|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THINKING through the relation between theory and teaching cannot be a matter of prescriptively determining how teaching ought to look in order to be judged adequate by theory. To do so would both underestimate the variability of classroom practices and overestimate the power of the theoretical imagination. Instead of a conceptualizing hierarchy that puts teaching in the back of the bus and leaves the driving to theory, I propose an examination of the more complex and very material effect of the several discourses we call theory on the practices of teaching in language and literature departments. “Theory” here is not at all primarily pedagogical theory but rather the open-ended set of paradigms that have forced a fundamental rethinking of the study of the humanities. This theory, including the incompatibles of poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism, to name a few, has most strongly affected departments traditionally devoted to literature, although it pertains just as well to other humanistic disciplines. The question I want to explore is how the larger theoretical revolution, with its epicenter in the language and literature departments, elicits structural consequences for these departments, for the curricula that are taught, and for the understanding of culture as the topic of teaching. The irreversible transformation in the perception of the field may be fundamentally at odds with the conventional structures of the departments.
As I have already suggested, theory is hardly a homogenous enterprise. Its diverse strands pose diverse challenges to pedagogy. I want to proceed by reviewing four theoretical discourses and consider their implications for the larger enterprise of teaching.
Language-based literary theory—from structuralist poetics to deconstruction—studies literary texts or works as linguistic objects, therefore locating them comfortably, or seemingly so, near the study of language. Our departments might seem to outside observers to be the natural sum of two distinct but related addends: language and literature. Yet the addition is not simple arithmetic and depends on several operative fictions: the philological claim that the study of language is the primary vehicle for the study of literature; the Romantic claim that literature is the ultimate culmination of language; the educational claim that a student might or even should begin with the study of language and proceed, as if in a dog-eared novel of development, to literature, and that this trajectory should be norm and define the pedagogical project of the department; and, finally, the departmental claim that language teachers and literature teachers work hand in hand, on equal footing, with mutual respect and collegiality in the interest of a shared agenda.
Of course, these fictions have never held empirically; there has always been much more to literature than philology and much more to language study than literary appreciation. Institutionally, the equality implied by the conjunction separating language and literature was never an adequate designation of the sorts of hierarchy that have tended to prevail: consider all the differences in prestige, power, and salary. Nevertheless, that Romantic constellation based on a presumption of the organic wholeness of language and literature made the pedagogical enterprise of the integrated department seem coherent. The language skills that a student might learn were, according to this view, perhaps inferior to the poetic language of literature but they were not of another existential status. Hence the model of using literary texts in third-year language instruction (for the commonly taught languages) as if the goal of language instruction was primarily literary appreciation.
All these beliefs have ceased to be tenable; a fundamental rethinking of the pedagogical enterprise—and the departments, which are constructed to house it—is in order; and, paradoxically, it is precisely the linguistic turn in literary theory that has severed the tie between language and literature as instructional material. For whether one designates the goal of language pedagogy as proficiency or competence or fluency, it necessarily implies some facility by a speaker or writer in communicating meaning. Yet it is precisely that communicative character of language that is denied by deconstruction. The central claim of deconstruction, strictly understood, is the absolute incompatibility of speech and writing; indeed, speech is taken to represent a degraded mode of language, since it is linked to the notion of a speaker who is a “subject” who “communicates” “meaning”—all terms hopelessly implicated in the Western metaphysics that it is deconstruction's project to attack. Writing, by contrast, is always separate from the author and never reducible to intention or meaning; it therefore represents language as ultimately undecipherable. Paul de Man's figurality of language (take nothing literally) and Jacques Derrida's grammatological bias against speech (writing is more authentic because it appears to be authorless) point to the always already deficient character of language, a site of confusion and mendacity, not communication and certainly not anything like “fluency.” Language proficiency is not a possible goal for deconstruction's language theory.
If the language-pedagogical agenda is concerned with meaning, it stands at odds with this strand of recent literary theory. The former is about how language works; the latter, how language cannot work. A house divided against itself? That alliance of “language and literature,” with its Romantic provenance and its shaky structure, finally breaks down. The results? Probably, on the one hand, a heightened professionalization of language instruction and, on the other, a separation of literature instruction from language specificity—that is, departments of comparative literature or of literature in general, with most work read in translation. In other words, when language specificity ceases to be the rationale for separate disciplines, the arguments for separate departments of national literatures become weak, and amalgamation into a single unit becomes likely.
An alternative possible consequence of the severing of language instruction and (some) literary theory is more subtle and less drastic. If language instruction is seen less as leading necessarily to literary study, it might plausibly be taken to lead elsewhere or even to lead to several possible sites, pointing to a model of “language across the curriculum”: use of foreign language skills in a variety of disciplinary settings, not only in the study of literature, although certainly there too. Using French in art history, German in philosophy, or Russian in political science courses could represent an intriguing vehicle to encourage the development of language proficiency outside the language and literature department, once deconstruction has granted the divorce. Indeed, a wider disciplinary use of foreign language could eventually generate a larger population capable of and interested in using original languages to explore literature.
Far be it from me to argue for this departmental reordering. My only point now is to trace some potential institutional and pedagogical consequences of recent theory. There are others, which point in other directions.
Cultural studies also pries at the Romantic link between language and literature, but somewhat differently and in a way that would presumably require less institutional restructuring. Departments of national literature have always had another function, although one implicated in the same Romanticism that viewed language as highest and purest when it was most poetic. For Romanticism located that poetic expressivity in the nation and discerned the nation's genius in the language of the people. Therefore literary material became the preferred route for the study of a nation, culture, or society, just as that nation, culture, or society was the preferred frame for the study of literature.
Neither side of that equation remains compelling. All that we have learned about the artificiality of national canons implies that there are probably better ways to think of literature than as the expression of nations. Further, there are certainly many materials other than literature one might use to study and teach other cultures, which is precisely the project of cultural studies. This branch of theory examines the symbolic orders in which intersubjective meanings and social practices are constituted and contested, including literary works, other artistic material, and nonartistic but nevertheless symbolic material such as modes of public representation, the organization of private and public spaces, and codes of gender distinction.
If deconstruction tends to subvert the viability of integrated language and literature units because of the specific character of its language theory, cultural studies does not, since it has no single language theory. Indeed, in general, cultural studies is a considerably more heterogeneous development, perhaps in part because its empirical orientation has much in common with some historiographic concerns about context, institutions, and change. To be sure, cultural studies has little use for the Romantic intoxication with language, but it de facto preserves the prominence of language, given the focus on specific geographical areas. Instead of teaching literature, which can only very dubiously be restricted to a single nation or language, one teaches a culture—Germany's for example—for which a language becomes an indispensable tool, although the language is no longer the magical place of the origin of the folk.
But even if we save the institutional coherence of “language and literature” departments by appealing to the cultural studies agenda of “teaching Germany” or teaching German culture (although the rationale for disciplinary autonomy and restricting oneself to Germany is no longer language-based), a larger question emerges pertaining to scholarly identity. Cultural studies cannot evade the immediate challenge posed by its own interdisciplinarity, for it is not only we in—or emerging from?—literature departments who teach Germany or any other culture. So do historians, art historians, political scientists, and others, and despite all the conferences, journals, and associations, an effectively and substantively interdisciplinary curriculum has not been achieved; here and there at the margins there may have been some cooperation, but these small efforts—the rare team-taught course or the coauthored article, for example—are hardly enough to transform the institution of scholarship. Despite some recent developments, the study of culture is still marginal in history departments, and culture is barely a factor at all in the quantitative social sciences. So the interdisciplinarity that devolves from the replacement of literature (narrowly defined) by culture (broadly defined) differs greatly depending on whether it is a matter of “German studies,” which seeks to bring together Germany specialists from various fields, or of “cultural studies in German,” which is certain to remain a largely postliterary phenomenon, that is, the intellectual agenda in language and literature departments after the primacy of literature, narrowly understood, is revoked. The former version, bringing together all the Germanists from various departments—we can call it Grossdeutsch —will tend to preserve conservative disciplinary distinctions by simply adding the literary scholar to the historian, to the economist, and so on. Cultural studies as Kleindeutsch has the advantage of revitalizing the language and literature model by using an innovative pedagogy that examines a culture through a range of objects, including but not restricted to canonic literature.
This important distinction also pertains to the pressures on the other foreign language fields either to network with other disciplines on the basis of a shared regional interest (area studies) or to redefine separate literature departments within the discipline as cultural studies departments in French, German, Spanish, and so on. This precise location of cultural studies entails reorienting scholarly attention from the literary work of art to the construction of collective cultural identity, and these two alternatives still represent the aporia of the Romantic legacy: literature and nationhood. Area studies, literary studies, or cultural studies: all three signify distinct possibilities in all the traditional foreign language fields; in practice, there is no one solution for all fields, since their disciplinary traditions are different from one another, as are the cultures themselves, the objects of study. In German, the shift to a specifically cultural studies agenda can draw on longstanding intellectual traditions, as well as the history of political obsession with national unification; in Spanish, the relation between culture and territory is configured very differently; and in Russian, the authority of a high tradition impedes any consistently postliterary developments. But both Russian and German fields are about cultures identified with a specific territory—Russia and Germany—in ways that English departments are rarely about England. It is precisely this difference—between departments oriented toward other cultures and departments oriented primarily toward the autonomous literary work of art—that is the site of cultural studies.
Literature may be taken to be universal; culture is particular, and the cultural studies agenda of teaching Germany or teaching France has the additional problem that its fundamental conceptualization may be nationalistic or even racist. Paul Gilroy has criticized British cultural studies for inheriting from a Stalinist Marxism an account of nationhood that necessarily disprivileged minorities. Hence the romanticizing search for the real England of real English workers: if not socialism in one country, then at least one culture in one country. This argument is homologous to the critique of apologetic versions of popular culture and everyday history in Germany: preferring to look at “normal” people in “situations” rather than at exceptions in exceptional circumstances, for example, the persecuted minority. In both cases, the scholarly problem is not irreparable, but its solution would require additional theorization of the “culture” in “cultural studies,” recognizing its instability and heterogeneity instead of imagining a pure and organic cultural material. All cultures, today and in the past, are internally diverse, so diversity might be a constitutive category of cultural studies.
The enlightened correction to cultural nativism is postcolonial theory, which has flourished particularly in English departments and has reoriented curricula toward issues of colonialism in earlier texts and toward the anglophone literature of formerly colonized nations. Analogous work in French and Spanish departments has produced varied results. Some interesting work on cultural aspects of German colonialism is under way, but because of the colonial era's limited span, the precise parallel to English material is rather small.
Yet postcolonialism is simultaneously the vehicle whereby English departments have been able to address increasingly diverse student bodies and sometimes escape the criticism of Eurocentrism. What is at stake therefore is less a conversation between postcolonial theory and cultural pedagogy than the viability of the study of individual European cultures in the historical context of postcolonialism, the end of European privilege, and an increasingly global cultural horizon. To put the issue clearly: given the restricted character of university resources, given an American national culture that is much less oriented toward Europe than it was when the European national literature departments were established, and given the increasing emphasis on teaching and enrollments, are there any curricular strategies worth exploring in departments charged with the teaching and study of European material?
An important part of the answer is of course the post-European move in the focus of literary studies to francophone Africa or, for Spanish departments, the shift in the balance between Spain and Latin America. But were that the whole answer, it would be poor indeed; it would surrender the European tradition to a misconstrued expediency and miss a dramatic opportunity to redefine the European material itself. Germany offers a particularly interesting example, therefore, because the brevity of its colonial past effectively prohibits a shift to a German material outside Europe as a formula for broad disciplinary change. What could the formula then be?
We are still at the beginning of a discussion on this point, and I have no definitive answers, except that the promise of a German cultural studies is intellectually viable only if inflected by a postcolonial orientation. In addition, it would be fruitless to relive the culture wars of the eighties and position a cultural fortress Europe against a misunderstood challenge of global diversity. The problem is rather to articulate a curriculum that teaches Germany while taking seriously the postcolonial question of diversity in various inflections relevant to the German material: nationhood and race (tragically topical in Germany in the light of the postunification xenophobia), German-Jewish topics, regional diversity and federalism, multilingualism—these might be some points at which to start to rebuild the curriculum. To rebuild it: not to add these issues on as marginal embellishments but to set them at the core and to renounce, finally, the neurotic compulsion to extend the literary canon of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Instead of literary studies slipping from national identity through nationalism to racism, one could imagine a cultural studies that would thematize racism alongside difference, plurality, and hybridity.
Posthermeneutic theory challenges the legitimacy of the departmental strategy that orients the curriculum teleologically toward the interpretation of literary works. Can the curriculum and pedagogy be rethought in a way that would challenge this passivity and give the student an opportunity to engage in more than retrospective thinking? Instead of encouraging students to become listeners and readers who interpret—or consume?—we can begin to envision a strategy designed to elicit active producers who engage in a culture rather than merely receive it.
The theoretical issue here has to do with the construction of alterity. We should not only work toward a conceptualization of culture that is complex enough to allow for internal heterogeneity—diversity is constitutive of all culture. We, engaged in a pedagogy that teaches the “other” culture, should also have a nonreactionary account of the student's relation to the other, an account that does not reify the other culture in its exoticism but that, on the contrary, foregrounds the relation between here and there, the positionality of the student in and toward the other culture. Instead of aiming for a “native fluency,” with its goal of a feigned identity—the American's dream of passing as French—one could explore an articulation of difference in which the student could speak for him- or herself as an American encountering France.
And not only speak. The point, however, is that a posthermeneutic pedagogy—one that promotes active skills over passive interpretation—can entail enabling the student to engage in the production of texts, spoken or written, rather than privileging the exegesis of canonic texts. Of course we should continue to teach high culture, but versatility in the interpretation of high culture is not the sole of ultimate desideratum. An alternative might be labeled foreign cultural literacy: the ability of the student to operate effectively in a different cultural setting. This goal can be achieved most successfully through study abroad, which would naturally include the study of language and culture but would also better prepare the student for future encounters with the host culture.
In this light, curricular concerns and the redefinition of the language and literature departments are part of wider issues in higher education, and we should be able to identify what specific contribution the study of other cultures can make to the educational enterprise. The question has shifted from the relative importance of particular material to the significance of why one should learn about foreign cultures at all. Spare me the answer “The national interest.” This notion is just a pipe dream of underenrolled departments eager to show their patriotism: the foreign policy elite was never made up of language and literature majors. The right answer might have to do with cognitive and operative gains pursuant to the engagement with material from other cultures, that is, considerably self-reflection, and it is there that the study of literature remains of primary importance.
Yet the understanding of literary history is not the only component of foreign cultural literacy, which in fact suggests a greater presentist component in the curriculum. If the point is to empower students to live and work in France—or with French people in the United States—or even merely to reflect more richly on their own situation by gaining a foreign perspective on the United States, the distant French past is surely important but, equally surely, less important than the twentieth century. The era of national literary history may have come to an end; think of the consequences for departmental structures. Instead of faculty positions assigned to neatly separated historical periods (the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, etc.), national literary history might shrink to the size of history of philosophy in philosophy departments, with more resources allocated to diverse aspects of contemporary culture: politics, popular culture, mass media, gender, and minorities.
The four theoretical tendencies I have touched on hardly converge on a single point or a simple agenda. Everything is due for review: the connections between language and literature, between literature and culture, between Europe and the globe, and between the literature of single nations and comparative literature. The status of the humanities and, especially, of the departmental organizations we know are likely to change profoundly. It makes little sense to dig in our heels to defend the past. Why should we want to? But we should want to reexamine our past, our intellectual obligations, and the challenges of contemporary theory and then build institutions that are adequately to them. This task requires asking why we think language, literature, and culture ought to be taught at all and whether they belong together for other than merely conventional reasons. Cultural studies provides a useful answer, insisting on the importance of studying foreign cultures, although differently than in the past: linguistic identity—the definition of departments as French, German, Spanish, and so on—has to be liberal enough to accommodate the diversity of minority languages, just as the study of literature will likely surrender some of its traditional privilege. Such a reconfiguration, which could help us impart to students a concentrated familiarity with another culture, is less a theoretical insight than a realistic assessment of students' interests in other cultures and societies, interests that are surely much more practical than they are strictly literary-historical or philosophical. Can our theoretical reflections on the challenges to inherited departmental structures become as practical as our students' concerns?
The author is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Director of the Overseas Studies Program at Stanford University. This essay is an expanded of a paper presented at the 1992 MLA Annual Convention.
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
