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  • In This Issue
  • Benjamin Fraser

Crisis in Hispanic Studies

With 2013 as its year of publication, this volume of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies provides the opportunity to continue our contemplation of a crisis that has long gone unresolved in language and literature departments. In broad terms, this crisis hinges on notions of interdisciplinarity, literariness, cultural studies and, of course, canon. It is clear that there are undoubtedly problems with reducing the current state of methodological crisis in our home discipline to being a reflection of that which exists in other language and literature areas, just as there are problems with seeing Hispanic Studies as a unique or exceptional case. Yet, as a way of acknowledging that the interests of Hispanic Studies are necessarily tied to those of other disciplines—and simultaneously that our engagement with the trends and pressures to which English, German and French, for example, have been distinctly subjected has been somewhat differently paced and unevenly experienced—we call your attention to an essay published in 1983 by Raymond Williams.

Precisely thirty years ago, Williams included the essay “Crisis in English Studies” in his book Writing in Society as a way of exploring questions of method within the context of contemporary institutionalized literary study—questions which his previous work had approached in complementary or perhaps even contradictory ways (“Crisis” 209–11). We do well, first, in affirming a central point of his discussion there, one which goes against the concept of self-contained, isolated methods that are mutually exclusive:

Within both Marxism and structuralism there are diverse tendencies, and there is further diversity in other tendencies in part influenced by them. This has to be emphasized not only to prevent reductive labelling but for a more positive reason, that some of these tendencies are compatible with the existing dominant paradigm of literary studies while others are incompatible and have for some years been challenging the dominant paradigm—and thus its profession.

(“Crisis” 192)

Williams’s nuanced text notes correspondences and divergences across approaches to literature which the very structure of any of a number of literary theory readers tends to encourage as being mutually exclusive (theories of reflection, mediation, Lukácsian Marxism, the views of Benjamin and Adorno, the formalism of Eichenbaum, Shklovsky, Voloshinov, Bakhtin, Mukarovsky, structuralism, Goldmann’s genetic-structuralism, Althusserian structuralism, semiotics…). That said, if we are to interrogate the literary in reference to the issues associated with notions of structure, system and the Marxist notion of totality (the latter goes uncommented by that essay’s author) such an effort will certainly require a much more lengthy contemplation than either Williams’s brief text or even the present reflection can realistically offer. [End Page 5]

What can indeed be stressed in the present format is this: that the potential Williams sees in what he calls the “explosive tendency” of a “radical semiotics” permits criticism to go beyond the existing limits of literary analysis (“whether it is analysing literature or television or physical representation, it is looking not for the academically explanatory system, but for the system as a mode of formation, which as it becomes visible can be put into question or quite practically rejected,” he writes in “Crisis” 209). It is undoubtedly worth reading the essay “Crisis in English Studies” along with the cultural materialism he advanced in Marxism and Literature just as with his foundational work The Country and the City, and yet readers should note that his argument assumes a more global relevance. This is due to the fact that it is couched in the generalized notion of paradigm shift outlined by Thomas Kuhn (Williams, “Crisis” 192–93). Particularly important is his awareness of the potential reach of his comments. The question with which he ends his essay seems relevant not merely to the English Studies of the 1980s but also to the Hispanic Studies of the 2010s, and it is this: “can radically different work still be carried on under a single heading or department when there is not just diversity of approach but more serious and fundamental differences about the object of knowledge (despite overlapping of the actual material of study)?” (“Crisis” 211).

There is no question that...

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