Stuart Davis

The state of the discipline

This article examines the shape of the pedagogical canon of Spanish degree courses in UK Higher Education institutions. After identifying briefly the current challenges to the sector, the article discusses the results of a data set relating to the academic year 2015/2016, before comparing them to data sets from the academic years 2006/2007 and 1998/1999. It will be shown that there is a demonstrable dissipation of any sense of a canonical core. The article concludes by suggesting that the shift away from a literary core towards a greater array of literary and cultural objects of study is part of the evolution of modern languages, and may be of benefit to the discipline.

Reading beyond Cognitive Meaning: Affective Strategies in Novels of the Spanish 'Memory Boom'

The twenty-first century ‘memory boom’ in Spain has resulted in a plethora of narratives in which the Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship feature prominently. Studies of these works have addressed representations of memory and trauma, recognizing how the authors reanimate the past and narrate stories of conflict and loss to a readership distanced from the historical events. This essay explores four texts, identifying the strategies that have shaped their circulation in the current affective economy. Analysis pays particular attention to text, but also explores the image as formative in the reading experience.

Close encounters of the cultural kind: the peninsular Spanish canon in a pedagogical context

AMartian, on a fact-finding mission to Earth, finds himself in a bookstore, it is not important which, or where, chain store or local independent seller. He is confounded by the shelves stacked high with these things called ‘books’; although he understands that humans have the capacity to distinguish something called ‘fiction’ from another concept known as ‘fact’, his knowledge of Earth has not yet grasped the distinctions between novel and history, between bestseller and classic. He must return to Mars with ten representative pieces of fictional writing: what should they be? This very question has been posed to many groups of first year language students in my small group teaching, who are then given ten minutes to compile a list of the ten texts or authors who must represent human literary endeavour for Martians. Typically, responses range from the predictable classics (Shakespeare, Austen, Orwell, Lorca), to the popular (J.K. Rowling, Catherine Cookson, The Beano), to the more debatable as items of fiction (the Bible and other religious texts, Delia Smith cookbooks). Justification of choices frequently reveals particular ‘sponsors’ for many of the texts, a desire to represent equitably a range of cultural positions and time periods, and relates to the reading required of them in school curricula (Orwell especially). Inevitably, since the majority are British students, the focus is on English writing with a smattering of European authors. A facetious exercise indeed, but one that always illuminates unexamined attitudes towards culture and canon. The canon has attracted much attention amongst literary critics and literary theorists. In recent years, especially the early 1990s, it became a questioned and debated key to the English literature ‘culture wars’, dividing more traditional academics, for whom the canon’s existence is self-evident and natural, from those who sought to question the academy and its constructs. However, the debate over canon has not been simply the result of the critical trends of the past few decades, of the post-structuralist deconstruction of master narratives, techniques and values previously assumed as standard by literary critics and scholars. Indeed, debates