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IF CERVANTES or Borges came back to life, he would have much to say about today’s pressing issues. Although technology cannot resuscitate dead authors, it offers the means of highlighting how fresh and current their canonical masterpieces are. It is thus a valuable pedagogical tool since our students relate better to what they perceive to be current and relevant to them. This is why we, a group of professors and lecturers of Spanish, are using technology to incorporate living writers in our teaching of canonical literature in Spanish.1 We are using the Internet as a fast, economical system of communication among people. Our students read short stories online by new writers who deal with the same issues presented in the canonical texts we are studying. After reading the stories, the students interview the authors by e-mail, write critiques of their texts, and present the results in class. These activities provide an excellent introduction to the canonical masterpieces.
We use Proyecto Sherezade, an Internet-based project publicly available to all: readers, writers, teachers, and students. Founded in 1996 by a group of Spanish language and literature academics in Canada and the United States, Proyecto Sherezade began as an Internet literary magazine that published nonestablished writers’ short stories in Spanish and commentaries sent by readers. Currently, it is one of the oldest magazines of its kind on the Internet. It has often been reviewed in the press and radio in Spanish-speaking countries and is listed in many Internet resource pages.2 On a monthly basis, it has five thousand steady readers all over the world. As of now, Proyecto Sherezade has published and kept online over 140 short stories from as many writers from twenty-five countries.
Proyecto Sherezade operates very much like a traditional literary magazine: the contributors submit their stories attached to their e-mail messages. Among the forty or more received every month, we select the two best to be published. We write a brief introduction to the story and put it online. We keep all the stories of previous months easily available, filed by date and title and by the name and nationality of their writers.
Most of the contributors are unestablished young writers from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Since young people are the group most at ease with technology, we tend to receive more submissions from younger than from older writers. We have received short stories sent by young people who are helping their technophobe older relatives to submit their writing, but every day more and more older writers are sending their work themselves. In this respect, Proyecto Sherezade has been an accurate gauge of how different age and gender groups are growing more comfortable with technology. At the beginning of Proyecto Sherezade, when Web browsers and e-mail programs were arcane, most stories we received were from male writers, many of them engineers and programmers who felt at home with the technology and had literary inclinations. But this gender imbalance has gradually disappeared as women and the public in general have become regular users of the Internet. Now we receive and publish stories in equal amounts from men and women.
Proyecto Sherezade is also a good gauge of the geographical dispersion of technology; we tend to get fewer stories from the countries in which access to the Internet is not widespread. But those contributors find a way around this difficulty; they use public computers to type in their texts and submit them. Many writers in these countries are happy to be able to use e-mail to send their stories because it is cheaper than printing the pages and using international postage. Some writers get together in writing clubs or shops that share one Internet access. For a while, we were receiving short stories by several writers e-mailing from an unlikely source: an official electronic account at the Ministry of Agriculture in Nicaragua. Later we learned that these stories were sent by writers in a literary group in Nicaragua, one of whose members had after-hours access to an Internet-connected computer at the ministry, where his spouse worked.
Proyecto Sherezade bears witness to how technology helps bridge the geographical diffusion of Spanish-speaking communities. In four years we have electronically published short stories from writers in Latin America, Spain, Australia, and Sweden. Contributions from unlikely countries, like Australia and Sweden, are frequent because in these countries many Latin American exiles and immigrants find on the Internet the Spanish-speaking virtual communities that their host countries cannot offer them. All the Spanish-speaking communities are represented in Proyecto Sherezade. The population distribution seems to be reflected in the submissions, since we receive more stories from the more populated Spanish-speaking countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and the United States.
Proyecto Sherezade is a good place for writers to showcase their work. Some new writers whose stories we put online attract the interest of publishers interested in printing their short stories in anthologies or in magazines. Many of the contributors also write novels. Having their short stories published by Proyecto Sherezade seems to help them find a publisher for their longer works.
The most interesting and innovative aspect of Proyecto Sherezade is how we are using it to integrate this living side of Spanish literature and culture into our Spanish literature, culture, and language courses. When we vote for the short stories to be published, we always notice the ones that are most suitable for our courses. Normally, they deal with some pressing social issues in Spanish-speaking countries. For instance, the present political situation in Cuba appears in several of the stories published. In a recent story we published, “La guagua,” by Jorge Luis de la Paz, a bus driver hijacks a bus and drives it nonstop around the city, ignoring the complaints of the passengers who want to get off. This story is a clear allegory of Fidel Castro’s position as the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution for the last forty years, and it introduces the writings of pro-and anti-Castro intellectuals in Cuba. Contributions from Argentinean and Chilean exiles often deal with painful testimonies of political repression and exile. The novels that are normally part of the undergraduate curriculum, such as Isabel Allende’s, are successfully introduced by these poignant short stories.
Other short stories we use for our classes are the ones influenced by Spanish literary traditions, such as magic realism, testimonio, the picaresque, novels of the Mexican revolution, and so on. Some stories are influenced by authors such as Borges, García Márquez, or Lorca. Such a story may present itself as an homage to the author. For instance, the story “Se llamará Federico,” by Maria Elena Lorenzin, engages in an intertextual dialogue with the poetry of Lorca. In several stories in the picaresque tradition a marginalized narrator in the first person resorts to elements of Argentinean tango folklore to narrate his life. In Jorge Morfin’s “Victor,” a short story dealing with machismo in contemporary Mexico, Calderón’s classic play Life Is a Dream is the model.
To make these stories more accessible to the average undergraduate, we have enhanced some of them with interactive vocabulary and historical and literary introductions. We have even added the voices of the writers reading passages of their texts. Although occasionally we have been tempted to add more advanced programming features, we continually remind ourselves of Marshall McLuhan’s famous mantra, “The medium is the message,” although for us, it is content that is the message. We acknowledge, however, that the medium conditions the message. This is one reason we have chosen the short story for our project, since its brevity makes it easy to read on screen—not the ideal place to read a novel or other longer genres. Likewise, its brevity makes it suitable for the time constraint of the average fifty-minute class. The short story is also a good pedagogical choice because it is an old, yet at the same time very alive, genre in Spanish. Finally, short stories are often fast, action-packed narrations that are a good introduction to the reading of literature for most undergraduates, who are used to short, intense entertainment forms.
Besides the emphasis on the content over the medium, another reason we keep our project technically simple is a purely practical one: we, the editors, do all the technical work of the publication ourselves, and we are not—nor do we have the time to be—programmers of C++, Java, or whatever the “in” programming language may be. In our experience, fancy programming work becomes obsolete in less than a couple of years. Sticking to basic ASCII text with minimal HTML encoding has been a better choice for us, because mere text resists time much better than ephemeral programming languages, as the literary masterpieces prove.3
Another important reason for our decision to stick to the basics in technology is pedagogical. Of all the technical features that the Internet offers, the most successful, yet one of the simplest, is e-mail. Plain e-mail offers the possibility for people to exchange near-instant messages very economically. If we just asked the students to read the short stories online, no matter how many bells and whistles the stories had, we would not be doing anything radically different from using printed paper. To promote in the students the vision of Spanish literature as the manifestation of a living culture, we ask them to contact through e-mail the writers of some of the stories we publish. Beforehand, we have grouped the students in twos or threes, depending on the size of the class. When two of Proyecto Sherezade’s editors in different universities happen to be teaching similar courses during the same semester, we pair students in different universities. We assign these teams a short story that can enrich the major works we are studying in class. If the paired students are located in different institutions, they have to e-mail each other (and e-mail copies to their instructors) until they produce a conjoint interview to e-mail to the writer of the short story.
Proyecto Sherezade’s writers e-mail addresses are always available at the end of their stories. Since most of Proyecto Sherezade’s contributors are young and eager to talk about their work, they promptly and thoroughly answer our students’ questionnaires. These interviews invariably contain questions on the creative process of the story. The writers often answer referring to present or historical events in their countries and to literary influences. The students may e-mail the authors a second time to pose new questions that the writer’s answers have elicited. Finally, the students use these interviews to write a socioliterary interpretation of the short story that they present in front of the class.
In theory, it could be possible to do all this just by resorting to the printed page and postal mail. In reality, the delay of ordinary mail and, more important, the formality of the written letter make that prospect unlikely. In a fourteen-week course, any delay in writing to people who live abroad or in receiving their answers would make this communication impossible. Besides, the students often feel intimidated by writing on paper to a person they do not know. The speed and, especially, the informality associated with e-mail solve these problems. We have also noticed that the writers themselves take longer and feel more intimidated writing back on paper; it is as if an e-mail were an informal chat that does not oblige them and cannot be held against them in the future.
Once this exchange of e-mail messages has taken place, we select the best commentaries and interviews and put them online at the end of the short stories. There, present and future students can use them as models. Furthermore, once the course is over, the students who wrote the commentaries continue to learn from this experience. Since the commentaries include the students e-mail addresses, many readers of Proyecto Sherezade will e-mail the students vehemently agreeing or disagreeing with their interpretations of the story.
Thanks to this approach, our students have the possibility of engaging in meaningful conversations with actual writers, with real people who share the same society and the same traditions as the authors we are studying in books and anthologies. This interaction makes the students better readers of the canonical pieces, whose content now has deeper significance for them because they can relate it to present-day people.
We have contemplated using more advanced technology to contact the writers, such as teleconferencing, which fits the communicative approach we are interested in. However, we prefer to confine ourselves to the simple technological approach of written communication, at least at the present moment when anything beyond the exchange of texts implies an intimidating array of technology.4 Besides, the written approach seems to be quite satisfying for the level of our students. We are still debating whether an oral approach—assuming that this technology will be easier in the future—would benefit them, especially since the short story is partially an oral genre.
On the one hand, Proyecto Sherezade is a progressive, McLuhanite project that illustrates McLuhan’s idea that technology is the originator of new relations between writers and readers, the bonfire around which we tell our stories in the global village. But on the other hand, Proyecto Sherezade is a conservative project. We are using the Internet for words, not for images or animation. We are using the Internet as an extremely efficient printing press that can break the remoteness of a printed page, a barrier that separates reader and writer. In the same conservative spirit, we are using the Internet in our classes to supplement, not to replace, the authors in our books and anthologies. Our classes are held in conventional rooms, without computers or screens, and our students do the computer work on their own after class. The kind of online texts we are using are traditional: texts written by individual writers with strong national identities, writing within a well-established, traditional genre. Maybe in the future electronic writing will produce hypertexts in which collaborative writing will diffuse authorial and national identities, but at the moment this is mostly a fantasy not a reality. The present communicative capacity of the Internet is what we are using in Proyecto Sherezade to break the barrier between writer and reader, since we believe that literature is about communicating ideas. In this way we can present Spanish literature to our students as a vital tradition of venerable texts that are still living in the creations of flesh-and-blood writers who are just an e-mail away.
2For a further description of Proyecto Sherezade, see Jáuregui.
3A secondary benefit of this low-tech approach is that it does not require additional funding, since the whole project can be kept on a personal home page. Keeping it there is a safe choice at the present, when the intellectual property of this kind of electronic material for teaching is not yet clear.
4We have successfully conducted a live Internet chat between students and a writer. Although it is more complex, this exercise has the advantage of being live and allowing the whole class to do it together.
Lorenzin, Maria Elena. “Se llamará Federico.” Proyecto Sherezade. Nov. 1996. Mar. 2001 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~fernand4/federico.html.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Morfin, Jorge. “Victor.” Proyecto Sherezade. Feb. 1997. Mar. 2001 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~fernand4/victor.html.
Paz, Jorge Luis de la. “La guagua.” Proyecto Sherezade. Aug. 1999. Mar. 2001. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~fernand4/guagua.html.
Proyecto Sherezade. Ed. Enrique Férnandez and José Luis Martín. 1996. Mar. 2001 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~fernand4.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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