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AT SEVERAL recent symposia, colloquia, and conference sessions on literary and cultural study and critical pedagogy, I have noticed that growing numbers of speakers are given to concluding their observations with the question “As we are about to enter the twenty-first century, how do we, as educators, prepare our students for an increasingly multicultural society?” or some variant thereof. (I must confess that I myself am not immune to this musing; I even replace “twenty-first century” with “a new millennium” for dramatic emphasis.) Job listings in the Modern Language Association Job Information List often include sentences like “X University or College is committed to diversifying its faculty and student body. Outsiders, minorities, and marginal collectivities are encouraged to apply.” But do most departments and programs seriously subscribe to a critically conceived diversification of the curriculum? Claire Kramsch correctly notes the need for orchestrated institutional effort in designing culturally diverse curricula: “More and more colleges and universities claim to educate students with an international outlook for the next century, and such claims must be followed through at the departmental and program level” (11). Because the task is literally and metaphorically global, the criteria for what constitutes a critical pedagogy with an international outlook cannot easily be established.
In this era of dissolution of borders and large-scale migrations, European nationalisms are increasingly challenged by threats to the concept of geographical, ethnic, racial, and linguistic unity. Foreign language and literature programs—particularly in the European languages—seem to be the ideal sites for the implementation of curricula responsive to historical and cultural changes at a global level. Unfortunately, the necessity of paradigm shifts in language and literature pedagogy is often misinterpreted, and the implementation of curricular change remains, at best, fragmented. A marked uncertainty over how best to introduce cultural study into the language and literature curriculum has for some time beset German and German studies programs at American universities. In the light of Germany's recent history, marked by strong vestiges of cultural imperialism and attacks on, denials of, and defensiveness about the country's historical and cultural legacies, curricular revisions trigger emotionally charged debates. In an essay in the special issue of the German Quarterly devoted to the question of inter-disciplinarity in German studies, Steven Taubeneck argues that many German programs in this country have so far resisted demands for the study of noncanonical traditions in German literature and culture. As a result, Germanistik (defined as a more traditionally conceived study of German language and literature) remains rooted in outmoded paradigms informed by “idealist, masculinist, and universalist assumptions that prevent students from approaching concerns of contemporary everyday life” (220–21).
A feverish activity designed to remedy this correctly diagnosed ailment can be observed at numerous conference sessions, at individual conferences (at the time of this writing, a conference called “ Germanistik in the USA: Prospects for Change—Changing Our Prospects” is scheduled for 13–16 October 1994 at Vanderbilt University), and in special issues of professional journals. In 1989, the year that saw the publication of special issues of the German Quarterly (Germanistik as German Studies: Interdisciplinary Theories and Methods ) and the New German Critique (Minorities in German Culture) , the president of the American Association of Teachers of German set up a task force to make recommendations for the promotion of minorities in German departments. In a thoughtfully written article, George F. Peters, the head of the task force, sums up the complexities that emerged when
a straightforward assignment—to devise strategies for making the study of German more attractive to students from minority groups significantly underrepresented in the classroom—quickly took on complicated ramifications involving issues of stereotype, racist ideology, and European politics.
(“Dilemmas”5) 1
Peters observes with deep insight that the study of a language and its cultural context cannot be isolated from frameworks of contiguity that link it to a larger social history. A sterilized curriculum, free of the conflicts that mark a culture, poses a serious threat to a genuine understanding of that culture, he writes: “The complexities of German history, the fate of minorities in Germany and of minority Germans in Eastern Europe, and the efforts of many Germans to come to grips with their country's past—these themes must be injected into the curriculum at all levels” (10).
I would venture that the failure to situate cultural study in its larger critical history risks complicity in the misrepresentation of the culture(s) studied. A reform in the curriculum requires more than just adding to departmental reading lists works by minority and oppositional writers. Furthermore, introduction of the most current or fashionable topics, such as From the Berlin Wall to the Berlin Mall, though informed by an innovative spirit, does not ensure enduring interest when the subject matter is presented in a time-specific manner without the benefit of other stories and histories. The contesting voices of different texts, which register a diversity of social and cultural practices, can always recharge and vary course content by incorporating new genres and critical perspectives. Through this dialogization of materials and issues, a series of disconnected monologues can be replaced by cross-disciplinary conversations.
I believe that a genuine reform in literary study has so far eluded our discipline for numerous complex reasons. For the sake of simplicity, however, I would like to suggest that merely reversing strategy in curricular design—by valorizing the so-called noncanonical texts and marginalizing canonical ones—has not been an effective remedy. During the past two years, I chaired one search committee in our German department and served as a member of a second search committee. As I studied many of the listings placed in the MLA Job Information List by other German departments, I realized that very few departments were interested in candidates in such areas as the Goethezeit or German intellectual history or nineteenth-century realism. Most departments were looking for people to teach feminist studies, film studies, or cultural studies, preferably all three. What we need, however, is a critical pedagogy that brings current concerns into a productive dialogue with voices of a larger cultural history. Unless we can institute a practice of critical reading in our classrooms, efforts to restructure our curricular models will not yield a genuine understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity. A well-intentioned inclusion in the syllabus of nontraditional works, writings by underrepresented groups, and texts of songs, films, jokes, rumors, graffiti, and other signposts of the cultural landscape does not ensure a critical engagement with them. We must look for those historical moments of critical innovation that anticipate our present efforts to reconfigure disciplinary paradigms. A brief glance at the recent history of literary and cultural studies may help place to necessary paradigm shift in proper perspective.
The poststructuralist theory debates have led to a gradual erasure of boundaries between literature and the arts and other forms and forums of popular discourse, such as mass media, rock lyrics, diaries, political pamphlets, videos, and advertisements. Thus, literary study has been transformed into what came to be known as cultural studies. The prestige of theoretical paradigms has drawn various disciplines—sociology, psychology, religion, philosophy, anthropology, and others—into a dialogue with language and literature study and refashioned our practice of literacy criticism as a form of cultural critique. What is disparagingly referred to as canon busting by critics of curricular reform is, in effect, a progressive intermingling of different domains of intellectual inquiry and should be investigated as such. At the level of foreign language and cultural study, from introductory literary-cultural readings at the end of first-year language courses to advanced textual analyses of literary works in graduate seminars, we need to understand this critical innovation in the context of its larger history. In this way, cultural transitions can be understood in a dialectical fashion in the original sense of the term, that is, in a dialogue with the present. As such, literary-cultural texts constitute the site of interlinkage among personal, social, political, philosophical, and institutional discourses. Mikhail Bakhtin's work has shown us that participation of the so-called high culture in the popular culture, as exemplified in “carnivalization” (the creative interchange between opposing, contestatory uses of language), has enriched and expanded the domain of high culture. “Carnivalization made possible the creation of the open structure of the great dialogue,” writes Bakhtin. It “permitted social interaction between people to be carried over into the higher sphere of the spirit and the intellect…” (177). By drawing texts of canonical status into a dialogue with those of popular and contemporary culture in our curricular renegotiations, we can avoid misrepresenting and patronizing “marginal” cultural productions or else ignoring the cultural criticism inherent in many classical works. Paradigm shift, a concept introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his study of scientific revolutions, does not mean, when applied to the study of literature, throwing the canonical baby out with the bathwater of tired rhetoric. A new paradigm does not invalidate the old one. Rather, it rewrites the old one to account for the new phenomena that the existing paradigm can no longer explain. Quantum physics did not make Newtonian physics obsolete; it offered a paradigm of understanding for problems not addressed by the Newtonian worldview. A brief look at current events in Germany illustrates how well-known and accessible literary texts can provide the larger sociocultural context of contemporary popular and media discourses.
Today, approximately five million foreigners live permanently in Germany. This unprecedented presence of the foreign has seriously challenged the relative homogeneity of German society and, as is only too well known, has led to alarming acts of violence against ethnic minorities. Having unwittingly and perhaps unwillingly become a second home to a very large number of asylum seekers and political and economic refugees after the end of the cold war, Germany is facing the inevitable task of transforming itself into a society that can accommodate the contesting demands of a multicultural population. One of the major obstacles to this task is that in German culture the foreign has had a relatively limited presence, one that has often been mediated rather than direct. That is to say, the investigation of other cultures has taken place in a representational matrix. Instead of a dialogic encounter with these cultures, the tendency has been to represent them in literature, academic writing, and media from the subject's point of view. The rise of xenophobic sentiments is often explained in the media and in academic discussions as closely linked to political, social, and, most significantly, economic insecurities. Although these factors play an important role in fomenting hostility against foreigners, negative representations of alien otherness constitute the most pervasive form of public experience of the foreign. The subliminal power of words, images, and language games (not to forget neo-Nazi-generated computer games such as Anti-Turks Test or Aryan Test) in promoting antiforeign sentiments is economy- and commerce-blind. Image becomes rhetoric; classical rhetoric, let us remember, was employed to move masses, to persuade, dissuade, and inflame them. Since language is representation—the site of the irreducible space between the word and what it stands for—and in its representational capacity dictates social practice, studying language as a signifying system and literature as an embodiment of figural language will enable the student of language to approach cultural difference, in Kramsch's words, “in a spirit of ethnographic inquiry rather than in a normative or judgmental way.” A curriculum designed to promote a dialectical understanding of language, literature, popular texts, and everyday practices can “make the critical study of foreign language and discourse central to a globally conceived international education” (9). And most important of all, such study can create a heightened awareness of the representational status of knowledge, theory, and ideology. This sharpened awareness of the role of representational regimes in the production and dissemination of knowledge has led to the aforementioned shift in the focus of literary criticism from aesthetic judgment to cultural critique.
Most first- and second-year German textbooks now published in this country include chapters on issues of women and minorities in German culture. 2 In a few cases, chapters on foreigners living in Germany present patronizingly folkloristic ethnocentric images. Conversely, Blickwechsel , an intermediate German textbook, includes inspiring autobiographical texts by women and foreigners along with exemplary short stories by prominent writers from German literary history. In this way, students of German are prepared for literature courses that offer a diversity of cultural traditions. I believe that a critical understanding of literary archaeology can facilitate dialogues between our present concerns and their earlier manifestations and enable a more productive curricular negotiation. Instead of adding new but separate courses to the curriculum—a practice Gerald Graff has called the “suburbanization” of departments—it would be more fruitful to investigate the points in the past when questions of cultural change were raised in different yet comparable contexts. To this end, I revised the syllabus of a broadly defined German literature survey course, listed in the course catalog as Topics in German Literature, to include not only selections from classical works of modern German literature but also exemplary texts in German by foreign writers living in Germany (see app. for the syllabus). Retitled The Experience of the Foreign in German Culture, the course, offered in the spring semester 1994, attempted to present a dialogic interaction among texts of different traditions that are linked by their common interest in representations of foreignness in modern German literary culture. Well-known texts of the literary canon were read along with writing by nonnative Germans; the class also viewed contemporary films. (The two films, selected for their critical insight and vision, were R. W. Fassbinder's Ali. Angst essen Seele auf [1973] and Hark Bohm's Yasemin [1987]). Both German majors and nonmajors who had had at least two years of college German and an advanced training course in the German language, or an equivalent background, could enroll. There were no specific German literature course prerequisites, although one explicit purpose of the course was to present principles of literary criticism and analysis not through a study of books on literary theory but through a close reading of and critical engagement with the texts themselves. In this way, the course would benefit both the novice and the more seasoned literature student. It was expected that students had some prior knowledge of both European and non-Western cultural histories and basic training in critical reading. Most Bryn Mawr students beyond their freshman year met this requirement; the freshman English and the introductory literary study courses at the college train students in strategies of close reading and critical analysis of a wide variety of literary and critical texts of world literature.
The desired objective of The Experience of the Foreign was not only to ease students into an advanced reading range but also to provide them with the proper critical apparatus for translating culture. Since literature both reflects and performs an implicit critique of social processes, it proves to be a consistently reliable context for texts. Unlike newspaper reports, documentaries, or television shows, it has a universal and enduring effect, and its allegorical vision is always open to revision and negotiation of cultural understanding. Most texts, though critically astute, were linguistically accessible. G. E. Lessing's ring parable from Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) , Wilhelm Hauff's romantic tales of an imaginary Orient, “Kalif Storch” (“Caliph Stork”) and “Das Gespensterschiff” (“The Ship of Ghosts”), German Romantics' and Heinrich Heine's depictions of the Orient in selected writings, Franz Kafka's parables and allegories of alienation and alterity, and Max Frisch's haunting play Andorra lent a critical corrective to current misconceptions of foreign cultures instead of representing a tired-and-true cannon. Explicitly and implicitly these texts demonstrate how dominant ideologies and political practices control the representation of the foreign. Therefore, they could be read as engaging in a certain dialogue with the works of many foreign writers now living in Germany and writing in German.
Selections from the texts of foreign writers of an emerging multicultural German literature 3 illustrated how these authors attempt to forge links between their own literary traditions and those of the classical German writers we were also studying. In a short and accessible article read in class, “Plädoyer für eine Brückenliteratur” (“Plea for a Bridge Literature”), Zafer Šenocak, a young Turkish German poet and journalist, gives a short and insightful overview of representations of the Orient by prominent German writers such as Goethe and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and analyzes the possibility of new syntheses between the old and the new and between the occidental and the oriental (68–69). Aras Ören, a prominent Turkish poet living and writing in Germany, has published a book of travel poems, Deutschland. Ein türkisches Märchen (Germany: A Turkish Fairy Tale) , a work whose title is a reverent reference to Heine's famous epic poem cycle Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter's Tale) of 1844. The work not only shows the acknowledged influence of a classical German writer but also reflects strong traces of the travel poetry of late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish writers.
The writing of foreigners is marked by a sense of irony and a parodistic criticism of German misconceptions of foreign cultures. The employment of such tropes as irony, allegory, and hyperbole resists and challenges the stereotypical construal of the foreign. The students were able to appreciate how the use to different metaphorical codes, code switching, humor, parody, and direct translation frees German from its metaphysical weight and lends it the impossible lightness of Scheherazade's tales. This writing, in Ülker Gökberk's words, moves “the German language, a language of a homogeneous society, toward one including the experience of diversity” (171).
It is important to note, however, that the work of foreign writers in Germany more often than not celebrates the classics of German literature. A final poem read in this class, “deutsche sprache” (sic; “German Language”), by the Turkish German writer Yüksel Pazarkaya, is a tribute to the German language as the voice of such progressive writers as Lessing, Schiller, Heine, Feuerbach, Marx, and Brecht. 4 Pazarkaya claims that those who use this language of reason and liberation to express xenophobic sentiments and to exploit others “sind nicht in ihr” (“are not in it”). He calls German his home and refuge in the coldness of a hostile society. Here Pazarkaya denies that language is necessarily the privilege of the native speaker; he separates it from blood and race and shows how it empowers those—native and nonnative alike—who use it responsibly. In his words, “sie gab mir sehen und hören/sie gab mir hoffen und lieben / eine welt in der es sich leben läßt” (“it [the German language] gave me sight and sound / hope and love / and a world where it is possible to live”; my trans.). The study of language is the study of a complex cultural semiotic with implications for a genuine and reflexive understanding of world affairs. The dialogic encounter between the classical writers of German and those who inscribe its popular ethnographies made the students aware of how language marks differences in race, ethnicity, and gender and how it also renegotiates these differences. Culture should today be understood not as the site of blood rites and birthrights but as the site of translation. Courses need to be designed as sites not of literal translation but of cultural translation. If we consider our confrontation with others as Bildung , as a learning venture with multiple paths, we can reclaim from well-known as well as occluded or forgotten sites of cultural history insights that can guide our efforts to introduce a new vision into curricular reform.
The author is Associate Professor of German in the Department of German at Bryn Mawr College. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 2–4 June 1994, in Monterey, California.
1 Subsequently, Peters also edited the special issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis titled Focus on Diversity (see Peters, “Dilemmas” 11n6).
2 Among the textbooks I use, those that include well-selected passages on minority cultures in Germany are Dollenmeyer and Hansen's Neue Horizonte (first-year German textbook), Vansant et al.'s Blickwechsel , and Walker et al.'s Assoziationen (intermediate German textbooks).
3 Selections were chosen from Blickwechsel as well as from Ackermann's In zwei Sprachen leben, Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 35.1 (1985), and Ackermann and Weinrich's Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur.
4 By using lowercase in both words of the title, and throughout the text, Pazarkaya frees himself from the dictates of the conventions of capitalization in German.
This course focuses on representations of foreignness in selected texts of the modern German literary canon beginning with the eighteenth century, in contemporary films, and in literary productions of nonnative Germans writing in Germany today. A critique of German perceptions of otherness will be undertaken through an implied dialogue between classical texts and the work of foreign-born writers of contemporary German letters. The major objectives of the course are threefold: to guide students into an advanced literary and cultural reading range, to stress the importance of historical positions in understanding the need for modern paradigms of cultural study, and to provide students with the critical apparatus and sharpened sense for linguistic usage necessary for analyzing cultural texts of different traditions.
G. E. Lessing, Nathan der Weise (the ring parable)
Wilhelm Hauff, “Kalif Storch,” “Das Gespensterschiff”
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (excerpts)
Heinrich Heine, Englische Fragmente (excerpts)
Franz Kafka, “Schakale und Araber”
Max Frisch, Andorra
Šinasi Dikmen, “Wir tun so als ob wir Deutsche wären”
Fatma Mohamed Ismail, “Ein deutsches Nein heißt Nein”
Aras Ören, Deutschland. Ein türkisches Märchen (excerpts)
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, “Mutterzunge”
Yüksel Pazarkaya, “deutsche sprache” (sic)
Franco Biondi, “Die Fremde wohnt in der Sprache”
Zafer Šenocak, “Plädoyer für eine Brückenliteratur”
Hark Bohm, Yasemin
R. W. Fassbinder, Ali. Angst essen Seele auf
Approximately every other week, you will be required to write a position paper of three to five pages closely tied to the reading materials and the films viewed and discussed. You will also be responsible for leading or coleading one discussion session focused on a specific set of readings. You are expected to participate actively in class discussions.
Position papers: 60%
Discussion-leader assignment: 10%
Class participation: 20%
Final take-home essay examination: 10%
Ackermann, Irmgard, ed. In zwei Sprachen leben. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte von Ausländern. Munich: DTV, 1983.
Ackermann, Irmgard, and Harald Weinrich, eds. Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Standortbestimmung der “Ausländerliteratur.” Munich: Piper, 1986.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Introd. Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Dollenmeyer, David B., and Thomas S. Hansen, Neue Horizonte. Lexington: Heath, 1992.
Gökberk, Ülker. “Understanding Alterity: Ausländerliteratur between Relativism and Universalism.” Theoretical Issues in Literary History. Ed. David Perkins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 143–72.
Graff, Gerald. “Democratizing the Academy: Questions of Pedagogy.” Keynote address. Alana Alliance Symposium. Haverford, 29 Apr. 1994.
Kramsch, Claire. “Foreign Languages for a Global Age.” ADFL Bulletin 25.1 (1993): 5–12. [Show Article]
Ören, Aras. Deutschland. Ein türkisches Märchen. Trans. Gisela Kraft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982.
Pazarkaya, Yüksel. “deutsche sprache” (sic). Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 35.1 (1985): 144. (Rpt. in Der Babylonbus. Frankfurt: Dagyeli, 1987.7.)
Peters, George F. “Dilemmas of Diversity: Observations on Efforts to Increase Minority Participation in German.” ADFL Bulletin 25.2 (1994): 5–11. [Show Article]
———, ed. Focus on Diversity. Spec. issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis 25.2 (1992).
Šenocak, Zafer. “Plädoyer für eine Brückenliteratur.” Ackermann and Weinrich 65–69.
Taubeneck, Steven. “Voices in the Debate: German Studies and Germanistik.” German Quarterly 62.2 (1989): 220–26.
Vansant, Jacqueline, et al. Blickwechsel. Boston: Houghton, 1990.
Walker, Ronald W., et al. Assoziationen. New York: McGraw, 1991.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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