33, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 5-7
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Foreign Languages and Foreign Cultures
RUSSELL A. BERMAN
DURING the past decades, increased scholarly attention to the historical and contextual frame of literary works has brought greater prominence to “culture” as a topic of both teaching and research. This tendency has been amplified by the expansion of criticism beyond literature, narrowly defined, to include the material of popular culture and everyday life. Indeed, the term culture has sometimes seemed to slip away from a traditional aesthetic usage, referring to canonic works of art and literature, toward an ethnographic sense, designating a full ensemble of values and practices. Furthermore, concern with issues related to nationality and identity, particularly minority identity, has posed the question of culture from another angle: What are the narratives or representational practices that define group membership? Whether in the specific sense of “cultural studies” or in the spirit of “cultural literacy,” the scholarly turn to culture raises vital questions for the mission of departments of foreign languages and literatures (see During; Hirsch).
Languages are embedded in culture and are born in culture, but the critical discourse of cultural studies has paid scant attention to the intersection of language and culture. Surprisingly perhaps, it appears that much of the cultural studies movement ignores linguistic multiplicity. This may reflect either a theoretical blind spot, that is, an assumption of language as fundamentally transparent, or a disciplinary predisposition to select primarily anglophone material. Is cultural studies ultimately as much an English-only project as American studies always has been? This would be consonant with Paul Gilroy’s critique of the origins of British cultural studies.
Nevertheless, there are extensive traditions of deep and ongoing engagement with the study of culture from scholarship associated with foreign languages, even if it is, for disciplinary reasons, segregated from scholarship on English-language material. Hence the current debate within the discipline of comparative literature on whether it should evolve into global cultural studies, and the 1996 foundation of the journal Transculture, dedicated to “interpretations and applications of cultural studies in the languages.” Indeed leading scholars in all the foreign languages have explored adaptations of the study of culture in their specific domains, placing greater emphasis on questions of cultural transfer, migration, and globalization, which reflects the particular situation of foreign language study. At the same time, the recent publication of standards for competence in foreign language developed by ACTFL also focuses attention on language and culture, especially in but by no means restricted to the literary domain.
Foreign language departments have always housed multiple agendas; in addition to second language acquisition and literary study, they have conveyed knowledge about the specific other culture. Foreign language departments have always been a location for instruction about the other place or places associated with the language of instruction. Besides teaching language and literature, German departments have conveyed knowledge about Germany, as well as (if less so) about Austria and Switzerland, just as Spanish departments are about Spain and Latin America. French departments, historically always concerned with France and French civilization, are now also, increasingly, about the rest of the francophone world--and they are about these other places in ways that English departments are typically not about England or other parts of the anglophone world. The presumption that English was a transparent medium, the natural language in the American world, with no foreign associations may have appeared to obviate any need to consider cultural difference. Hence a fundamentally different relation of English and foreign language departments to their materials. (It is interesting that where English is studied as a foreign language, e.g., in Germany, attention to cultural topics is greater. Cultural approaches to English material in the United States have historically been pushed out of English departments and marginalized as American studies.) It is certainly worth speculating that the initial emergence of cultural studies in English departments simply reflects their historical backwardness on the question of culture. It was a more radical move for English departments to begin to address culture and thereby, in effect, to catch up with foreign language departments, for which culture had always been part of the curriculum.
Foreign language departments frequently mount culture courses, designed to introduce students to aspects of the history and society of the other place, and often with a fairly systematic framework. Nonetheless, undergraduate culture courses have tended to be treated merely as an auxiliary device, a sort of add-on to the primary track of study that was imagined to take students from language learning to literature interpretation. However this status quo ante of the traditional culture course has undergone a profound transformation due to the transitions in literary criticism and the concomitant cultivation of interdisciplinary approaches to culture. The extensive repositioning of culture in the intellectual landscape is generating new opportunities to the cultural curriculum, in the foreign languages as well as in English. The expansion from literature to film, from film to popular culture, and from popular culture to an effectively unlimited range of texts has opened up culture to many new materials, reflecting the literary-theoretical slide toward a pantextualism. Following certain insights of structuralism, all cultural phenomena have come to be treated as texts, which are therefore regarded as readable, open to interpretation, and taken to be indications of their surrounding culture. If culture courses twenty years ago were merely the modest stepchildren of a curriculum that targeted literature, today they have the potential to build on some of the most contemporary cultural theory and to work with an expanding set of material, which can greatly enrich the study of the other place. What was once a backwater has become a hot spot, and as such, this redefined cultural material has the potential to play a determining role in the reconfiguration of the relation of language to literature.
There is therefore a considerable gap between the language blindness of cultural studies as an intellectual movement and the embrace of culture by the foreign language community. This surely reflects the continued separation of English and foreign language scholarship, which is deleterious to both communities. Possible reform on the English side is beyond the scope of this paper. For foreign language scholars, however, it is necessary to promote a systematic inquiry into the theoretical underpinnings of the study of culture as pertinent to the foreign languages areas and, simultaneously, to highlight the multiplicity of pedagogic practices in order to foster further innovation. Teaching foreign languages implies a direct and special engagement with the material of the other culture--its language--which indicates how close the foreign language field is tied de facto to the project of cultural studies. In other words, the historical advantage of foreign language curricula, the institutionalized inclusion of culture as a topic of inquiry, has to be opened up to the wider discussion of culture in literary scholarship. In order to explore this linkage, three distinct perspectives are crucial.
Language and Culture
Second language acquisition and cultural knowledge are closely linked: study of the language without access to cultural material is empty and represents a technical dumbing down of the curriculum; cultural knowledge restricted to material in translation is superficial. Beyond this consensus, however, numerous questions are posed pertaining to language as itself a topic of cultural inquiry. The stratification of culture is inseparable from issues of sociolinguistics, just as linguistic diversity depends on discourse-theoretical questions. What does linguistic variability within a society tell us about its culture? Furthermore, the models of foreign language study are surely not much more enlightened on linguistic diversity within their target societies than English has been for the United States. Hence the urgency of inquiry into the standing of bilingualism or multilingualism as a feature of culture. To what extent are implicit definitions of culture dependent on a model of linguistic uniformity? Can one culture have multiple languages, and if so, what are the implications for assumptions about culture, language, and their study? What is the standing of literary language and its relation to culture? What of language in other media?
Teaching Foreign Cultures
The cultural turn has challenged the preeminence of literary study in the foreign language department, but there is hardly a unanimity on the project of cultural pedagogy. Various approaches compete: cultural studies (as in “German studies” or “French studies”), cultural literacy, and language across the curriculum, as well as various hybrids in between bring interdisciplinary perspectives to the foreign cultural material. The time is ripe to undertake a systematic examination of the range of approaches and to analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages. Can it be shown that a cultural enhancement of the foreign language curriculum accelerates second language acquisition? Does the inclusion of culture counteract attrition and build deeper interest in the language and culture of study? Advocates of the culturally enhanced curriculum would surely like to think so; at the same time, instructors are familiar with the challenge, from some students, that they only want to learn the language (for their own purposes) and not spend time reflecting on the other culture. Hence the need to be able to demonstrate and argue, more effectively, that cultural education is integral to foreign language acquisition.
In the same vein, some greater specification of the internal organization of cultural pedagogy is needed. What is at stake, in the classroom, in the study of another culture? Answers range from eclectic collections of data to a systematic presentation of canonic material to an underscoring of the difference between the language learner and the target culture. The former models involve various presentations of the other culture; the latter suggests a focus on the relation of the learner to the other culture. What is the value of psycholinguistic treatments of second-language skill development for the understanding of cultural learning? What is the value of psychoanalytic models of language? Whose identity is at stake in the teaching of foreign languages, and what assumptions are made about it? These questions point to the need to think through what opportunities for cultural education are provided specifically by the language-learning setting.
Foreign Cultures, Transnationality, and Globalization
The predisposition of the foreign language department to pursue teaching and research with regard to the culture of its respective area--in contrast to the more emphatically literary and literary-historical model of English departments--frequently implied a paradigm of a single language-single culture, with little room for minority diversity. However problematic this may have been in the past (in relation to traditional minorities or regional cultures), it has become a major challenge in the era of globalization and the attendant mobility of populations and language skills. Can the study of culture in the national literature department account for linguistic and cultural diversity, not as an afterthought but as constitutive of the respective culture? How does immigration challenge the departmental division of topical areas? Can Spanish departments lay claim to the study of Spanish literature and culture in the United States or will that material be captured by the English department? In what ways have foreign language departments adequately examined or merely dismissed the immigrant experience: nineteenth-century German immigration? contemporary Russian immigration to the United States? Globalization, furthermore, includes a new regime of information and its circulation; for example, the Web has changed access to foreign cultural and linguistic material enormously. How does this alter the project of the national literature department?
This presence of linguistic diversity within cultural communities raises important institutional questions alongside the intellectual challenges to inherited assumptions of a one-to-one mapping of culture and language. The organization of literary studies into distinct language-specific disciplines (French literature, German literature, Spanish literature) emerged in the nineteenth century, linked to the paradigm of national literary history. None of these language categories ever corresponded neatly to a single nation-state; hence an underlying weakness in the nation-state model for literary history. As national specificity becomes relativized by regional and globalization processes, a general or comparative approach to literary study can lay claim to the superiority associated with a higher level of abstraction and generalization. A shift toward a cultural studies organization, however, could reinforce the importance of local distinctiveness, that is, the need for distinct units to study Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and so on. Yet it is precisely here that the questions of multilingualism (sometimes, but not always, associated with processes of migration) becomes pertinent: What resources should a field of French studies be prepared to devote to Arabic culture? German studies to Turkish? Spanish to Amerindian languages? The national literature model implied, ultimately, the possibility of comparative literature, studying various national literatures side by side, and hence an engagement with multiple languages typically in an international framework. The cultural studies model, thought through consistently, points to linguistic multiplicity as well, although perhaps more typically in reference to multiple languages (and multiple cultural traditions) that exist in hybridized form within the same or overlapping territories.
For these reasons, foreign language departments are called on to take a closer look at a long-standing component of their curriculum: culture. The transformation of the discussion of culture has implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional structure, as well as for research. It is urgent that foreign language departments build on their historical advantage, their openness to a consideration of culture, in order to strengthen their positions within the university and to contribute better to the needs of students in the context of globalization and its linguistic consequences.
The author is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. This article is based on his presentation in the forum “Foreign Languages, Foreign Cultures” at the 2000 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
During, Simon, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Gilroy, Paul. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton, 1987.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
