SOURCE: “Alfonsina Storni: In and Out of the Canon,” Monographic Review, Vol. XIII, 1997, pp. 310–18.

In the following essay, Titiev argues that, although several of Storni's poems are now included in the “canon” of Latin-American literature commonly studied in classrooms, these selections still represent only a narrow selection of Storni's range of thematic concerns.

We tend to refer to “the canon” as though there were only one, although we know that there are, in fact, many different canons. In a discussion based for the most part on the study of English and U.S. literature in English-speaking North America, Lillian Robinson wrote about “the informal agglomeration of course syllabi, anthologies, and widely commented-upon ‘standard authors’ that constitutes the canon as it is generally understood. For, beyond their availability on bookshelves, it is through the teaching and study—one might even say the habitual teaching and study—of certain works...