The Discipline of Spanish

Abstract

of the Latin American culture industry and the emergence of the professional writer in the 1950s and 1960s. Arecent addition to the growing genre of theory how-to books, Teaching Contemporary to Un dergraduates (1994) illustrates the difficulties faced by literature teachers who want to expand the use of theory beyond graduate student seminars. In his introduction, William Cain pleads the necessary mea culpa when he be gins, Theory has a daunting range of meanings and ap plications (3). Cain senses the incongruities that arise from a book that prescribes specific uses for contemporary theory. A book directed at the pedagogical question of how to use theory in the classroom must avoid presenting a purely synchronic view of theory or a view that theory constitutes a stable body knowledge, a more or less uniform product that can be plugged into a course syllabus. The assump tions implicit in many contemporary interpretive ap proaches push us in different directions. Rather than finding convenient articulations of theory and course plans, a project more consonant with post structuralist approaches compels us to turn our critical attention to the field as a whole. An important corollary moves us to consider pedagogical issues and theory as a process that necessarily includes a reassessment of (at least certain) aspects of our discipline with the same critical rigor that we apply to our objects of study. At the same time that we help students learn to participate in the in terpretative processes associated with contemporary theory, we must not neglect the imperative to re-examine our field. In the first chapters of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Nelson makes the point that novel interpretations