Latin American prose fiction and Cultural Studies. He compkted his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1997 and has published articUs on Mexican literature and professional issues . He is currently working on a book based on his dissertation that examines the roU ofthe Latin American culture industry and die emergence of the professional writer in the 1950s and 1960s. A recent addition to the growing genre of theoryhow -to books, Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (1994) illustrates the difficulties faced by literatute teachers who want to expand the use of theory beyond graduate student seminars. In his introduction, William Cain pleads the necessary mea culpa when he begins , "Theory has a daunting range of meanings and applications " (3). Cain senses the incongruities that arise from a book that ptescribes specific uses for contemporary theory. A book directed at the pedagogical question of how to use theory in the classroom must avoid presenting a purely synchronic view of theory or a view that theory constitutes a stable body knowledge, a more or less uniform product that can be plugged into a course syllabus. The assumptions implicit in many contemporary interpretive approaches push us in different directions. Rather than finding convenient articulations of theory and course plans, a project more consonant with poststructuralist approaches compels us to turn our critical attention to the field as a whole. An important corollary moves us to consider pedagogical issues and theory as a process that necessarily includes a reassessment of (at least certain) aspects of our discipline with the same critical rigor that we apply to our objects of study. At the same time that we help students learn to participate in the interpretative processes associated with contemporary theory, we must not neglect the imperative to re-examine our field. In the first chapters ofManifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Nelson makes the point that novel interpretations Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 244 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies of literary texts often take precedence to self-reflective analyses of the very disciplines to which we belong (18-19). Nelson argues that while professors in the Humanities have become adept at radically redefining their objects of study, the humanistic disciplines themselves have remained under-theorized: [Theorists] do not challenge the territorialization of univeisiry intellectual activity or in any way risk undermining the status and core beliefs of theii fields. The difference, for theorists, is that this blindness or reluctance often contradicts the intellectual imperatives of the very theories diey espouse. (19) Nelson's criticism may not endear him to some, but his point is well taken concerning contemporary Hispanism. Our own field benefits from Nelson's assumption that any discussion of how to apply theory in the classroom is enriched by self-reflective analysis. Spanish is a profoundly schizophrenic discipline. In purely quantitative terms, the vast majority of students enrolled in Spanish courses do so in the basic language curriculum. At my own institution, first- and second-year students outnumber Spanish majors by a ratio of twenty three to one, a situation not unique to Wabash College. I mention this not to complain, but rather to underscore the fact that in the profession generally, while most of our teaching resources are dedicated to first- and second-year students, die majority of our professional conversations and concerns revolve around a small minority of advanced students. At larger universities this discrepancy is muted by a familiar division of labor: tenured or tenure-track professors teach literature courses and graduate students teach basic language. In departments with large graduate programs it is not uncommon to find senior faculty whose latest experience with the basic language curriculum dates to a time before most of those who currently teach firstand second-semester Spanish were born. Pierre Bourdieu, in Homo Academicus (1984), describes the evolution of this division of academic labor into a two-class system and traces it to changes in the recruitment of new adherents of the discipline (143-47). While the specific...