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IN THE past five years, after decades of neglect, the humanities have gained the attention of the public. The debate over the West-only curriculum that William Bennett initiated as secretary of education has now largely run its course, since recent events in geopolitics have rendered many of his arguments insignificant. The need for colleges and universities to offer courses in languages, literatures, cultures, and political systems besides those of North America and Western Europe has become obvious.
In the past fifteen years, literary criticism has gained the attention of scholars from various disciplines, mainly because of contributions theorists and feminist, ethnic, and other political thinkers have made to an ideological critique of Western culture. In turn, we have learned much from philosophers, historians, psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, and even biologists and physicists, whose work we might once have considered irrelevant to literary analysis. Partly as a result of this exchange of ideas, scholars in many fields now acknowledge that meaning is contextual and that we are part of the context. Moreover, since “we” are not all alike, what we know about the world is relative to our positions in it-that is, to our values and interests, our language and culture, our sex, race, and class, our community, our generation. With this recognition we realize the value of intellectual cooperation.
The new interdisciplinary discourse, as we have all noticed, has invigorated literary scholarship and transformed graduate study. But what has it done for undergraduate study in departments of foreign language and literature? Before proceeding to ways we might wish to change our undergraduate programs, let's think about what we do in some of our literature courses and how they might be viewed by scholars outside our discipline-scientists, for instance.
Since, in the spirit-matter dualism of the Cartesian paradigm, the humanities and the sciences developed in opposition to each other, humanists and scientists acquired very different purposes for the study of their subject matter. To see this difference let us imagine (for fun) what a sophomore botany course might look like if our New Critical forebears had designed it. Here is a description for Botany 222: The Great Plants:
Botany 222 will introduce students to the great plants of the Western world, selected according to universal standards of beauty. The purpose of the course is to develop good taste in the students and to increase their pride in Western foliage.
Accordingly, the class will waste no time on ugly plants, little-known plants, plants generally cultivated by women and by the lower classes, or weeds.
Students will concentrate on the plant itself, and not on such peripheral matters as the soil, the climate, or the cow dung in which the plant grew. In this course, the professor does not appreciate materialist or utilitarian approaches that lead our attention away from the aesthetic quality of the individual plant.
The latter half of the course will focus on flowers-mainly white flowers, and mainly sweet-smelling flowers grown for aesthetic purposes alone (flowers suitable for a still life or a dining-room table). The professor follows Kant in the assumption that the beautiful is useless.
Several weeks will be devoted to close analysis: two weeks to the study of stamens and a couple of days at the end, if time remains, to the study of pistils.
Now, as you probably suspect, really good ecology-minded 1990s-type botanists would not think highly of this course. Those brought up to be polite might ask such questions as, How do you decide which plants are beautiful? Why limit your curiosity about the planet's vegetation to a few species from a few countries? What is the point of increasing pride in Western foliage? Those eager to show off their knowledge of Darwin's writings might ask, What about the “tangled bank”?
In the last paragraph of his Origin of Species , Charles Darwin writes:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Ecologists have devoted themselves to studying the tangled bank. For them, flowers are not intrinsically more important than roots, nor are birds intrinsically more important than worms. To understand birds or flowers, one has to understand their environment as a system, a system that includes soil, climate, and cow dung.
Institutes and programs of ecology bring together teams of geneticists, zoologists, botanists, and even economists, among others, in the recognition that studying the tangled bank requires collaboration among thinkers of various disciplines. The teams are often international, since understanding the planet requires cooperation from scientists and policymakers around the world. Their work is not advanced by competition to prove who is best or whose foliage is most beautiful.
The ecology-minded 1990s-type botanists zeroed in on assumptions implicit in our present teaching practices, assumptions that critics have been attacking for the last decade or so. What interests me most, however, is the question, What about the “tangled bank”? I would argue that if we in the discipline of language and literature do not reorient our undergraduate programs to promote contemplation of the tangled bank, we shall find that almost nobody wishes to study the flowers anymore.
But how can we teach the tangled bank-that is, culture, of which literature is an integral part-with our current departmental structure and language-literature program?
Most of us, if not all, would say that the study of any culture must include acquaintance with the culture's language and literature. But we also know that many undergraduates interested in interdisciplinary cultural studies do not wish to major in a language-literature program.
The question to address is, Does our coupling of advanced language courses with literature courses serve our students well? Or does it actually dissuade some students from studying a language in depth, those students primarily interested in history or political science-or cultural studies? Does it even discourage cultural studies majors in other departments from taking upper-division literature courses? Are we reserving Unamuno for those who read Spanish?
What I propose is to separate advanced language instruction from literature courses in order to make indepth language training more attractive to nonliterature majors and to make the study of literature more accessible to nonlanguage and nonliterature majors. The goal is to integrate both language and literature into cultural studies-in order that undergraduates may contemplate the tangled bank. Ideally, the move will strengthen our discipline.
I can imagine several objections to this proposal: such a reorientation in language instruction is utilitarian; the teaching of literature in relation to other discourses, or in translation, depreciates literature as art; and changes along these lines will result in fewer language and literature majors. I would answer, however, that by reconnecting literature with its social context we assert its centrality to culture and that by giving advanced language training to more students we assert the centrality of language competence to inter-cultural understanding.
We are not succeeding in making these connections with our present practices. Our discipline has been distinguished from other disciplines by its dedication to the study of literature as art and its presumption that art transcends other discourses. By teaching only literature in upper-division language courses, we make the goal of foreign language fluency subsidiary to the study of a nation's literature. And by teaching these upper-division courses only in the foreign language, we suggest that aesthetics is the primary reason for studying a foreign literature. To simplify the issue, I would say that we thus tie advanced language study to literature and then separate literature from everything else.
Other disciplines, in the course of their development, have also striven for autonomy. Typical departments of political science and history still require relatively brief exposure to foreign languages for their majors, who may come to think that one need not study much of another nation's language (or literature) to understand its political system, social structure, or past.
Many of us would characterize the attitude that English suffices as outdated, as representative of a cultural imperialism that we hope to abandon. We know from our experience as teachers and critics that translation, like paraphrase, is to some extent mistranslation and that if we want to know a literary work well we ought to read it in the original. The same principle holds for another society: if we want to know it well we must learn its language.
On the other hand, I think that our insistence on teaching literary works only in their original language has marginalized literary study in the undergraduate curriculum. The reluctance to teach literature in translation has arisen from a traditional purpose of our discipline, promulgated by the New Critics, in particular: to know literature as aesthetic expression. However, if we also teach literature as a form of cultural expression, in relation to its social context, as many of us do in graduate courses, we see that students majoring in a number of fields may learn much from scholars expert in particular foreign texts. Some familiarity with a culture's literature acquired through translation is better than none. I can imagine that a student majoring in European history might enjoy a class in French literature in translation; so might a student interested in French imperialism in Africa. By offering a few such courses, literature professors in language departments can make their knowledge available to a wider audience and thereby reconnect literature with other discourses.
The times are changing. We need to avoid inadvertently isolating ourselves just when undergraduates have become attracted to interdisciplinary cultural studies. If we guard our territory of language-literature too jealously, we may find that other departments' programs in cultural studies do not include literature at all. By fencing in our own language-literature majors, we fence nonmajors out.
Yet must we all become interdisciplinary? I am persuaded by the argument Stanley Fish made in his Profession 89 essay that “being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do” because “the imported product will always have the form of its appropriation rather than the form it exhibits ‘at home’” (19). That is the problem with single-handedly teaching a course such as Spanish Literature and Painting at the Turn of the Century or Chinese Literature and Music. We humanists naturally appropriate from other disciplines those texts that we can relate to what we want to teach, and then we apply to them our own disciplinary skills in textual analysis.
But there are other ways, entailing cooperation with colleagues across campus, to teach the tangled bank. To participate in cultural studies programs and to attract more students to our existing departments, language departments could offer a language-culture major (in addition to the traditional language-literature major). Such a major might include advanced language study, at least one upper-division course in that language's literature, and a number of related courses in other fields. It would be what my own university calls an “area studies major,” but one with a thorough grounding in the pertinent foreign language.
In large programs professors engaged in upperdivision language courses could work with professors from other disciplines, such as history, who are competent to teach classes in the target language. Professors involved in upper-division literature courses could form teams to focus on a particular issue and could conduct the class in English. A course on modern Brazil might be taught not only by a scholar of Brazilian literature but also by a geographer, an economist, and an ecologist.
Ultimately, in separating advanced language instruction from literature, we could achieve two objectives: we could draw more students to language courses; and we could, by relating literary study to philosophy, history, science, and so forth, draw more students to study literature. In the long run, we might have to expand our literature offerings. Thus by supporting cultural studies as an interdisciplinary undergraduate program, we would strengthen our foreign language and literature departments.
The time has come to abandon interdepartmental competition in favor of cooperation. The advantage of the cooperation model (the ecological model) for cultural studies majors in a particular language program is that they could get instruction in various disciplines by professors well trained in their respective fields. The advantage for nonmajors is that they could obtain knowledge of literature relevant to their areas of interest even if they did not know the language well enough to read the literature in the original. The advantage for professors involved is that they could learn from one another, without having to take on classroom responsibility for being “interdisciplinary,” when “being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do.” Everybody would contribute his or her expertise to the study of a system.
In keeping with our postmodernist belief that meaning is contextual, we would thereby seek to understand literature in the context of other texts, documents, and events. We would argue that just as literature is embedded in history, so is history embedded in literature. And all our cultural habits and ways of thinking are embedded in language. To explore these relations is to contemplate the tangled bank.
The study of the tangled bank is what I call “holo-humanities” in my book Reconnection. I use that word for our new, holistic practices because the word humanities has implied, in the past three hundred years, an isolation from science, technology, and politics. We need to bring cultural studies (holohumanities) to the center of the curriculum, both for the benefit of our students, who will have to deal with global problems in the twenty-first century, and for our well-being as an evolving discipline.
The maturation of our discipline that I have described-and advocated-will occur naturally, I think, in response to changing environmental conditions. As I see it, we are in the third stage of an evolution that has gone from interdisciplinarity through disciplinary specialization into cross-disciplinary cooperation.
Interdisciplinarity characterized the prehistory of our academic disciplines: for example, before the Civil War one college professor might have taught philosophy, natural history, and geology and related each area of inquiry to the others; another might have taught philosophy, the Greek and Roman classics, and theology. Disciplinary specialization followed, at the end of the nineteenth century, as both an effect and a cause of our culture's increasing knowledge; disciplines defined their subject matter in competition with one another, and scholars specialized in particular areas. At the end of the twentieth century, as the world becomes an information-cluttered global society, it is time to bring the disciplines together-by means of cross-disciplinary cooperation, by specialists from various fields collaborating on particular questions.
The academic model of cross-disciplinary cooperation corresponds to an emerging geopolitical model of global cooperation. Thinkers of all kinds from many nations are working together to address the planet's most pressing problems: widespread poverty, abuse of human rights, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and environmental pollution. With respect to environmental pollution, in particular, we recognize that if nations do not work together the human race may not long survive. Nor will it if we do not cooperate on disarmament. Perhaps one day we may view international competition for military superiority as outmoded, the way we now view imperialism. (And then we may witness a fairer distribution of the earth's bounty among its many cultures.)
Thus, if we look at the bigger picture, we see that cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research, like multicultural education, represents a new order of social interaction. It represents an appreciation of multiple viewpoints on a given issue and of various kinds of expertise, an appreciation of cultural diversity and of the interrelatedness of our endeavors -in short, an acknowledgment that no person, discipline, or nation alone can “get it right.” To instill this model of cooperation in our students, whom we have long been teaching “pride in Western foliage,” we must institute contemplation of the tangled bank.
The author is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. This article is based on a paper presented at the 1990 ADFL Seminars East and West at, respectively, Penn State University, University Park, and the University of Arizona and Pima Community College.
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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