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But on the whole, academic subject groups are self-defining, exclusive entities. Each has its own jargon, pecking order, newsletter, professional association. The members probably meet only once a year—at a conference. Then, with a lot of hallos, howareyous, and whatareyouworkingons, over the drinks, over the meals, between lectures. Let's have a drink, let's have dinner, let's have breakfast together. It's this kind of informal contact, of course, that's the real raison dêtre of a conference.
Each subject, and each conference devoted to it, is a world unto itself.…
—David Lodge
WHY do discussions of literary theory, pedagogy, and politics so often exclude the foreign languages? The answer certainly has to do with the way English departments in America dominate and even territorialize all literary, theoretical, and cultural domains that are taught or written about in English. 1 But since I am disinclined to argue defensively, I must fault those in foreign language and literature departments who have not paid enough attention to the mobilizing power of the foreign, strange, and alien to disconnect them from familiar contexts and settings. What is missing, in fact, is attention to place—whether national, disciplinary, or pedagogical—and its productive critical and political potential for disruption and disorientation.
David Lodge's satiric novel Small World sets the tone for this essay. As a kind of interpretive ethnography, it represents disciplines anthropologized as cultures made up of national traditions and even geographical places. These locations are sites for constructing meaning, especially when and where such cultures clash. My own application of German hermeneutics, French poststructuralism, and American ethnographic theory to the foreign language classroom shows just how interdisciplinary and international foreign language pedagogy can be if anthropological theories on cultural reproduction, representation, and exchange are taken into account. Reflection on this kind of border crossing and “changing places” (a phrase borrowed from another of Lodge's academic novels) makes the foreign language classroom a more productive arena for cultural studies, the recognition of difference, and a pedagogy of the foreign. 2
Teachers in foreign language classrooms transmit culture like anthropologists who have already recognized that they can neither speak for the natives nor assume that the natives can speak for themselves. Just as the anthropologist struggles to represent and therefore mediate another culture in textual form, coping with all the attendant problems of narrative and voice, I want to “textualize” the foreign language classroom in order to “read” it as a culture that has its own story to be analyzed and interpreted. This story is about the student's confrontation with the foreign, the alien, the strange; its metastory is about the process of its own construction. I want to show here how these two stories intertwine.
Interpretive anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow, and George Marcus have demonstrated that culture in general and academic culture in particular are constituted, emergent, and situational, even though both are organized and symbolic signifying systems 3 . The popularity of a novel like Small World among academics attests to their identification with the representation of their own culture and one of its most obvious subcultures—literary theory and its practitioners. This group represents itself most dramatically and self-consciously as the stars of the profession, or as those who aspire to this position of prestige and power. They speak a common language even though they are dispersed throughout an international diaspora of literature and language departments, each shaped by its own national identity. Lodge exposes the rituals, rites, and practices of the theory professoriat who gain their professional status and satisfaction and their personal pleasure by appearing at conferences around the world. If they are lucky, their activities, which they pursue with a vengeance usually reserved for the emissaries of Realpolitik , might eventually lead to more prestigious academic affiliation, perhaps even to the UNESCO chair of literary theory. Even without resorting to Foucault, a theorist any inhabitant of Lodge's world would be proud to quote, one can clearly see how institutional positions control academic functions, discourse, and, of course, power. The concerns of disciplinary and national cultures evidently coincide.
Let us accept academic culture as an object of the anthropological gaze and the English/foreign language dichotomy as a binary opposition setting off the negativity or lack represented in the asymmetry of all minority discourses: man/women, black/white, heterosexual/homosexual. The groundwork now appears for a further distinction based on anthropological thinking, namely, that between academic and critical practice. 4
Such a diferentiation is crucial for analyzing the political and critical functions of the foreign language classroom as another version of Lodge's small world. This classroom—especially when embedded in an international, perhaps more modest, tug-of-war between the home and target cultures and languages—highlights the position and practices of mediating systems and discourses. This emphasis parallels the way in which recent anthropological thinking thematizes the anthropologist's voice in the representation of other cultures. In the same way that anthropologists must acknowledge political interests and ideologies that inform, legitimize, or author-ize their constructions of narratives about other cultures—the infamous ethnography—so too must foreign language instructors, who are constantly mediating the “other,” stress their academic as well as their critical practices in the classroom. In short, the foreign language teacher is also constructing a story about an alien culture. The instructor becomes an ethnographer of sorts and must make classroom practices explicit, enabling students to recognize them as subjects of critical reflection that are ideologically rooted in particular political agendas. For example, teaching German before unification always involved the issue of how to present “life in the German Democratic Republic.” 5 One's political orientation and relation to the GDR and its policies determined how one represented this other Germany and sometimes whether one taught it at all. Following what I have theoretically suggested, the instructor could choose whether or not to teach the GDR and whether or not to talk about what including or excluding the topic means for understanding “Germany.” Other “minority” issues—such as foreign workers, refugees, or women's emancipation—could illustrate the same point. The instructor's orientation draws attention to place, the classroom, and the positioning of the teacher-ethnographer in the representation and reconstruction of the foreign culture for the American audience.
While critical practices—poststructuralist, reader-response, psychoanalytic, feminist—attract a large part of our theoretical interest, as Lodge's characters' fixations reveal, academic practices drive us to mingle in academic settings. In other words, the talk and activity that go on in the hallways or corridors, during office hours, in informal discussions, at conferences, and in faculty clubs—though often insignificant, trivial, or superfluous—determine who we are and what we do as scholars and teachers. Extending the cultural anthropological domain to such “micropractices of the academy,” Paul Rabinow declares:
Those domains that cannot be analyzed or refuted, and yet are directly central to hierarchy, should not be regarded as innocent or irrelevant. We know that one of the most common tactics of an elite group is to refuse to discuss—to label as vulgar or uninteresting—issues that are uncomfortable for them. When corridor talk about fieldwork becomes discourse, we learn a good deal. Moving the conditions of production of anthropological knowledge out of the domain of gossip—where it remains the property of those around to hear it—into that of knowledge would be a step in the right direction. (253)
Rabinow's move from gossip or corridor talk to discourse is crucial since it addresses the place and condition of knowledge production through specific practices that have traditionally been relegated to minor status. Considered as incidental to “what really goes on” in academic scholarship, such talk often determines careers, research, and learning. By moving it from the marginal corridors to the center of the classroom, faculty members and students have a chance to understand it as a constitutive part of the academic domain.
While Rabinow focuses on what happens outside the classroom, he still draws attention to how meaning derives from the conjoining of a specific sites of activity with social and pedagogic practices, whether inside or outside the formal borders of the classroom. He makes us aware of places and practices outside the fifty-minute course or two-hour seminar on the third floor of some generic humanities building. Though knowledge is obviously expected to be disseminated in the classroom or at a conference panel, much of the raison dêtre of learning actually takes place during informal situations, as Lodge asserts in the epigraph.
Pedagogy may not be able to exist without the classroom; critical pedagogy, however, cannot be produced without awareness of the attendant situations and practices that mediate it, whether internal or external. If this picture seems overdrawn, think only about the lively discussion that often breaks out during a pause in a seminar as soon as the formal boundaries have been broken down—when the students stand up, go outside the room, perhaps smoke cigarettes, and so on. I have often wondered how one could turn the situation inside out and inject the seminar with some of the same lively exchange that seems to emerge outside the formal pedagogical frame.
One way to make this turn, I am suggesting, would be to bring “corridor talk” into the classroom as discourse. Alongside the subject of the class runs a metacritical narrative to which the instructor can continually refer. Normally, this second narrative is only a private or silent story—an agenda the teacher constructs to “make sense of” (or give meaning to) the material or to lead the class through discussion. But if the teacher makes this story an integral and substantive part of the class, students can check on their own and their teacher's ideological under-pinnings, which are usually taken for granted or mistakenly left up to “education” courses to take care of. I refer here, for example, to how the content or subject of the class is treated, presented, and received, how certain assumptions influence the questions asked and the interpretations that result, and how students and teacher determine the direction of the discussion on the basis of what they regard as valid or appropriate knowledge. In this way academic practice, considered merely the pedagogical form into which substance is poured, is seen to be as much about critical orientation as theory is itself.
The difference between inside and outside, between academic and critical practice, that shifts in a classroom is always present in foreign language teaching. Learning a foreign language becomes a paradigm for reflecting on the conditions of understanding, in short, on how one understands at all. 6 A discursive space is created for making difference explicit when discourse is grounded at the place where two cultures, two practices, and two positions collide.
Without erasing difference—internationalizing in the American way—this confrontation over the unfamiliar territory of the target culture becomes the terrain for hermeneutic exploration and interpretation for the uninitiated other (the student) who uses the textbook as Baedeker and the teacher as a guide. Schooled in both cultures, the teacher with the “guidebook” in hand is a Hermes, crossing foreign borders and unfamiliar boundaries to bring that culture “back” to the student. Foreign language teachers, however, do not shed their own foreignness. On the contrary, by standing in-between they create a place—perhaps behind or on the hyphen?—for the explicit confrontation of cultures to take place. Comparable to the anthropological interview or even the psychoanalytical session, this moment of exchange, where difference emerges, is in the words of an anthropologist “systematic reflection about the process of interpreting difference, or of rendering the exotic familiar, or of reaching an understanding of unfamiliar situations” (Maranhão 292).
To mediate this confrontation, the foreign language teacher has an additional tool—the textbook—that was traditionally considered as transparent and utilitarian as the classroom or anthropological interview itself. Claire Kramsch has been decisive in bringing together foreign language teaching and the cultural dimensions of discourse. She makes us aware of the socially and politically transformative power of experiencing difference in the foreign language classroom, not surprisingly, through the textbook:
The role of the foreign language textbook is unique among its peers in the textbook culture. It must be grounded in the native culture of the users and at the same time show them a way out of their native culture and into a foreign mode of thought and behavior that will eventually change their native ways. Education always implies change, but foreign language education implies social change. (85)
Kramsch's use of the term native points to the multiple meanings of the word today, connoting “indigenous” as well as “(ab)original”, “native speaker” as well as the “natives.” 7 The reference is confusing, since it describes the position of both the American foreign language teacher (“native culture of the users”) and what Kramsch wisely calls the “foreign mode of thought,” which is also often referred to as “native.” These connotations can make American foreign language teachers as restless as the proverbial natives who have suffered real political oppression in addition to the discursive constraints placed on them by anthropologists and philologists trying to represent their cultures. But the distinctive meanings also remind us how slippery the notion of native is and how the concept changes according to the speaker and the speaker's position in a culture.
Yet, the many significations of the word do steer anthropology and foreign language and literatures (earlier called “philology”) toward a social and political project better termed “cultural hermeneutics” and toward a discourse as familiar to scholarship as to travel. We should not overlook the similarities in the nineteenth-century origins of these disciplines. Early anthropologists, often as missionaries and travelers, discovered and colonized strange and “primitive” lands, and the (classical) philologist explored new foreign texts as well as countries like Greece and Italy. It is left to interpretive ethnographers and cultural critics to recognize that these geographies might be more imaginative than real. Still, the major task for both is to translate, to re-present these experiences in accounts comprehensible to those who were not there. Today the tourist-academic, so well represented in Lodge's “ethnography,” incorporates a fascination with encountering the exotic in going from country to country and from conference to conference. The disciplines of anthropology and foreign languages and literatures are therefore preoccupied with topographical and geopolitical imagery and movement that can describe both academic and global relations of political power. The classroom and the study of its discursive power, especially at the international level of foreign languages and literatures, serve as a shorthand for thematizing the problems of the modern world. The foreign language classroom, the most concrete representation of the heteroglossia of conflicting discourse worlds, becomes the most appropriate place for analyzing not only a significant academic practice but also the ways that politics and national identity condition meaning in a site where participants are constantly moving, repositioning, and redefining themselves.
If the foreign language classroom really is paradigmatic when a cultural hermeneutics is founded in a common politicized and textualized anthropological-philological project, then one must ask what provides this potential. What parallel model emerges to locate the practices of both disciplines in a notion of exchange aimed at communication and understanding in an intercultural setting? For both anthropology and philology, the most dynamic model is the dialogue, a move between the unfamiliar and the familiar, a bridge between two worlds. The anthropological interview is as much a part of the professionally requisite fieldwork as that more banal exchange the infamous and literal dialogue in the foreign language classroom. But in the more political, ideological, and critical context of exchange that I ask for here, the dialogue also draws attention to the power relations of domination and subjugation inherent in instruction and learning.
But first let us look at Gadamer, who uses the metaphor of translation to focus on the dialogue ( das Gespräch ) as constitutive of understanding:
The example of the translator, whose task it is to bridge the gap of languages, makes the mutual relationship played out between the interpreter and the text especially clear. This interaction corresponds to the mutuality of communication in the dialogue, because every translator is an interpreter. The difficulty in translating from one language to another is nothing but an extreme case of hermeneutic difficulty, incorporating both otherness [ Fremdheit ] and its overcoming. In truth, certain meanings of all objects with which traditional hermeneutics concerns itself are clearly and uniformly other/foreign [ fremd ].
(365; my trans.)
The overcoming of foreigness (a goal never entirely attained) projects the hermeneutic burden onto the anthropologists in the field or in their academic world as they try to translate multifarious native experiences into understandable and often univocal narrative accounts. In a now classic article appropriately entitled “From the Native's Point of View,” Clifford Geertz, using Kohut's categories, calls this a move from “experience-distant” to “experience-near” (226). The anthropologist Tullio Maranhão, who acknowledges his debt to Gadamer, expands the translation metaphor for understanding anthropological thinking:
Human discourse can be transcended through critique, that is, through the application of a metadiscourse over the discourse, or through translation, when one kind of discourse is converted into another with the preservation of meaning. Transcendence consists in the consciously explicit renderings of the contexts of understanding. (303)
In the foreign language classroom, translation takes place both literally, from one language or culture into another, and metaphorically, from one “context of understanding” into another, when it is made “consciously explicit.” As the location for dialogue, that is, for questions and answers, the classroom is informed by the same kinds of constraints that affect traditional culture. The translative-interpretive process in that setting becomes the middle ground “in-between” the objectification of another culture as a reified other and a complete identification with the target culture. By neither “remain[ing] ethnocentric and preserv[ing] [one's] psychological identity” or “de-ethnocenter[ing oneself], which entails the risk of becoming one of them [the natives],” the ethnographer or foreign language teacher becomes, as Maranhão says the “tertius inter pares” (294). But the teacher in that position should not be defined negatively as “someone without definite cultural identities” or as “the stranger,” in the words of another anthropologist (Nash), but should be seen, rather, as the embodiment of the foreign language classroom at its most fruitful moment. If any sort of transcendence is to become the basis for critique, it emerges from the place where difference becomes the dominant discourse.
Difference is constitutive of foreign languages where American students confront the unfamiliarity of a new language and culture. But if difference is to have any critical value, it has to be made explicit at every opportunity where misunderstandings, both in the positive hermeneutic sense and as interventions in the political sense, interfere or clash with an all too facile assumption of transparent interpretation. At this point students can acknowledge how not only their own language but also their cultural and political assumptions “get in the way” of understanding. The teacher can intervene to undermine the claim to one position or to the hegemony of a dominant discourse. By drawing attention to the vacillating power structures and positions constituted by cultural norms, expectations, and interests, the teacher shows that the relations between self (the teacher) and other (the student) are relative and makes the foreign language classroom an ideological site for uncovering power, authority, and domination when familiar or secure boundaries are shifted. Here again my earlier example is pertinent. The comparison of German textbooks and their presentations of the GDR illustrates to the students how different generations have projected their interests or fears onto the concept of their country. Teachers can also acknowledge where they stood in relation to the two Germanies and what any one position meant for understanding not only the unique situation of a divided nation but the ways that questions about Germany get formulated and answered.
The binary opposition between self and other underlies, in fact, the dialogic situation where questions are asked. What every ethnographer conducting an interview learns through “participant observation” is that
the interaction is characterized by an intersubjective bond that makes every question of the ethnographer to a certain extent determining of the informant's answer, and every answer determining of the following question. The representation of reality thus constructed is dialogic in the sense that it does not depend on the self of the representing subject alone, but on his self mirrored on the other. (Maranhão 294)
Although Gadamer's brand of “philosophical hermeneutics” never explicitly characterizes his concern with “question and answer” ( Frage und Antwort ) as anthropological or even political, his emphasis on Verständigung , which for him means both understanding and communicating, is essential for a project of cultural hermeneutics based on dialogue. Gadamer states:
The dialogue is a process of reaching understanding/communication [ Verständigung ]. Thus as part of every genuine dialogue, one enters into the other person, allows [that person's] viewpoints to really matter, and projects oneself into him insofar as one wants to understand him, not actually as this individuality but what he says. What is to be understood is the real legitimacy of his perspective so that we can agree with one another in the matter [ die Sache ]. (363; my trans.)
Unfortunately the classroom often takes this dialogic exchange for granted. Of course, “discussion” can be chosen over “lecture,” but this decision does not necessarily mean that the kind and quality of “intersubjective interaction” that I discuss here will receive appropriate attention. The teacher must mark this activity as an academic practice by making it conscious and reflected, by drawing students' attention to how they are participating in negotiating meaning. In this form the academic and the critical coincide. Theory and practice can merge in the classroom not only when the dialogue mediates reflection on the interpretive-translative process but also when this communicative juncture becomes, as Gadamer declares, the matter or object of study. In the foreign language classroom, in particular, where communication and communicative competence are the central issue, difference emerges in this exchange between the familiar and the alien, and the political import of power strategies in such hierarchies comes to the fore.
How one makes difference explicit evolves from the opposition of self and other in the dialogue. Reminding us that the relationship of self and other is not equal, Maranhäo alerts us to the dynamics of power:
The interaction between ethnographer and informant…is a good context to render explicit, or to bring to consciousness, the theoretical tenets of the research design, as well as the dialogical difficulties of intercultural relations bound by domination. The positivist estate bequeathed us a rhetoric according to which we write or state what the reality of others is. The hermeneutic approach applied to the fieldwork situation may substitute for that a rhetoric in which we state what tweezers in our research arsenal can pick what objects in the reality of the others.
(299)
The self-subjects must therefore doconstruct the power position inscribed for them by the institution and acknowledge their subjective imprint (what Gadamer calls prejudice [ Vorurteile ] on the knowledge and understanding mediated in the classroom. Once these presuppositions are made explicit, the structures governing authority can be renegotiated. Such an environment leaves more room for de-authorizing positions, in the literal, paternalistic sense of the verb, and eventually for formulating positions that are not absolute, totalizing, or merely self-referential. This activity or process cannot be reduced to the cliché of only listening or only tolerating another's position. It is much more the recognition of the historical conditionality of any question or answer in the classroom that is specific to a political, cultural, or gender-specific position. Understanding emerges when the participants in this discourse recognize how their own histories shape their “reading” of the classroom, this newly textualized situation.
The political potential of the dialogue is evidence especially in anthropology, because of the colonialist underpinnings of anthropological cultural confrontation. In foreign languages, particularly in German, as I have already pointed out, the East-West opposition and residual liberal democratic or communist ideologies of the cold war are often promoted or condemned in grammatical exercises, pattern drills, and reading passages. But while Gadamer's version of this project sets the groundwork for a cultural hermeneutics, it seems to miss the political dimensions, failing to recognize that making otherness the subject of one's own activity foregrounds the impact of imperialism and power structures. The jump to a global perspective affirms the way that critique and opposition apply to difference, whether in the classroom, the discipline, the institution, or the world.
The potential of a cultural hermeneutics grounded in the awareness of power, authority, and domination should not come as a surprise in an analysis of the foreign language classroom. What may initially seem a rather innocent or innocuous area of academic or pedagogic activity suddenly bristles with political potential. Discipline and punishment are as familiar to the academic institution as to the foreign countries occupied by outside invaders. Foucault has been our best source for drawing together all the institutions and sites where such practices are enforced. A combination of German hermeneutics and French poststructuralism not only internationalizes this “small world” of the foreign language classroom but also marks it as an explosive site for political criticism.
Such criticism has rarely, if ever, been the task or goal of foreign language teaching. Although a combined analysis of culture, politics, and power does take place in literature departments, if is found primarily in English and cultural studies programs. Highlighting the “foreign” in foreign languages can establish links to colonialist and minority discourse studies, the most international and interdisciplinary subjects in English and cultural studies. In an important critique of colonialist literature, the literary critic Abdul Jan Mohamed, not surprisingly a Pakistani in an English department, frames the argument in terms familiar to any hermeneutic discipline that uses cultural analysis as the central paradigm:
By thus subverting the traditional dialectic of self and other that contemporary theory considers so important in the formation of self and culture, the assumption of moral superiority subverts the very potential of colonialist literature. Instead of being an exploration of the racial other, such literature merely affirms its own ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of “civilization,” it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality. (65)
The foreign language classroom provides a related potential for deauthorizing ethnocentric assumptions when the dialectic of self and other is made explicit. For foreign language teaching, the reifying of these oppositions would inhibit the learning of a language in any contemporary interactive method, whether conscious of the dialogic process described here or not. Such calcification would take foreign language pedagogy back to the antiquarian language-learning methods of translating written texts.
This “imperialism” of traditional or rote pedagogic functions reminds us again of positioning and its power to control the representation of colonized or minority cultures. Introducing a special issue of New German Critique , called Minorities in German Culture , the Turkish Germanist Azade Seyhan notes:
We write about the other within the framework of typologies our institutional practices sanction. But every typology presupposes a topology. Our meanings are closely related to our cultural and institutional space. Discursive practices, that is, not only specific representational tropes but also prejudicial assumptions, interpretive norms, and theoretical models delimit a horizon of understanding that defines the object of investigation.… There has to be an exchange, however confrontational.… I think we need to let the students in on the confrontation. (7–8) 8
The foreign language classroom shows how difference can be used as an emancipatory force politically and pedagogically. It proves unequivocally the impossibility of trying to deny or erase difference. The mediator of difference, as anthropologist or teacher, should draw attention to the critical capabilities of such sites for provoking reflection on preconceived interests or ideologies that shape our understanding, no matter how objective we claim to be.
The students, who need to be let in on the confrontation, according to Seyhan, are not just objects of theoretical speculation. They are enlivened by a classroom that is more energetic and participatory because they are forced to try to communicate, to speak and think “the other” in its most literal representational form, namely, in language. The constant shifting back and forth across borders and boundaries makes them stumble and fall over their linguistic, cultural, and political a prioris. The inter-subjectivity of such movement or exchange, no matter how fraught with impediments, illustrates how the dialogue between teacher and student is constructed and therefore invested with positions and prejudices. These exchanges might take place in literal dialogues but more often occur in constructed role-playing or even in pattern drills that require students to put themselves in the place of others, to act as foreigners in their own country or as fellow citizens living in a foreign culture (Americans abroad). It is always a revelation for the American student of German, for example, to recognize the connotations of intimacy or politeness carried by different forms of address in German, the different notions of time and space inherent in certain vocabulary or idioms, and the different words used for some of the same concepts by native German speakers from various areas—Austria, Switzerland, and the former East and West Germanies. At such moments of insight mere language skills are transformed into cultural discourse.
Stimulated by the convergence of thinking about the strange, the alien, and the other from anthropology, literary study, and now pedagogy, we who preside in the foreign language classroom can “recolonize” our ground and even achieve a new status. We cannot do so, however, in the imperialistic or single-minded fashion of the political systems from which we take this metaphor. We can, in fact, reclaim lost territory by turning this geopolitical discourse back on such countries. We can show how a different sort of interdisciplinary and international approach to learning and pedagogy can add an intercultural component to all study and, by making the most of difference, benefit critical reflection.
As foreign language teachers we will have a new role to play when the study of culture in this form joins literature as an activity appropriate for our field. While I am not suggesting that a heavy dose of poststructuralism per se is necessary for anyone who wants to teach German 101, I am saying that theoretical thinking of the sort I present here has a place even in first-year language teaching—in the heads of those how are teaching and then, one would hope, in their critical and academic practices. Accordingly, graduate students, who do the bulk of this teaching, at least at large research universities, should get this kind of “educational theory” in their home departments and then integrate it legitimately into their teaching. In short, an applied linguistics of this theoretical kind, if it is to be taken seriously, must become a central part of graduate education in the foreign languages. This step, however, is as political as what I hope emerges in the foreign language classroom, since it means a restructuring of academic territories, the reorganization of authority, and, perhaps most controversially, the redistribution of resources. Were we to follow this path, then the “small world” to which our discipline belongs could expand to include those in many other academic fields that are interested in asking similar or related questions about culture. We can do more than teach language skills or prepare students to read the great books (both jobs that we already do well). If we want to take more advantage of our potential for stimulating critical thinking and to enhance the role and status of the faculty members and students who practice this activity, then my suggestions might be kept in mind. 9
The author is Associate Professor of Germanics and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.
1 For a more detailed analysis of English departments in American universities, see my article “The British Are Coming!'” where I point out that English departments in this country do not make American students of English literature sufficiently aware of the “ foreignness” of England and its traditions. Because the literature is taught “in English,” English departments often conflate the cultural differences between studying English and American literature.
2 For further discussion of this topic, see my article “Advanced Literary Study.”
3 Note especially Geertz's Interpretation, Local Knowledge , and his more recent Works and Lives. See also Clifford and Marcus's collection of essay, Writing Culture , particularly Rabinow's “Representations” and Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology.
4 These terms emphasize what the practitioners of particular disciplines do, how they perform their particular activities. Critical practice refers to the various theoretical approaches that critics use with literary texts. Academic practice, which interests me more, includes activities that take up most of our time in academia, such as talking with colleagues, eating together, socializing, and interacting in all forms.
5 By citing the German Democratic Republic, which no longer exists as a political entity, I do not in any way mean to imply that this example is no longer useful for the pedagogical practice I describe. In fact, the trajectory of unification and the status of the former GDR today continue to make eastern Germany a productive “ site” for analysis of the foreign.
6 It is worth noting here that this hermeneutic orientation that might only be associated with more contemporary thinkers such as Hans Georg Gadamer has its roots in the eighteenth-century German tradition of language philosophy. Johann Gottfried Herder and especially Wilhelm von Humboldt are two of the most significant figures who developed notions of language and understanding that shaped later thinking. Humboldt's concept of “language as world view” is especially relevant to this discussion of foreign language teaching and hermeneutics. For further discussion, see chapter 2 of my book Hermes (54–106).
7 For an analysis of the problems of authority and experience provoked by the multiple meanings of the term native , see my article “ Going Native.”
8 Also see my essay “What's the Difference?”
9 I would like to thank Maria-Regina Kecht for first encouraging me to write this paper and Claire Kramsch, Steven Taubeneck, and a number of anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. Grudzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Mohr, 1975.
Geertz, Clifford. “From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. 225–41.
———. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.
———. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1983.
———. Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
JanMohamed, Abdul. “The Economy of the Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985):59–87.
Kramsch, Claire. “The Cultural Discourse of Foreign Language Textbooks.” Towards a New Integration of Language and Culture. Ed. Alan Singerman. Middlebury: Northeast Conference, 1988 63–88.
Lodge, David. Small World: An Academic Romance. London: Secker, 1985.
Maranhão, Tullio. “The Hermeneutics of Participant Observation.” Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1986):291–309.
Marcus, George E., and Michael J. Fischer, eds. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Nash, Dennison. “The Ethnologist as Stranger: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19 (1963):149–67.
Peck, Jeffrey. “Advanced Literary Study as Cultural Study: A Redefinition of the Discipline.” Profession 85. New York: MLA, 1985. 49–54.
———.“The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!' Notes for a Comparative Study of Institutions.” Teaching German in America. Ed. David Benseler, Valters Nollendorfs, and Walter Lohnes. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988, 271–84.
———.“Going Native: Establishing Authority in German Studies.” German Studies Review 13 (1990):127–33.
———. Hermes Disguised. Literary Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Literature. Kleist, Grillparzer, Fontane. Bern: Lang, 1983.
———.“What's the Difference? Minority Discourse in German Studies.” Minorities in German Culture. Spec. issue of New German Critique 46 (1989):203–08.
Rabinow, Paul. “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-modernity in Anthropology.” Clifford and Marcus 234–61.
Seyhan, Azade. Introduction. Minorities in German Culture. Spec. issue of New German Critique 46 (1989):3–9.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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