2012 MLA Convention Feature: What Do Graduate Students in Spanish Need to Learn, and Why?
- 2012 MLA Convention Feature:What Do Graduate Students in Spanish Need to Learn, and Why?
For the AATSP session at this year's MLA Convention, we assembled a panel of experts to discuss what they saw as the most pressing needs in Spanish graduate education today. The session was chosen as a Presidential Theme Session, linked to outgoing MLA President Russell S. Berman's convention banner of "Language, Literature, Learning." The following is the session description listed in the Convention program:
This roundtable session responds to a fundamental question posed by Russell S. Berman in establishing the 2012 convention theme: "Today's graduate students will become tomorrow's teachers of undergraduates: Do we have the right curricula in place?" Panelists will work together with the audience to try to identify literary, linguistic, and cultural items that are indispensable for graduate education in Spanish.
For the roundtable on January 7, 2012, in Seattle, panelists Randolph D. Pope, Emily C. Francomano, Roberta Johnson, Sheri Spaine Long, and I each delivered a brief presentation, followed by comments and queries by other panelists. The last portion of the session was reserved for responses from audience members. The audience of about fifty ranged in experience from graduate students to department chairs and deans. The five short essays that follow are slightly revised versions of the panelists' talks, incorporating new opinions or conclusions derived from the vigorous exchange of ideas that took place that day. Following the last paper a conclusion summarizes many of the salient topics explored by panelists and audience members during the discussion period. Although the session topic focused on Spanish, it is equally relevant for graduate education in Portuguese and other languages. [End Page xiii]
Elias Ahuja Professor of Spanish
University of Delaware
- Why Spanish Graduate Students Need a Canon
Our graduate students do not have a common canon. The items that they are expected to read on their way to earning a PhD in one department are, to a surprising extent, different from what their peers read in other doctoral programs. Put another way, each doctoral program in the United States has its own canon.
This is at least in part because there is no defined canon in our field. This assessment is based on my analysis of the contents of required graduate reading lists in the United States. With the assumption that required reading for the doctorate represented our graduate canon, I analyzed the reading lists of the 56 doctoral programs in Spanish that existed in the late 1990s, using lists at the MA or PhD level or both. To my surprise, the universally shared core consisted of only three items in a database of nearly 15,000 works and authors. (They were Don Quijote and Lazarillo de Tormes, plus Galdós for a combination of different titles.) Works on 90-99% of graduate reading lists, what I call the core canon, were also scant: just nine works, all but one from Spain.1 Even at lower levels of agreement (with presence on 75% of the reading lists, or on half of them), glaring omissions of the core canon persisted. These were especially egregious in the areas of gender (with scarcely any works by women writers), genre (missing any nonprint works), nationality (with Spain the favored country and many countries absent), sexuality (heterosexuality only), language (restricted to Castilian Spanish), and century representation (with the eighteenth century ignored).
Today our canon situation is even more chaotic. Of the 49 Spanish doctoral programs that remain, only 39 use reading lists for an entire cohort of students, and these lists appear to be nearly identical to earlier ones, with additions but no subtractions. (Since not all institutions post their reading lists online, it is not possible to establish this continuity beyond a doubt, but it exists in all reading lists that are publicly available.) The minimal shared graduate canon that exists today is much less comprehensive than the one that a newly minted professor will be expected to cover in a literary survey course for undergraduates.
What are the pedagogical implications of this absence of a...
