When I was an undergraduate student in Hispanic Studies at McGill, a semester lasted 12 weeks. This means that we were assigned 〰 10 novels or equivalent to read per course. And after my first semester, I always had 6 courses per semester.
And it wasn’t all that hard. Yes, it was a lot of reading but it was incredible fun and I was enjoying it massively. And now I defy anybody to find a remotely important text in my field that I haven’t read. (Except for Cortazar’s Rayuela. That one defeated me.)
I’d love to teach this kind of courses. I did once, back at Cornell, but that was years ago. I can’t do it now for various reasons. First of all, I can’t make students buy 10 books in Spanish. We don’t make them buy books at all. It helps students financially but the downside is that they end up never seeing anything but the stupid textbooks by greedy educational publishers that we rent out to them.
Another problem is that the program is set up in a way that delays the students’ encounter with reading literature for as long as possible. Even the Intro to Literature course is 1/3 grammar. And this tendency keeps growing. Students are given more and more prerequisites (language courses) they need to complete before they are deemed ready to read anything but a two-page excerpt. When they finally complete the prerequisites, it’s time to graduate, so that’s that. I’ve tried to combat the prerequisite mania but it’s useless. The nasty things keep mushrooming.
Of course, there is also the issue of habit. It’s one thing to say to somebody “Read this novel by the end of the week” when that person has been doing that her whole life anyway. But it’s quite different when the habit is not there.
Clarissa's Blog 
“they end up never seeing anything but the stupid textbooks by greedy educational publishers that we rent out to them”
Past a certain point textbooks are the enemy of language learning (except as reference works accessed on the student’s own time). At what should be undergraduate level and presuming a student is starting from zero they should need no more than two years of basic Spanish learning, grammar, vocabulary with a textbook and should then graduate to real world materials with all possible speed.
“the program is set up in a way that delays the students’ encounter with reading literature for as long as possible…. Students are given more and more prerequisites (language courses) they need to complete before they are deemed ready to read anything but a two-page excerpt.”
That’s the textbook industry working as it’s intended to.
One advantage of being interested in languages without big textbook industries behind them was that I had to graduate to real world materials very early on. Tough (and only doable with individual study which might not be an option for your institution) but effective.+
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There is a pervasive myth in language teaching in the US (and probably elsewhere), that students need to master all/most of the grammar before they can handle serious literature and cultural studies. This is incredibly dangerous and destructive because they will never master the language until they grapple with serious content. Students spin their wheels doing the same grammar activities over and over again, get bored with the lack of content and many give up on the language.
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“and many give up on the language”
If they’re not allowed to give up on it they may simply grow to hate it…
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I never took a literature course in a foreign language so I didn’t read long novels. The only equivalent courses with even that kind of reading load I took was a capstone seminar in which I read on average 500 pages of theory a week, another seminar in which I was to write one 20 page original research paper, and a English literature course in which we read a novel every two weeks. Most writing, foreign language and otherwise, was based on articles, poems, short stories and excerpts (up to ~50 pages) from books, not complete works.
I’d argue the books have more resale value than the textbooks. The textbooks nowadays are stupid especially if they’re part of a class with an online component. If you’re going to make me pay $100-200 for a book, I should own the book fully and not own a license which expires after certain period of time.
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I realize that you are not that interested in language pedagogy research, but it does in fact support the type of teaching you want to do (see research on extensive reading at the lower levels for example). Overcoming the structural and ideological barriers though is a whole nother problem . . .
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“Overcoming the structural and ideological barriers though is a whole nother problem . . .”
That’s precisely the problem. If everybody but me wants to do things this way, there’s nothing I can do. I’m trying but it’s useless.
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Keep trying!…more practically, how much oversight is there to your classes? Could you just do it? That is what I used to do when I worked in a program where the only oversight was “finish this textbook chapter by such and such a date”
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