Dan Schnaidt, ACM for the Arts and Humanities, interviews Professor Antonio González of Romance Languages and Literatures about his course Web site and its usefulness in teaching literature.

On your web site you present Spanish223 as a study of modern literature "in it's historical context and in relation to other artistic expressions, especially painting." Before you developed the web site, how did you provide this kind of historical context?

Before I constructed the web site the students didn't have as much context.. . . .mainly what I would tell them in class or excerpts from manuals that I would photocopy. As far as images go, it depended on my level of energy to get slides, screen and projector; it was a huge time investment.

Reading is always a critical performance. And I would like to include in another more specialized course, perhaps on Lorca, assignments for students to go into the recording booth and create this kind of critical performance

Why focus on painting? Among all the arts, is there a special relationship between literature and painting?

From a pedagogical point of view, it's particularly useful. Students relate to the visual more immediately than to other artistic expressions. I should be clear that my treatment is not what you would get in an art history class. Half way through the semester The students read Ortega y Gassett's essay "Concerning Point of View in the Arts," which focuses on the relationship between painting and philosophy at crucial junctures. Although I don't use it exclusively, Ortega’s approach helps us to focus the relationship between literature and painting in a very particular way.

Ortega conceptualizes history by comparing it to a movie made up of a series of stills on film. Using the tool of phenomenology, he telescopes history through this series of stills. What we need to do is find those special stills that help us to understand historical evolution in a general sense. I base the course on this notion while emphasizing to my students that there are many other ways of conceptualizing history.

For each author, you've written a short essay or reading guide, which helps to create historical context. Each guide is followed by a list of themes and questions. How does all of this come together in the course?

I draw on those themes to structure the discussion in class. The way for the students to best understand the reading is to have the reading guides and questions next to them, and to use the questions to motivate their reading so that reading [of the assigned text] becomes something of a detective-like search of specific information.

At the end of the Espronceda reading guide is your" Introduction to the Analysis of Poetry." Are there other critical aides like this? If so, how important is an understanding of analytical methods for students at this level

In the guide to Moratin I inserted a very elementary discussion of Aristotelian poetics as it was understood in the neo-classical era. These materials are there for the students to use when they are appropriate. It is significant to understand a little bit about Aristotle's dramatic unities when they read Moratin's play. It's significant, once again, to understand the basic concepts of poetic analysis when they start reading the poetry. But I wouldn't want to front-load too much of that stuff in this particular course.

There are over 200 poems on the web site. Is the act of reading poetry on a screen fundamentally different than reading it on the printed page

The act of reading on the web is crucial for the course. An example is the way context is provided for Antonio Machado. The image [that accompanies "Hacia un ocaso radiante..."] of the "noria," a primitive well used still in the 20th, is crucial for understanding the symbolism of this cultural artifact in Machado’s poetry. A wheel holding buckets is put into action by a horse or donkey that circles around the well pushing a pole. These physical circular patterns are directly related to the circularity of being in time and of cultural traditions as Machado views them.

You accompany another Machado poem, "Retrato," with a half-dozen images and a rendition in song by Joan Manuel Serrat. The song, images and the text combine, for me, as a type of critical performance. Does this point toward new critical methods that are only possible on the web? If so, will you ask students to create similar work?

Yes. Reading is always a critical performance. And I would like to include in another more specialized course, perhaps on Lorca, assignments for students to go into the recording booth and create this kind of critical performance. In the short term, there are still a lot of logistical problems, but this is my long term goal for teaching literature.

Buñuel made a movie in the 1950s based on the 19^th C novel "Tristana" by Benito Pérez Galdós. Students now see the movie in class. It would be useful to isolate a scene or two and put them on the web as a place to discuss the relationship between writing and film as art forms.

Can there be too much? Is there a point at which media intended to in some way enlarge a work of art can start to distract from or even displace it?

People do sometimes run astray of the centrality of the written word. But tools in and of themselves are not too much; it depends on how faculty use them.

The Span223 site includes over 2500 images. Sheer number tells us you believe there is a strong iconic component to learning. Would you say that text has been overly privileged in undergraduate study of literature?

I hesitate to put it in those terms. I will say that often literature is not contextualized enough &emdash; at the level of deep contextualization that Ortega speaks of, at the level of the philosophical and ideological basis that art and literature share.

Maps. In addition to geographic context, maps help to illustrate geopolitical and thematic concerns and make them more accessible to our students. Since most of our students have not been to Spain, bringing Spain visually to them is crucial. Take Unamuno's theme of the centrality of Castile within the framework of the Spanish national identity. If you look on a map you can see the wedged-shape of the Castilian-speaking area of the Iberian peninsula, the result of Castile’s role in leading the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims during the Middle Ages.