A place for professors of Spanish Literature to complain about or defend the field.
Friday, February 20, 2009
An earful from the MLA
As promised, here is the 2008 MLA White Paper. I think it is excellent. It outlines a balanced but forward-looking position on reclaiming the importance of language and literature study in higher education.
Thanks for posting this document. I received an email from MLA notifying me of the document but had yet to open it and read it. Some of what is described in the paper is part of our core curriculum, which obviously is geared toward a liberal education and to all students, but we could certainly do more with our majors and with the English faculty. Like you, I rub shoulders every day with English faculty. We've talked about requiring our FL majors to take a Western Lit. course to broaden their literary knowledge and begin to analyze lit. in English first or early on in their general ed. before doing it in Spanish or French.
The definition of literature on page 2 is too narrow, but language's esthetic and poetic elements are mentioned later on page 8. It does seem that the paper has a pragmatic focus, which it must have in these times.
After UCLA, I started reading pedagogy guidebooks and memoirs from professors in the humanities, mostly English and Comp. Lit., all of which have offered passionate defenses of the language arts and teaching strategies. Currently, I'm reading Showalter's Teaching Literature and Wayne Booth's The Vocation of a Teacher (see chapter on Who Killed Liberal Education?). Booth's memoir is also full of teaching anecdotes and strategies. Jay Parini's The Art of Teaching is a nice little book too and reads well with George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters (very erudite, but it's Steiner). I've also followed as much as possible some of the recent debates and forums published in the PMLA (117:5, "Conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Language" and "Why Major in Literature" discussed in the same conference and republished in this volume). I also benefited from Ken Bain's What the Best College Teacher's Do (very empirical but extremely practical). I suppose we are all writing our own books as we experiment, fail, and try again with every class and every class session. I love teaching for its chance to begin again, renovate, defend, and for the constant reflexivity it offers.
I just finished reading the document and I must say I agree with Kent. I was also suprised to see that it advocated close reading and an appreciation of the aesthetic elements of language "for which literature can be a primary source."
I, too, like the emphasis on great books and close reading. It seems that there's a growing recognition that the downside to a post-everything theoretical approach is a loss of certain reading strategies best described as formalist or structuralist. I'm reading Culler's Structuralist Poetics right now, and loving it.
Dave: Thanks for the reading list. I'll have to dive in.
5 comments:
Thanks for posting this document. I received an email from MLA notifying me of the document but had yet to open it and read it. Some of what is described in the paper is part of our core curriculum, which obviously is geared toward a liberal education and to all students, but we could certainly do more with our majors and with the English faculty. Like you, I rub shoulders every day with English faculty. We've talked about requiring our FL majors to take a Western Lit. course to broaden their literary knowledge and begin to analyze lit. in English first or early on in their general ed. before doing it in Spanish or French.
The definition of literature on page 2 is too narrow, but language's esthetic and poetic elements are mentioned later on page 8. It does seem that the paper has a pragmatic focus, which it must have in these times.
After UCLA, I started reading pedagogy guidebooks and memoirs from professors in the humanities, mostly English and Comp. Lit., all of which have offered passionate defenses of the language arts and teaching strategies. Currently, I'm reading Showalter's Teaching Literature and Wayne Booth's The Vocation of a Teacher (see chapter on Who Killed Liberal Education?). Booth's memoir is also full of teaching anecdotes and strategies. Jay Parini's The Art of Teaching is a nice little book too and reads well with George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters (very erudite, but it's Steiner). I've also followed as much as possible some of the recent debates and forums published in the PMLA (117:5, "Conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Language" and "Why Major in Literature" discussed in the same conference and republished in this volume). I also benefited from Ken Bain's What the Best College Teacher's Do (very empirical but extremely practical). I suppose we are all writing our own books as we experiment, fail, and try again with every class and every class session. I love teaching for its chance to begin again, renovate, defend, and for the constant reflexivity it offers.
I've printed it out and hope to read it shortly.
I just finished reading the document and I must say I agree with Kent. I was also suprised to see that it advocated close reading and an appreciation of the aesthetic elements of language "for which literature can be a primary source."
Those are good suggestions for summer reading, Dave. I still have not purchased the tome you recommended on writing, but I mean to.
I, too, like the emphasis on great books and close reading. It seems that there's a growing recognition that the downside to a post-everything theoretical approach is a loss of certain reading strategies best described as formalist or structuralist. I'm reading Culler's Structuralist Poetics right now, and loving it.
Dave: Thanks for the reading list. I'll have to dive in.
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