Confronting our canons

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"Confident and authoritative, Well-Written and balanced, provocative and controversial: this is an excellent book, a call to arms and action, that all shapers and readers of literary canons should study with care."--David T. Gies University of Virginia" "What is canon and why does it matter? In Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century, Joan L. Brown shows that a canon has the power to define a field and determine what is taught. She argues that it is both productive and necessary to confront our canons, to see what is actually in them and how these works and authors got there. Only then can educators take charge of their teaching canons and, by extension, their disciplines. Brown demonstrates that there is little agreement in the reported teaching canons in English and Spanish. Analyzing twentieth- and twenty-first-century required graduate reading lists in Spanish and Latin American literature in the United States, she finds that the core literary canon for graduate students is less comprehensive than the Spanish Advanced Placement reading list for high school students. She encourages the field of Hispanic studies--curators of the cultural patrimony of our country's second language--to take the lead in developing a diverse, flexible, shared foundational canon at the graduate level, before the arbiters of "best practices" do this for us." "An Introductory chapter explains the power of canons and acquaints readers with the book. Chapter 1 contextualizes today's issues by reviewing the history of canon formation over time, crystallizing the evaluative and sociocultural functions of canons. Chapter 2 theorizes the types of canons that currently exist, from the dual internal canons in each person's mind to consensus in the fields of English and Spanish. Chapter 3 describes the canon in Spanish and Latin American literature, apprehended through a late twentieth-century statistical analysis of required graduate reading lists; this chapter also provides a guided tour of masterpieces in Spanish, nearly all of which are available in English translation. Chapter 4 exposes this canon's missing contents and uses readinglist data from the twenty-first century to trace the persistence of gaps. Chapter 5 draws out the implications of statistical findings to chart the factors that make a work, and by extension an author, canonical. Chapter 6 reviews canons past and present, then advocates the disciplinary construction of a continually evolving consensus canon for Spanish and Latin American graduate education. While these recommendations feature Hispanic studies as a model, they are applicable to all literary fields and to other areas in the humanities."--Jacket.

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