British Hispanists and the Curse of Conservatism

Abstract

Around the late 1980s, the tranquil waters of British Hispanism were rippled by a wave of discontent as a group of youngish, theoretically-minded scholars cast a series of damning indictments of their own discipline. The field, they claimed, was methodologically outdated, institutionally petrified, and ideologically suspect. “British Hispanism still presents a narrow, highly selective and linguistically defective introduction to the foreign culture(s) it studies, relying almost exclusively on a literary access route,” Barry Jordan stated in British Hispanism and, the Challenge of Literary Theory (1990). To Jordan, the field seemed “permanently in intellectual arrears.” It appeared “disturbingly parochial in its intellectual interests,” reflected “a pervasive cultural mandarinism,” and had been “largely unwilling … to reflect on its own assumptions and practices.”¹ Jordan (b. 1950) lamented that British Hispanism had been almost completely oblivious to the theoretical “revolution” that had rejuvenated literary studies throughout the 1980s, particularly in English. But although this revolution had by now become comfortably institutionalized elsewhere, Jordan argued that, for Hispanism, “the questions raised by theory are still important enough to warrant attention, elucidation, and dissemination.” His sense of urgency was further fueled by his awareness of the potential threat to academic literary studies posed by Margaret Thatcher’s utilitarian-minded educational policies.