Talk:Ilan Stavans

Name
Why is this Ilan rather than Ilán? - Jmabel | Talk 03:37, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your question. When I started working with Ilan, I used the tilde when I wrote to him in Spanish. However, he prefers the Hebrew transliteration without the tilde. "Ilan" means palm tree in Hebrew. Vero 70.240.248.210 22:22, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. By the way, "~" is a tilde; "´" is an acute accent. - Jmabel | Talk 20:56, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Tienes toda la razón. The ~ is also called a swung dash when it is placed before a word (instead of over a letter).... In order to keep the peace, let's talk about diacritics instead of tildes :-) Happy New Year. Vero

Unreferenced
Much of this article is unreferenced, and reads like an autobiography or press release. Indeed, much of it has been written by Veronica Albin, a close collaborator of Ilan Stavans's. It would be good to have some sources, and for the tone of the article to become somewhat more encyclopedic. --Jbmurray 12:58, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * The external links list needs to be trimmed, though some of the trimming could be accomplished as part of the sourcing task; that is, some of the links would meet the criteria of sources for statements in the article, in which case they could be incorporated into inline footnote and removed from the "External links" segment. Lawikitejana 06:03, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

This entry on Stavans reads like a dust jacket promotion. He may have been critiized for being white and Jewish and trying to represent US Hispanic culture, but he has also and much more profoundly been criticized for passing himself off as a great public intellectual when he is a know-nothing whose work is riddled with basic errors and simplistic stereotypes. His introduction to an anthology of Ruben Darío's poetry famously asserts that the Nicaraguan writer's health deteriorated quickly after the first world war when Darío died in 1916 -- Roberto González Echevarraría cleverly points out this and many other factual lapses in his review of Stavan's introduction. In the category of self-promotion, this Wikipedia article uses the passive voice to indicated that a collection of Stavan's work came out in the "Essential Ilán Stavans," but doesn't mention that this was a self-edited volume published before Stavans was fourty years old -- more than a tiny bit of hubris. Finally, in the area of simplistic stereotypes, many prominent U.S. Latino writers (eg Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz) have been highly critical of the way Stavans addresses bilingualism and code-switching; there is nothing more meaningless in that sense than Stavan's moronic rendition of the opening of Don Quixote into an artificial, Stavanesque mixture of Spanish and English with no social or literary reference. He is an academic with no academically vetted publications and a public intellectual with no public constituency but he has pushed his way into the publishing world and from there into the cultural media with almost no one pausing to ask what the value of his work is. Defghi 9:01, 7 December 2007 (CST) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Defghi (talk • contribs)


 * Indeed, this guy not only heavily relies on stereotypes but also has the tendency to arbitrary and cynically generalise. Throughout his writings we come across with "Mexicans this..., Mexicans that..." as if being Mexican were a monolithic cultural state. He also makes the fundamental mistake common to virtually all essayist when writing about Mexico: this is, to equate Mexico City with Mexico. It's a shame that people like these try to pass as cultural embassors.--Scandza (talk) 13:17, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Criticism
Precisely because of these concerns (see section 'Unreferenced' above) I found and added a reference to a New York Times article from 1999 addressing criticism of Ilan Stavans. Also added a 'Criticism' section that I think is much needed. From the wikipedia entry it would seem that Stavans' critics were just unaffiliated or non-academic 'Latino' circles, but reading the New York Times article it seems that there are critics from within academia itself, so I think that is worth addressing in future updates of this entry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.227.179.180 (talk) 20:33, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Since I recently performed some research on what academics have written about Ilan Stavans and directly engaged with his work, I've added some citations to the Critical Bibliography. It seems worthwhile to condense the Criticism references and Critical Bibliography together to avoid repeat citations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.77.179.162 (talk) 19:08, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Articles Online
In addition to Ilan Stavans' print publications, should there also be a section including web articles he's written? Heather Chait (talk) 19:42, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

POV
I added a POV tag. This article reads like the dust jacket of a self-published novel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.85.253.79 (talk) 19:11, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Poorly Referenced
For its size, this must be the most poorly referenced WP bio article I've seen. I placed a few tags over the most prominent uncited claims being made, but the article needs cites in far many more statements than those I tagged. The list of 6 references there now are almost useless to support the article even existing: two of them are permanent dead link, 2 others aren't taking directly about the subject of the article, and out of the remaining 2 only one, imo, is from a WP:RS. I am not saying article doesn't meet WP:N criteria. What I am saying is the article makes a lot of claims, some of which can be substantiated by solid RSs but those existing RSs haven't been taken advantage of by previous editors. The article appears written by either the subject of the article himself (read WP:COI or some of his fans. Mercy11 (talk) 03:15, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

American?
He appears to be a Mexican resident in the States. If he has dual citizenship, that should be indicated. 142.205.202.71 (talk) 20:54, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Date of birth
Dr. Stavans was born on 7 April 1961 148.85.255.193 (talk) 07:31, 21 June 2024 (UTC)