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Spanish Cultural Studies in the Undergraduate Classroom Mary Coffey, an Assistant Professor of Spanish literature at Pomona ColUge in CUremont, California, has published articUs on narrative and theater and is computing a book entitUdWriting the Nation. Benito Pérez Galdós and the project ofthe Episodios nacionales. From 1991 to 1994, Professor Coffey lived in Madrid, whkh stimulated her interest in contemporary Spanish culture. In addition to Spanish cultural studies, she teaches courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century Spanish literature . Her current research, "Bridging the Generation Gap: The Spanish Novel from 1875 to 1925 " involves a diematic reassessment ofthe reUtionships between Spanish noveL· ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The unprecedented growth of cultural studies at universities in the United States has been greeted with enthusiasm by graduate students and professors (particularly junior faculty), often by skepticism on the part of senior faculty, and even serious concern by some of its leading exponents.1 It is an intellectual project that, despite its dear connections to the social sciences, is making a strong impact in the humanities, particularly in departments of language and literature. Nonetheless, cultural studies has yet to find its place within the undergraduate curriculum, and it is that situation which I would like to address here. This essay is essentially a chronicle. It is the story of a successful undergraduate course which linked cultural studies to language acquisition. By telling this story, I wish to draw attention to the value and efficacy of teaching Spanish cultural studies to language learners and to stimulate some discussion about the pedagogical and theoretical challenges of just such a project. In addition, by examining what I felt to be both the benefits and difficulties of this type of course, I also hope to encourage professors to consider offering courses with a specific focus on cultural studies at a much earlier point in the undergraduate career . Finally, by narrating this story, I wish to signal at the very least my awareness of the various interpretive possibilities within it, both pedagogical and theoretical. Incorporating theory into undergraduate teaching is a challenge in itself, and the addition of foreign language instruction Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 252 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies certainly affected the shape of die course. But, as I hope to demonstrate, the advantages of weaving die teaching of cultural studies into the project of foreign language acquisition and the presentation of political and historical information proved to be an advantageous mix in helping my students arrive at a better understanding of contemporary Spain. Perhaps not surprisingly , some of the tensions most evident in the project of cultural studies actually reinscribed themselves into the structure ofthe course in a subtle yet powerful fashion. Cultural Studies and Contemporary Spain Before elaborating on the form ofthe course and the actual experience of teaching it, I feel it is necessary to address the issue of cultural studies as an academic discipline. There is no doubt that sociohistorical factors have promoted the development of cultural studies in the academy today. The proliferation of postmodernist dieories of literature (and by extension of various other forms of cultural production ) has created an almost limitless variety of approaches to an equally vast set of objects (literature, film, television, advertising and lived practices). As a result , nearly every critical foray into this field begins with an explanation of what cultural studies is or is not as well as an attempt to position one's self into the context of the discussion. This essay will be no different, except that I hope to demonstrate the connections between this theoretical rationale and my own pedagogical practices and experiences in the classroom in the last section of the essay. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler define cultural studies in the introduction to their anthology , Cultural Studies, as the study of "die entire range of a society's arts, beliefs, institutions , and communicative practices" (4). This wide range of possibilities for study has occasioned criticism that accuses cultural studies of being a field with no stable disciplinary base nor an established methodology. This perception, while incorrect , points to the core of the project's postmodernist nature. Cultural studies, because...

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