Quality literature is the least important thing in "cultural studies"

BarcelonaBy resolution of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​​​a position is being announced for a full professor position attached to the Department of Spanish Philology, but with a relative profile in the area of ​​knowledge of literary theory and comparative literature. However, this area would be much better located within the Department of Catalan Philology, and thus students would not be so bored; the degree program would perhaps be overflowing, supplying institutes with the much-needed teachers of Catalan language and literature (no adjective; which would have had to strengthen the teaching of foreign literatures, a point that would have enriched ours).

In principle, what a department of theory and comparative literature most needs is people who, ideally, know two classical languages. And in Catalonia, we already know Catalan and Spanish, and two or three other modern languages to choose from among French, English, Italian, German, and Russian, the most productive in literary terms over the centuries.

But the call for applications isn't about that: perhaps candidates only know the two official languages of Catalonia because they aren't required to speak any other languages. This is a bad thing if you want to teach anything inspired by the essence of comparative studies, which is universal—or at least Western—and not specific. And now comes the worst part: it doesn't matter whether the candidate has read Ausiàs March, Joanot Martorell, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Petrarch, Leopardi, Pushkin, Dante, or Carner. They don't need to have read anything, perhaps because the subject they must take and the teaching project they are asking for are titled "Cultural Studies with a Gender Perspective."

It has been proven for years now that "cultural studies" is a pseudo-discipline always inclined toward what is called "politically correct"—completely alien to philology—and a field not exactly conceived as a field concerned with discussing whatever comes out (without preconceptions), but rather based on quality literature, that which "matters," that which "matters," that which "matters," that which "matters." Regarding the gender perspective, the author of the article no longer has the space to analyze this unusual form of literary studies.