Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century [Paperback]

What is a 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 studiescurators of the cultural patrimony of our country's second languageto 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.Joan L. Brownis Elias Ahuja Professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware.

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, University of Virginia

Scholars must confront their canons, argues Brown (Spanish, U. of Delaware), in order to understand their contents and their pedagogical consequences, and only then take action to ensure that these consequences are the ones the scholars intend. She takes examples and evidence from her own field, but does not expect readers to read Spanish, and nearly all the titles she mentions are available in English translation. Her topics include literary canon formation in Western history, ló¾