Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century (review)

Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century urges us to examine our assumptions about literary canons, understand the important pedagogical functions that they perform, and take responsibility for the construction of a Hispanic studies consensus canon. In this illuminating work, Joan L. Brown disproves the myth of the Canon, or single list of greatest works, demystifies the process of modern canon formation, and proposes an inclusive and flexible model that can serve as a blueprint for other disciplines. The balance of theory and data analysis provides a comprehensive view of the topic and, although examples are gleaned from Spanish and Latin American literature, Brown's observations and recommendations are accessible, and pertinent, to other fields.

The first chapter reviews the history of Western literary canons, demonstrating the indebtedness of modern canons to those of the past. Brown argues that, in performing the necessary function of sorting and selecting a smaller set of items from a much larger one, "the primary sociocultural function of a canon is to delimit and unite a community," since "[t]he choice of a reduced set is based on discrimination, which elucidates shared values" (40). She also emphasizes the relationship between canons, pedagogy, and disciplinary definition, asserting that "transmission of a discipline involves training the next generation of experts . . . [therefore] a canon shapes teachers (experts) and students (cultural consumers) alike" (41).

Seeking to disprove the myth of the Canon, the second chapter shows that modern canons are multiple and coexistent, ranging from an individual's internal list of personal preferences, to those requiring consensus such as literary histories, anthologies, and reading lists. Brown calls attention to the problematic lack of explicit criteria that characterizes the process of consensus canon formation, urging educators to move towards a clearer definition of the variables that determine canonicity in their field.

The statistical analysis of the "Hispanic graduate reading list canon" is the focus of the third chapter, which examines fifty-six reading lists, in use at the end of the 1990s, from American PhD granting programs. This examination yields the contents of "the universal canon" (works and/or authors on 100 percent of the lists), "the core canon" (90 to 99), "the nearly core canon" (76 to 89), and "the marginal canon" (50 to 75). While the dissection of each of these subsets, supported by material included in the appendix, is at times difficult to follow, it is informative and demonstrates that there is little agreement on what is deemed required reading in the field. This is most evident in the fact that the only universal items found were Don Quijote de la Mancha, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Benito Pérez Galdós. According to Brown, a non-exhaustive survey of current graduate reading lists shows no major changes since the late 1990s.

The data analysis also reveals alarming omissions in the Hispanic reading list canon that convey the urgent need for its revision. Gender and geographical gaps in the core were readily evident: only one of thirty authors was a woman, and only seven were from Latin America. Also noted was the core canon absence of any work that deals with homosexual experience (124) as well as that of Afro-Hispanic literature (114).These omissions, Brown contends, are the result of deliberate selection, not of scarcity. In the fifth chapter, the elucidation of extrinsic and intrinsic variables that contribute to canonicity helps demystify the process of canon formation, but fails to fully explain exclusions. It does demonstrate, however, that the first step towards content revision must be identifying the factors and values that have shaped canons in the past, and those that should do so in the future.

Brown offers a model for a "dynamic [and] inclusive" Hispanic studies canon (178) consisting of a "central core" shared by all graduate programs, whose contents are determined according to explicit but flexible criteria, and clear pedagogical...