LAUSR

The article introduces the cohort approach, widely used in diverse fields of knowledge, but never used to date in the history of Hispanic literature or art. This clearly designed approach provides a high degree of precision in creating and defining samples; allows for differentiating and situating cohorts in a larger scale in order to compare among and within cohorts; and carries out an in-depth characterization of groups with respect to socio-institutional variables. Likewise, it makes possible a temporal ecology, that is, the characterization of the literary system at a given moment. Its operationalization is not based on ideological variables, nor does it need to rely on them, as is the case with the concept of generation. Finally, we compare two studies whose results would have been impossible using the concept of generation. Thus, the cohort approach emerges as a new periodization tool in the history of art and literature.