The State of Catalan Studies in the United States

Having been asked to comment on the state of Catalan Studies in the United States, I must consider it an invitation to speak about myself. Not because my vanity prompts me to say, as Louis XIVth allegedly said, that I am the thing itself, but rather because, in the absence of programs of Catalan Studies in this country, I can only refer to my subjective experience to answer a question that has been addressed to me for reasons that must appear pertinent to others. At the outset, a word of caution with respect to terminology is in order. American academe is fond of attaching the word “studies” to just about anything as a way of producing instant disciplines out of virtually any passing interest or fad. “Studies” is the pedantic version of the “isms” that proliferated in the early 20th century. The word, in the current context of academic instability, operates much like the suffix “ism” did, albeit adapted to an era that has sought to dismantle aesthetic certainties. On seeing the word “studies” used as a crutch, it is useful to ask whether the radical to which it attaches refers to a structured branch of knowledge or is the telling sign of institutional indefinition. A term like “Literary Studies,” launched by F. R. Leavis to propose the reform of English into a self-grounded discipline – the very discipline that has now been dismantled beyond repair –, displays the same oblivious redundancy as the term “Lake Lagunita,” which marks one of the features of the Stanford campus landscape. It shows, that is, a semantic layering indicative of the cultural substitution affecting a relatively invariable object. “Study,” in its ordinary acceptation, began simultaneously and inseparably with the invention of literacy, while the latter, in its alphabetical modality, came to be in the process of transmitting through study, i.e. memorization, poetry that previously had been performatively composed. The Spanish language still retains a vague memory of the essential synonymy between literacy and learning in the term letrado, which refers to a person qualified in the legal profession.

Mechanically, “studies” appears to endow with structure and epistemological coherence things that often lack both. An anecdote will show what the stakes are. A few years ago, when the proposal to change the name of Stanford’s department of Spanish and Portuguese was being considered, I met with the director of the Latin American Studies program to ask for his thoughts on the new name: Iberian and Latin American Studies. Contrary to my expectation, this affable colleague offered insurmountable opposition to the word “studies,” and so we settled on the alternative term “cultures.” He did not object, as one might expect from a serious academic, to the ambiguity of the term “studies” but rather to “our” use of it, a rather peculiar objection in view of its proliferation throughout the university. I was told that “you,” that is, a literature department, “do not do studies, we do.” Etymology was certainly not my interlocutor’s strong suit. If we did not “do” studies, what might our pedagogical mission be? Never mind that I had previously taught in departments of Hispanic Studies and of Romance Studies, had co-founded a “Literary Studies” program, and had published in journals that flaunt the word “Studies” in their titles; none of this seemed relevant or sufficiently empirical when it came to define academic turf.

One could reasonably object that Iberian Studies, a concept I have promoted for years, suffers from the same vagueness that prompts the unrestrained and sometimes imaginative use of “studies.” Although I am inclined to grant the point, I would nevertheless offer a line of defense, which goes roughly like this: by itself the adventitious and potentially redundant concept of “studies” cannot substantivize adjectival objects of interest (i.e. “visual studies”) and is thus superfluous in relation to well-established fields of inquiry. We do not have poetry studies but rather poetics, rhetorical studies but rhetoric, historical studies but history, law studies but law, philosophical studies but philosophy, and so on. But we have a whole array of “studies,” often accompanied...