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European journal of American studies
1-1 | 2006 Spring 2006
Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/193 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.193 ISSN: 1991-9336
Publisher European Association for American Studies
Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 1-1 | 2006, “Spring 2006” [Online], Online since 01 January 2006, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/193; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.193
This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Marc Chenetier
American Studies in Austria Susanne Mettauer
American Studies in Belarus
American Studies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
American Studies in Finland Jopi Nyman
American Studies in France. A critical review.
Theorizing American Studies : German Interventions into an Ongoing Debate
(Re)Considering American Studies in Greece
American Studies in Hungary
American Studies in Italy Part 1 : State of the Art of American Literary Studies in Italy
American Studies in Italy Part 2 : U.S. History in Italy at the beginning of the 21st Century
American Studies in the Netherlands Doeko Bosscher
American Studies in Norway: Past and Present
American Studies in Poland
Overview of American Studies in Portugal
American Studies in Romania
American Studies in Russia
(North) American Studies in Spain: between eclecticism and politics
American Studies in Switzerland : A Preliminary Overview
American Studies in Turkey Gülriz Buken
USAmerican Studies in the United Kingdom
European journal of American studies, 1-1 | 2006 2
Introduction
Marc Chenetier
1 This « concept » or « test » issue of the European Journal of American Studies gathers a series of presentations on the state of and problems posed by American Studies in a variety of European countries. As we endeavored to take advantage of the potential new dimension that might be given American Studies in Europe thanks to the generous hospitality of the « revues.org » website, it seemed fit to give Americanists and all readers interested in American Studies a general sense of the situation before the Journal develops its real character. It will, as time goes by and experience accumulates, fundamentally become what EAAS members want to make it.
2 This issue was not prepared by the editorial team that will soon be put in place. Having initiated this project with the unanimous support of the EAAS Board, what I have attempted to do by putting together this first ensemble, is to give everyone a sense of the possibilities offered, in the hope that, as soon as the editorial structure takes its functions, numerous contributions will be offered and find their place in this new, flexible publication. The desire to see this e-journal come into existence demanded immediate and rapid action. I take full responsibility for what might be construed in these pages as methodological biases or shortcomings even though absolutely no editorial « line » was recommended to the authors whose choice of format and often divergent views I take as the first effects of the freedom of thought and diversity of viewpoints this publication will always encourage. 3 So that the present collection of review essays should by no means be considered as illustrating or anticipating in any manner the editorial choices that may be made and directions taken by the team soon to be chosen by the European Association of American Studies. It merely aims at demonstrating the possibility of movement by walking and at extending readers an invitation to participate in this new adventure, to take advantage of this opportunity to make European research in American Studies more visible and more easily accessible. 4 On the basis of this initial « dossier », the revues.org website saw fit to give EJAS its definitive agreement and the journal can now take on what shape European Americanists think best to give it.
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5 Finally, having reached this stage, I shall only remain on hand to help with the constitution of the editorial structure, make sure technical necessities and difficulties are dealt with and generally oversee a publication for which final responsibility will remain that of the board and officers of EAAS. 6 This new tool is now in the hands of European Americanists. Let it help them formulate and define their specific approach to the study of the United States.
AUTHOR
MARC CHENETIER President, European Association for American Studies
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American Studies in Austria
Susanne Mettauer
1 American Studies in Austria in an institutionalized form, as a distinct entity within higher education, is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The Amerika-Institut in Innsbruck was founded in 1956, an effort that was greatly supported by the official United States. The local Amerika-Haus, a United States Information Center, was closed and the complete reference section of its library, including scholarly journals, was handed over to the university and the new institute. The latter did not yet conduct American Studies in a scholarly sense, but one of its main functions represented the American Studies approach in the broadest sense: providing access to much needed up- to-date resource materials for subjects all across the academic curriculum, that is, regardless of the boundaries of the traditional disciplines and faculties.
2 The study of America as a scholarly discipline of its own benefited in particular from the Fulbright program, which has brought a wide range of American professors to Austrian universities. These scholars came from many academic fields, but in some way or other, they all contributed to and facilitated the local teaching, research, and knowledge about U.S. civilization and culture. Prior to the mid-1950s, these concerns were found in the university curricula and lecture courses only marginally and sporadically. In the post-World War II era, due to the increased activities of U.S. public diplomacy as well as the acknowledgment of the significance of this subject, the study of the United States. saw a rapid growth in Austria. Again, it was the United States who, in its own interest much more than for the mere sake of scholarly ideals, helped to make this development possible. An agreement between the United States and Austria determined that a certain amount of the counterpart funds that resulted from European Recovery Program (“Marshall-Plan”) activities in Austria was to be earmarked for the establishment of professorships in American Studies at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. Material and ideological support from the U.S. Embassy and the Austrian-American Educational Commission (“Fulbright Commission”) has remained crucial in securing American Studies interests ever since. Today there are independent American Studies departments at the universities of Innsbruck and Graz. In Vienna, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt there are combined departments of English and American Studies. All five institutions have professors of
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American Studies and/or Literature. Attempts to establish a chair in American History have not been successful, even though particularly the History departments in Vienna and Salzburg have a strong tradition of research and teaching in this field. 3 Similarly, efforts to establish American Studies as an independent degree program have not been realized yet. Still, the field has come a long way on which it had to overcome the often strong opposition and prejudice of the “mother discipline,” English Studies, as they competed for resources, personnel, students, and prestige. Presently, all five Austrian universities mentioned above offer a study course “English and American Studies,” either toward a general academic diploma or a teaching degree for secondary schools, in which case it has to be combined with a second subject. Within these study courses, American Studies is a compulsory component and equal to English Studies. Students are required to study the literature and culture of both the United States. and Great Britain, with the option of choosing an area of concentration. Linguistics tends to emphasize the British point of view and treat American varieties and developments as appendices rather than course topics in their own right. Language proficiency courses too are usually connected to the English Studies departments or departmental subdivisions. Therefore it may not be a coincidence that certain prejudices and stereotypes concerning American speech still prevail, however subtly and informally. 4 This common pairing and parallelization of English Studies and American Studies in the university curriculum results in the frequent misperception that the two disciplines are basically the same: same language, same structural break-down, same methodologies— even the differences between the two countries are often represented as minimal due to their shared history and organic relations. This apparent homogeneity is particularly dangerous because of the numerical superiority and more entrenched status of English philology. No wonder that the reabsorption of American Studies by English Studies has been a real and serious threat ever since the former established itself. Apparently American Studies has had difficulties to present its interdisciplinary nature and potential to a wider, not immediately involved audience. Primarily, that is the case because this multi-pronged approach cannot be fully and visibly realized within the current university curriculum, that is, in the combination of English and American Studies. There may be room for individual specializations, for example film studies, media studies, gender studies, or cultural theory/studies, in the form of coherent modules within the degree program. Yet, however comprehensive and systematic such modules may be in the context of their own subarea, they do not and cannot represent the systematic study of U.S. civilization as a whole that American Studies proper signifies. 5 Therefore, at least on the curricular level, the study of America in Austria still awaits its full realization. Although it is possible to complete a Ph.D. program in American Studies, this specialization is not really sufficient, especially in consideration of the relatively small number of students who go on to attain a doctoral degree. The implementation of the EU-wide Bologna process, that is, the introduction of a three- tier academic grade model instead of the traditional two-cycle system (Magister and doctorate), would theoretically mean an opportunity to design specific degree programs in American Studies on an earlier level than the doctorate. Of course such a development mainly hinges on the availability of funding, and even that does not guarantee a consensus on the part of the university management concerning the basic desirability of such programs. On the one hand, a systematic knowledge and
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understanding of North America quite obviously have low priority in today’s Austria, especially when a great number of people either feel or seem to be competent enough to make judgments themselves, and actual events as reported by the media apparently confirm the popular sentiment and preconceived notions about the United States. On the other hand, American Studies as a discipline, like almost all the humanities, faces the challenge of being measured and evaluated by criteria that are dictated by the world of business and economic interests, and that are therefore hardly applicable to endeavors oriented toward ideals of education and independent inquiry. 6 In spite of these institutional and structural obstacles, many individual Austrian scholars have explored the full range of American Studies, and for over three decades they have been represented by a professional academic organization. In 1974, a group of Austrian Americanists got together in Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, to found a national Association for American Studies, which in 1976 also became a member of the European Association for American Studies. Today, the AAAS has around 100 members with a variety of academic affiliations. It publishes an annual newsletter and the American Studies in Austria series. The chairmanship of the association rotates every year between the respective departments in Klagenfurt, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. The presiding institution is responsible for organizing that year’s AAAS conference, which also serves as the general meeting. Conference topics of the past years were, “The EmBodyment of American Culture” (2001), “(Anti)Americanisms” (2002), “U.S. Icons and Iconicity” (2003), and “Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change” (2004). The 2005 conference was going to take place in New Orleans and examine the many facets of “The South, New Orleans, the Caribbean, and Discourses of Creolization.” The meeting was meant to contribute to the international outreach of the AAAS as well as to the diverse activities under the long-standing friendship agreement between the University of Innsbruck (which currently holds the AAAS presidency) and the University of New Orleans. However, with the program and workshops fully set up and most arrangements already made, the conference had to be cancelled eventually, due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Consequently, the 2005 meeting will only consist of a board meeting and a general assembly without the usual keynote lectures, papers, and scholarly discussions. 7 A regular element of AAAS conferences has been the graduate student forum in which students with a research interest in American Studies present their theses, whether completed or still in progress. The lively participation in these events testifies to the strong appeal of American Studies to young scholars, and to the many ways in which the subject offers considerable relevance to their lives. A glance at the current list of M.A. and doctoral theses compiled in the AAAS Newsletter suggests the full potential of the field of American Studies and includes such diverse topics as guitar blues, the New York City marathon, Arab American memoirs, or “Mark Twain Meets The Simpsons.” Every year, the most outstanding thesis is acknowledged by the Fulbright Prize in American Studies. This award is sponsored by the Austrian-American Educational Commission, managed by the AAAS, and amounts to € 1,000. 8 One reason for the impressive number of American Studies theses is arguably the fact that many students are taking advantage of exchange programs and research grants to study in and thus experience the United States first-hand. The internationalization of Austrian American Studies fostered networking and institutional cooperation and led to numerous exchange programs, both university-wide and on a departmental level.
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The University of Salzburg has ties with the universities of Utah and Minnesota, to name but two. Graz has joint-study agreements with the universities of Little Rock and Oklahoma, in addition to more than a hundred U.S. universities that participate in the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP), of which the University of Graz is a member. Innsbruck, finally, signed friendship treaties with the University of Notre Dame, Utah State University, and the University of New Orleans. Under the latter agreement, more than forty Austrian students a year study in Louisiana, which makes this the single largest exchange program in the country, even exceeding the total number of American Fulbright students coming to Austria every year. Apart from university exchange programs, student and faculty mobility in Austria and the U.S. is greatly enhanced by the Fulbright program which offers exchange opportunities in both directions, thereby truly realizing Senator Fulbright’s idea of fostering mutual understanding and goodwill. Fulbright grants are open to students, professors, researchers, and teachers from all academic disciplines, a feature that also applies to many university exchange programs. This further emphasizes the inter- and multidisciplinary character of American Studies. 9 There are also numerous study abroad opportunities at other European universities which have an American Studies focus. Regional and inter-European networks and cooperations are just as important as transatlantic connections and help Americanists here to build a distinct profile. In the past, Austria was twice the center of crucial developments in European American Studies. In 1947, the first Salzburg Seminar in American Studies took place at Schloss Leopoldskron. The Schloss is also the birthplace of the European Association for American Studies, which was founded there in 1953. The location of Austria in the heart of Europe may turn out to be an advantage once more, as the European intellectual scene is greatly expanding and Eastern European universities are being integrated into the existing scholarly network. The University of Graz, for instance, has a well-established friendship agreement with the University of Maribor. Another indication of the promising position of Austria in this regard is the increasing participation of young Americanists from Eastern Europe at AAAS conferences. 10 Quite obviously, American Studies in Austria is a rich, engaging field with great potential, increased possibilities, strong attraction, and above all very motivated and innovative people. However, it is often very frustrating when this potential is thwarted and possibilities limited by current developments in the educational sector. The most serious factor is the reduction of funding, and that the reduced budget is allotted on the basis of criteria which, as already mentioned, do not favor the humanities. The absorption and/or limitation of American Studies by English departments is a scenario that looms large at all five universities. At the University of Salzburg, the Department of English and American Studies was renamed and is now called Fachbereich Anglistik in which “American Literary and Cultural Studies” is one of several subdivisions. In Innsbruck, the new development plan that was proposed by the rector and is currently under debate in the responsible committees, envisions a fusion of the American Studies with the English Studies department. The American Studies faculty strongly opposes this plan and insists that its idea of American Studies would suffer from a joint department in which English Studies would be much more dominant. One effect of the debate about the future of the discipline has been a heightened concern with the contemporary nature and function of American Studies, and completely new projects
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are in the air. Without a doubt, American Studies in Austria will be able to thrive also in the future, in both traditional and innovative forms.
INDEX
Keywords: Amerika-Haus, Salzburg Seminar, Slovenia, Fulbright, Icons, Creolization, New Orleans, AAAS
AUTHOR
SUSANNE METTAUER University of Innsbruck
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American Studies in Belarus
1 The interaction of cultures is becoming an ever growing factor in the world of today. 1989 was the year that promised tremendous changes in the relations between countries and nations. The barriers that had separated people in the East and in the West were smashed, and it seemed that the future was going to be a straight thoroughfare leading to mutual understanding and prosperity. People on both sides of the Berlin Wall suddenly realized how many things they had to share and how much they could learn from each other. This incited enormous interest in the cultural heritage of other countries, especially in the former communist bloc.
2 The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the emergence of 15 independent states, some of which are still in the process of self-identification. They are called upon to re- evaluate their position in the world and their role in world civilization. 3 The history of Belarus is quite dramatic. Throughout its history the country had been continuously part of other states. The fact greatly affected Belarusian culture, which was marginalized by the culture of the dominant state but developed unique qualities that are determined by its position at the cross-roads of cultures. The country gave the world Marc Chagall and M.Bogdanovich, but has difficulty with self-identification. 4 Belarus had always had a special relationship with the United States of America. Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the great hero of the American Revolution, was born in Belarus. Marc Chagall whose frescoes decorate the United Nations building in New York comes from the Belarusian city of Vitebsk. Among the Nobel Prize winners who made their career in the U.S.A. are a few Belarusian-born academics. A number of American writers have their ethnic roots in Belarus. On the other hand, the Belarusian Diaspora in the U.S.A. has never got much publicity. At the beginning of the 20th century, thousands of Belarusians moved to the U.S.A. in search of the Promised Land. The majority of those emigrants were illiterate people who came from small poor villages. It is quite remarkable that far away from their homeland they had preserved the language and authentic Belarusian culture, which were vanishing in Belarus because of the attempts at russification and the extermination of the nation's elite in GULAG. 5 However, in spite of these cross-cultural links, the study of America in Belarus has been inadequate and fragmented. The first translations of books by Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell, Jack London and other major American authors into Belarusian appeared
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during the Belarusian Revival of the 1930s, and the first Ph. D. dissertations dealing with the U.S.A. date back to the post-WW II period. 6 New opportunities for the study of America appeared after 1991 with the development of academic exchanges and cooperation between the two countries. 7 American Studies are among the very new things that have appeared on the university syllabus over the last fifteen years, though traditionally they involve philology students. It will be wrong to say that there has been no expertise in the field of American Studies, but to this day American Studies have not been institutionalized (with the exception of the American Studies Center at the European Humanities University, which, regretfully, was closed in 2004.) However, the EHU ASC has managed to train a number of teachers and researchers who have elaborated a number of American Studies courses that are being introduced at different universities. Textbooks have been made, distance courses developed. The next step is to make American Studies interdisciplinary. 8 One of the most important fields of American Studies is American Literature. The study of American Literature in Russia (Belarus then was part of the Russian Empire) started as far back as the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe were as popular in Russia as they were in the U.S.A. However, during the communist regime years our knowledge of American literature was specific. On the one hand, the names of U.S. great classics were well-known to every educated person, and some of the literary characters, like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, were immediately identified not only as phenomena of American culture but also as part of the local cultural tradition. On the other hand, there were noticeable lacunae in the study of even the greatest of American authors. Usually the critics emphasized the social criticism their books contained but were suspicious about the experiments with form which are characteristic of American authors. Jack London was acknowledged as the most popular American writer (the number of his books published in the USSR exceeded that of any other foreign author) while Henry James began to be carefully studied only quite recently. This overemphasis on Jack London is easy to explain: he was one of V. Lenin's favourite authors, and his story "Love of Life" was mentioned by N. Krupskaya as the one she used to read to the dying Lenin during his last days. It is only now that Jack London is being adequately evaluated—in the complexity of his strengths and weaknesses. 9 Such discrepancies are typical of the whole course of the history of American Literature which was taught in this part of the world. Some of the literary figures were blown out of all proportion because of their ideological message ; others were underestimated in spite of their tremendous contribution to world literature. The reading lists for university students included mainstream writers like Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner along with people like John Reed or A. R. Williams who were journalists and not really important literary figures. Modern American Literature was not adequately represented, the giants of the 1930s-40s being the most recent. 10 Another peculiar feature of the study of American Literature was that it focused almost exclusively on the mainstream with little concern for minority literatures or for what is regarded as low or popular culture. It is only during the last decade or so that Belarusian Americanists have started to analyze the trends that determine the American literary scene today, taking special notice of the effects of multiculturalism. The result is the book market that is beginning to demonstrate a change in the readers' attitudes, making the map of American Literature more complete.
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11 The Belarusian Association for American Studies was established in 1995. Its history is both dramatic and exciting. It unites Americanists not only from Belarus but also from the neighboring countries, such as Ukraine and Lithuania. Their major forum is the annual conference that has been held since 1991, and the American Studies Yearbook (published since 1995) has become a recognized source of information about American Studies in Eastern Europe. It is clear that the questions Belarusian Americanists are called upon to solve are more numerous than the answers they can give at the moment. It also explains the need for the new generation of specialists in American Studies who will be able to do what their predecessors could not, for various reasons. 12 And this is a great challenge, isn't it?
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American Studies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
1 Czech and Slovak scholars concerned with American studies have traditionally worked together in the times of Czechoslovakia, but this fruitful cooperation has also continued after 1993, when the two nations separated into two independent countries. So that the existence of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies (CSAAS) is certainly more than a symbolic confirmation of mutual closeness. What is truly encouraging is the fact that especially the younger generations and some of the newly founded centers in the field, also outside the two capitals, Prague and Bratislava, find it natural and useful to seek new opportunities for collaboration—in personal and institutional contacts, in organizing a number of seminars and conferences as well as various publication projects.
2 For decades Czechs and Slovaks shared a common historical experience, and in the more recent common past, namely after the Communist takeover in 1948, they, understandably, had to cope with similar difficulties. Under the totalitarian regime scholarship dealing with American topics was hardly allowed a fuller development; the confined and cramped state of American studies was a result of the political isolation of the country from the freer world and, consequently, of a limited access to valuable information. The official propaganda, in the ideological wrestle with the “political adversary” in the Cold War, was based on dogmatic interpretations of everything American. On the other hand, however, against and despite the expectations of the regime authorities, things American, and above all American culture, served to many as alternative politics providing strong inspiration for independent thought. 3 Although the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies could formally be established only after the “velvet revolution” and the collapse of the Communist regime of 1989, it achieved membership in the European Association for American Studies shortly after, in the early nineties. In the years of the dramatic transformation of the whole society which was characterized by enthusiasm for the newly gained liberties and by, sometimes rather hasty, implementation of principles of democracy, free market and the rule of law, chances were opened for new concepts of cultural and academic projects, including programs of American Studies. With the assistance of the Fulbright Commission, and a number of other exchange schemes involving American
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and European educational and cultural institutions, a few multidisciplinary study programs were founded, most often on the basis of departments of English philology. Student and teacher exchange trips, newly available to unprecedented number of individuals, was of vital importance for providing a wider acquisition of first-hand knowledge of American culture and social reality, which served as an important correction to the rather simplistic white-and-black or black-and-white visions of America inherited from the decades of totalitarianism. 4 The new political situation, and the rapid computerization of institutions and the whole country, made it possible for information of all sorts to be more freely and widely available. But the growing access to the contents of the web, frequently lacking assurance of reliability and accountability of the provided information, together with some irresponsible, frequently hardly qualified, attempts to “catch up with the world” in publishing ventures (purely profit-driven and in poor translations), also raised serious doubts. The early ardor accompanied with the belief that all possible hardships would be over after the fall of Communism then had to be followed also by a call for caution and concern. Although censorship was indeed gone and so was the straightjacket of the dogmatic ideology, the removal thereof in itself was obviously no guarantee of good quality of work, which indeed had been one of the meaningful weapons in the continuous struggle with the old regime’s stupidity before the political change arrived, be it in inventive and daring editorial ideas, in intelligently coded critical and essayistic performance, or in excellent translations. And it was the new atmosphere of freedom that proved an encouragement to fully publicize and publish what could not have passed the censorship in the past. But it was also a certain necessity, urged by a degree of pride, to take stock of the results achieved by groups and individuals who, for long years, had been striving against acceptance of a total separation from the luckier world outside the “iron curtain”. 5 The popular fiction writer Josef Škvorecký who, over the dark decades, had been offering interesting news on America and American culture from his Canadian exile on the frequencies of the Voice of America (news then not accessible in the Soviet- occupied Czechoslovakia) could finally bring into his homeland country the harvest of his and his wife’s painstaking efforts, namely about three hundred books they had published in their private Toronto Sixty-Eight publishing house, books that could only be boldly smuggled into the country before 1989. It was Škvorecký who also let the free world know of the activities and persecution of various dissident groups in Czechoslovakia, including the Charter 77 and the Jazz Section. True and full information could suddenly be provided by the actors themselves. The Jazz Section, which had been publishing “for members only” in thousands of copies various documents and texts on jazz and rock music but also on western culture in general, had a chance to give an account on what was really their story and history. An anthology of translated modern American poetry (Child on Top of a Greenhouse) which had been in preparation for years by Josef Jařab and Jaroslav Kořán in the Jazz Section publishing program, and which was captured and destroyed by the police a year prior to the November 1989 events, could finally be printed and reach its readers in that revolutionary year. 6 Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka, as editors, decided to collect into one volume prefaces and afterwords accompanying translated works of American fiction over a few decades from more than a dozen authors and thus provide a sort of a substitute for a
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nonexistent and badly needed Czech or Slovak history of the American novel and short story (From Poe to Postmodernism, 1993). A group of scholars translated A History of American Literature: From Puritanism to Postmodernism by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury and brought its message even closer to the Czech readers, having included a long essay on the reception of American letters in the Czech Lands and having provided a bibliography of translations of American works written by authors mentioned in the pages of the book. 7 In the year 2000, a monumental tribute to generations of Czech translators of American literature from 1798 to 1997 appeared in print—a three-volume Bibliography of American Literature in Czech Translation, compiled by Marcel Arbeit and Eva Vacca; the collected data covered translations of “books, non-periodical publications, periodicals with up to twelve issues a year, samizdat and exile periodicals and franzines.” Besides manifesting the literary popularity of individual authors over the decades and suggesting literary vogues among the readers, the bibliography also provided valuable information on true authorships of translations that had to be signed by someone else willing to be a substitute for colleagues whose names could not appear officially on any publication. Among such “hidden translators” there could be excellent writers and scholars whose names were blacklisted by the regime and to whom translations gave chance to be productive and to make a living. 8 One project that deserves a nostalgic mention is the literary review Světová literatura which proved to be a link to the world outside the isolated country from the mid-fifties for the following decades up to the mid-nineties. Besides writers of other nationalities, modern and contemporary American authors did appear there before their books could be published (Josef Škvorecký was editor in the early stage of the journal). Whole anthologies of verse, of short stories or essays and informative as well as critical surveys were offered to anxious readers. The history of the changing periods of rigidity and political “thaws” in the country is reflected in the contents and the measure of attractiveness of the review (similarly in Slovakia in the Revue svetovej literatury). The mere fact, however, that the periodical survived even the occupation of Czechoslovakia of 1968 but could not find enough support (either from readers or sponsors) in the mid- nineties is a rather sad and telling piece of news; not even the courageous and self- sacrificing effort of Anna Kareninová as editor-in-chief could save the journal, and its extinction is an eloquent comment on the change of general atmosphere in the society, including a rather rapid change of the value system guiding the population. Anna Kareninová, herself a brilliant translator, moved into another uneasy project of translating the works of Ezra Pound, from ABC of Reading to the Cantos , and in professional terms is doing admirably well. At present a few older (Host) and newly founded journals (Aluze, Svět literatury) compete in filling in the missing mission of informing on and evaluating world literature, including the literary production of America. 9 So here is one of the paradoxes we face: Although the number of students preoccupied with English and American studies at present is undoubtedly many times bigger than it used to be before 1989 there is hardly a corresponding proportion to be found within the student body of individuals with deeper, academic, interests. And so the programs themselves strive to be accommodated rather to the more generally shared objectives of the studies, i.e., they try to comply with the requirements emphasizing clearly pragmatic aspects. Thus, for instance, the fashionable interdisciplinarity of American
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studies could be a desirable enrichment of scope but also a tendency to bypass depth of investigation into rather superficial surveys. One assessment of the current situation is that a thorough revision of the curricula is still a task unfinished—a revision that would, besides other objectives, also provide a possibility for a bifurcation of programs for students with more practical interests and those with more scholarly ones, and yet keep alive in both lines the cultivation of critical thinking. Not an easy goal to be achieved but worth the effort. 10 The membership of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies should and, possibly, even could be more numerous after we can deal with some of the educational and systemic problems of the field more convincingly and successfully. One task involves the very nature, and consequently the contents and orientation, of American studies in our two countries. After spontaneously emulating the development of American Studies in the United States (which was quite natural after we opened ourselves to the freer world again in the aftermath of November 1989) more of a national and European perspective in the study of America should be applied and employed. Such an approach shall prove to be not just more useful for us but also more interesting for the American side, for our American counterparts. This is how the U.S. co-founders of the EAAS, half a century ago in Salzburg, saw the role of European Americanists, and there is hardly a good reason to introduce a change in such a vision, especially when the original concept has never been fully embraced and elaborated on. 11 What indeed is happening in American studies in Czechia and Slovakia, where are the active, and therefore important, sites, what are the research projects involved in, what aims are being pursued, and with what results? 12 Since the early 1990s, Olomouc has claimed to be the home site and center of the CSAAS. The post-revolutionary Rector of Palacký University, Josef Jařab, became the first president of the association and the Department of English and American Studies continues to provide most of the elected officers, currently Marcel Arbeit, Michal Peprník and Roman Trušník (the vice-president´s position has so far been reserved for Slovak representatives, presently Alena Smiešková). Ten years ago, the idea of the Olomouc international colloquia was born—an opportunity for participants from all parts of Europe and from the United States (and even some other places) to involve in week-long discussions (in early September) on various topics which are usually formulated as a question or a dilemma. From the recent five colloquia, volumes of contributions have been prepared for print and published; the titles are self-revelatory —Spirituality and Religion in American Culture, (Mis)understanding Postmodernism, Fiction of Politics and Politics of Fiction, Popular Culture and Democracy, America: Home of the Brave. The most recent colloquium dealt with ” Cult Fiction, Cult Films and Happenings” and the one planned for September 2006 will be on “ New York—Cradle of America´s Cultural Plurality”. 13 A research grant in the latter nineties gave birth to the Center for Comparative Cultural Studies which has, together with the CSAAS, co-organized the annual colloquia but has also helped to shape the basic lines of research which, in most general terms, are concerned with the plurality and pluralism of America and American culture. A new research project for the immediate future will deal with the theme of “Pluralism of Culture and Democracy.” Within the general orientation and in addition to it, individual scholars at Olomouc pursue their own research activities: Josef Jařab´s fields are primarily African-American literature, American specificities in modernism, and
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modern American poetry, Marcel Arbeit is focused on literature of the American South (he is preparing an international conference on the topic in Olomouc for 2007, and has completed, with Jakub Guziur, an anthology : Narrators of the American South), Michal Peprník is involved in studying literary theories and in researching classical American literature (he has just published a book on The Topos of the Forest in American Literature in Czech), Jiří Flajšar´s interests concentrate on contemporary American poetry. The doyen of American studies, Jaroslav Peprník, has been responsible for an important shift from the traditional “Life and Institution” approach to documenting our understanding of America and evaluating the influence American reality has had on Czech life (America in Czech Literature, in Czech). 14 The doctoral program at Olomouc University has over the recent decade graduated more than a dozen PhDs who are active in the field of American studies at the universities of Brno, Ostrava and Pardubice in the Czech Republic, and in Trnava and Banska Bystrica in Slovakia. 15 At Ostrava University Stanislav Kolář continues in his study of American Jewish literature and its European roots (the title of his new book is Seven Responses to the Holocaust in American Fiction, 2004), at Masaryk University, Brno, Tomáš Pospíšil investigates the impact of American popular culture, above all in the development of film as art and industry (his recent publication in Czech covers images of African Americans in 20th-century American film production), Irena Přibylová writes on American music and produced an interesting dissertation on the bluegrass singer Bill Monroe. Initial attempts to find a niche and specific angle in the studies of America have been registered also in new universities at Pardubice, Hradec Králové (Bohuslav Mánek is an eminent expert in 19th -century American literature), Plzeň, where Štěpánka Magstadt develops her interest in ethnic minorities in the U.S. and the phenomenon of immigration. 16 At Charles University in Prague, the American Studies Institute, directed by Martin Procházka, can boast of a long and rich history. At present the group of scholars deals with the issues of multiculturalism in American culture and literature. Members of the team regularly publish results of their research—Justin Quinn on modern poetry, Hana Ulmanová on modern fiction. Another American Studies Department at Charles University is part of the Institute of International Studies—the head of the unit, Miloš Calda is a political scientist who has done fruitful work on the history of the American Left. The cooperation between Charles University and Georgetown University under the auspices of The Fund for American Studies in Washington gives participants of summer schools organized in Prague attractive academic and social opportunities, as do other exchange programs in Prague and other places. 17 The two most active sites of American studies in Slovakia are the universities of Prešov and Nitra, despite the fact that the Department of American Studies at Comenius University in Bratislava may be the largest one, and is definitely the one with the longest and richest history. Nina Vietorová (postmodern American literature, metafiction) and Štefan Baštín (anti-war novel) who best represent the Bratislava Americanists are still being unsuccessfully lured into a more direct participation within the framework of the CSAAS and EAAS. Jaroslav Kušnír from Prešov University continues to write on Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme and postmodernism in American fiction; recently he has been enlarging his scope of studies by taking in relations and links between sciences and literature. The team at Nitra University
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explores theory and popular culture (Alena Smiešková) and critically examines the potential of structuralist and poststructuralist theories in the interpretation of classical American literature (Anton Pokrivčák, author of Literature and Being, 1997, and American Imagination, 2005, both in Slovak language). Katarína Feťková from the University of Banska Bystrica represents a strong voice in feminist criticism (Motherhood and Sisterhood in Toni Morrison, dissertation in Slovak). 18 Last April, Charles University and Prague became the venue of the EAAS Biennial Conference and, besides being a good professional gathering, the event also became a celebration of American studies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia—which was confirmed by the presence and active participation of great numbers of researchers, teachers, and students not only from Prague but from the whole territory stretching from Prešov to Plzeň. It could also be perceived and appreciated as a tribute to the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies whose former but also first president, Josef Jařab, was completing his four successful years in the office of president of the EAAS. So the conference confirmed it was not just an individual but also a collective dream come true, an encouragement for good work in the years to come.
INDEX
Keywords : Fulbright, popular culture, interdisciplinarity, Poetry, multiculturalism, Postmodernism, Feminism, minorities, American literature, African-American literature, modernism, American South, music, political science, metafiction, immigration
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American Studies in Finland
Jopi Nyman
1 Since its establishment in 1996, the Finnish American Studies Association has sought to promote the field of American Studies in Finland by organizing conferences, events and by increasing networking amongst its scattered membership (ca. 35) working at various universities and other higher education institutions. The current President of the Association is Dr Jopi Nyman (University of Joensuu) and its Secretary is Dr Ari Helo (University of Helsinki).
2 While currently only the University of Helsinki has a Chair of American Studies and a full multidisciplinary degree programme in North American Studies (BA/MA/PhD) run by the University’s Renvall Institute of Area and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation has very recently donated a five-year Professorship in North American Studies to the University of Tampere to develop the field. Up to this point, it has been possible to study American Studies as an undergraduate minor at Tampere, but this donation makes possible MA-level teaching due to start 2006. Several other universities have offered an undergraduate minor but there exist no separate teaching posts for those programmes. 3 More traditionally, components of American Studies (history and literature) have been taught as parts of the curriculum at several English and History departments, and also by visiting Fulbright professors. The University of Helsinki has hosted a special Bicentennial Fulbright Professorship since 1976, a post that has attracted many leading scholars in the field. At the University of Joensuu, teaching in American Studies has been supported by incoming SOCRATES/ERASMUS teachers, who have contributed to the Department’s two-week Summer School in American Studies run annually in June since 2003. In postgraduate education, several departments contribute to the National Graduate School for the Study of the Americas directed by Professor Markku Henriksson at the University of Helsinki, a graduate programme that has five fixed- term fellowships funded by the Ministry of Education. 4 Major future events in American Studies in Finland include the 11th Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference organized by the North American Studies Programme at the University of Helsinki 16-19 May, 2006, and the Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies to be organized at the University of Tampere 24-26
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May 2007. The Association is planning to tighten collaboration with other neighbouring associations in the future. 5 The Association’s website can be reached at the following address:
6 http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/renvall/pam/fasa/
INDEX
Keywords: Fulbright, Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation
AUTHOR
JOPI NYMAN University of Joensuu
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American Studies in France. A critical review.
1 As this presentation aims at improving European exchanges and, hopefully, fostering greater collaboration, not only through better information but also through practical changes, it does not merely describe what is being done in France but also makes several critical statements on aspects of the situation of “American studies” that may be found wanting and unsatisfactory. These opinions remain personal, inspired by several years of study of the field and of direct involvement in various aspects of scholarly policy. They do not necessarily reflect a consensus in the profession but, being for the most part drawn from a report on the state and future of studies on the United States in France (http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/rapport.pdf) resulting from interviews with many researchers in the field, they may retain a modicum of overall relevance.
2 It is also hoped that the new interactive format of this publication will allow French colleagues to add their point of view, be it contradictory, and others to propose comparisons, ask questions and queries. 3 Many explanations and remarks applicable to the social sciences and humanities in France have been included. In that respect, although American studies have their own history they are of necessity linked to the state of the academic system in France. As this system is evolving under both European pressure and that of the internationalization of research in the humanities (where things have long remained heavily national) many of the traits portrayed below will mutate in a way yet impossible to foresee. But the basic conviction underpinning this presentation is that we, as European Americanists, have substantial messages to deliver and serious contributions to make because of the wealth of our research and the variety of our experiences. A general understanding, therefore, of the conditions of production seemed at least as important as descriptions of the actual work being done, since information concerning the latter can easily be found by all through specific contacts in conferences, via web sites and by reading existing publications.1 Context
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4 The study of the United States in France is ancient, even if one chooses to limit it to « modern » academic practice. The following lines, however, will not try to retrace its detailed history and genesis, but merely to focus on the specificities of its development over the past 40-odd years (roughly since the 1960s) and to give a sort of overall panorama of the present intellectual (or scholarly2), but also institutional, situation. Europe—and singularly France with its centralized and strongly national system—being at the dawn of a new age heralded by the Bologna process (first called 3-5-8 in France then commonly LMD—standing for Licence (BA), Master (MA), Doctorat(e)), the whole academic landscape is about to change, - in as yet unforeseen ways. My overall impression, however, is that the move will dramatically alter our national practices, as well, probably, as our university map in significant ways, that American Studies will thus be reconfigured as profoundly as the rest of academia. 5 Before the 1960s, the study of the United States was mainly conducted in some universities in Law schools, the School of Political Science in Paris (Science Po), history departments, and English departments; but there were few if any professors whose research or teaching was entirely devoted to the United States. The main impetus for the development of a broader and deeper study of American culture originated in English departments. The experience of the war for young academics who wrote their dissertations in the 1950s as well as the context of the criticism / admiration of the United States in the late 50s and early 60s created both a demand and an offer. The rising student population led to an increase in the teaching population. In English departments, the teaching of American literature was allowed to expand as curricular changes took place and teaching became more modular. But for the generation of such pioneers as Maurice Gonnaud, one of the former EAAS Presidents, it was an uphill struggle to gain some space against English literature. 6 At the same time, student—and, more generally, social—demand, led to the expansion of a new approach to “culture” which tried to define itself as the study of “civilization”. English departments had long proposed courses on the history of (English) ideas, but this always remained extremely close to literature. What was now sought, at least in courses, was the integration of readings of documents inspired by the social sciences (sociology, history, ethnology and political science) and that of the then-flourishing structural/semiological analyses (in particular in the realm of the media and images). But until the mid-seventies dissertation topics still remained rather traditional and American studies instructors often had to write on a British topic, or British writer, in order to have a chance of acquiring a position. 7 Americanists were not alone in their attempt at displacing boundaries, as the same demand was taking place within (French) British studies. Monica Charlot, an English academic married to a French politologist, pioneered the expansion of the social sciences in the field of English studies in English departments. Some joint projects were even conducted, and many instructors taught both American and English topics, at least in their junior years. The general trend, however, was rather to keep fields separate, as the problem of American studies was to build a double legitimacy : geographic, in both the fields of literature and “ society”, and specifically intellectual for those engaged in « civilization » studies. The process was hardly eased by the relative absence of research on the United States in French social sciences3 (whereas the Spanish-speaking world for instance was very well represented) and by the strict
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institutional organization in national academic « sections » which prevented any true interdisciplinary work, except very locally and often in a limited way. 8 A word of explanation on the institutional peculiarities of French universities may here be necessary to shed extra-light on the stage. Much indeed can be explained by structural factors, shared by other academic fields. University departments are organized according to disciplines (or “sections”) defined by the ministry of education as leading to a particular diploma (BA, MA, Ph.D). Academics depend for their career (hiring and promotion) on the evaluation by local and national committees of peers active in their “section”. While many sections cover traditional “disciplines” in the scholarly sense of the term (history, sociology, philosophy, etc.), modern languages each belong to a specific section (German, English, Spanish, etc.) making them not disciplinary sections but area sections.4 So that a professor of American literature will not « belong » to a broad literature section but to an English-speaking world studies section comprising specialists of literature, linguistics and the social sciences.5 The negative side is obviously the lack of recognition of scholars by their discipline. 9 But there is also a positive side. Part of it is actual, the other still virtual. On the actual side lies the fact that the overwhelming majority of American studies specialists in France were trained through a broad curriculum including literature of the English- speaking world, “ 10 « civilization »and language, and that all have a strong competence in the English language.6 This is reinforced by the existence of national civil service competitive examinations (the CAPES and the Agrégation). The Agrégation has long functioned as a means to certify a general competence in English that is highly appreciated by search committees, so much so that the “title” is (almost) an unwritten pre-requisite to land an assistant/associate position. The virtual side is that the English-speaking world section is a potential laboratory for true interdisciplinary research in the field of “culture”, the field being broad and the staff large. 11 The origin and development of American studies in France can be seen as a strange image of American “mythology”. Born of a struggle to create a space for itself (and its personnel) as well as to develop another way of looking at society, American studies has emerged from its marginality as a particularly dynamic field. From the 1970s onward, it has attracted younger scholars looking for greater freedom in their research. Literary criticism has been a particularly active field, both concerning the 19th century and (very) contemporary American literature. The case of Marc Chénetier is probably most exemplary of this expansion not only in the academic field but also towards the general public, many translations having opened the world of American contemporary writing to an ever-wider audience. He and other scholars have found in a fruitful dialogue with American colleagues and writers an original path, one that, while using the tools of modern criticism, attempts to lead beyond the various literary theories hatched in the 60s and 70s and ever since prevalent, to dust up and renovate critical attitudes. 12 In the study of society, however, a greater complexity has prevailed. Most French Americanists were not trained as social scientists and tried to develop a transversal alternative to the disciplines. Paradoxically, they took a long time establishing a dialogue with American theory (the American version of cultural studies in particular) that might have offered solutions. Many reasons can explain this distance vis-à-vis the research conducted in the United States. One is that a large segment of French interest
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in the United States was originally rooted in a criticism of the policies of the United States and an ideological—often left-wing—agenda, which, so to speak, privileged the study of the underprivileged, the margins rather than the mainstream. Second is the presence of powerful French theories and models. Third is probably a French intellectual tradition that places the rhetoric of argumentation and theoretical coherence above the debate between methods (historiography and epistemology are still rather rare centers of interest in France). Last but not least, are the lack of documentary resources and the dire state of sources and documentation on the United States in French libraries, which until very recently made access to scholarly articles in journals difficult prior to the doctorate and a research trip to the United States. 13 One of the questions that agitate French Americanists today is the redefinition of their “area”. The effect of post-colonial theory, as well as original questions raised by economists, historians, geographers and cultural studies that have tried to redefine an exceptionalist model centered exclusively on the US, has led many to broach the Transatlantic, Caribbean, Pacific space or that of the Western Hemisphere.7 Greater attention thus seems paid to debates in the United States and elsewhere in American studies. But more prosaically such moves have also been fostered by incentives from the ministry (the source of all research funds) to consolidate smaller research units under more federative themes, often for bureaucratic reasons; as well as by the definition of a national project to create an “Institute of the Americas” located in Paris and federating research groups working on South and North America.8 The policy of the ministry has been superciliously perceived by Americanists as it appeared to dilute and emasculate a specificity that they had tried to define and build on for 40-odd years without really improving training and research. It forced many groups rhetorically to alter and warp their projects simply to stay on the map. The most desirable perspective would be, it seems, a real comprehensive plan for American studies, organizing projects regionally by allowing a better collaboration between universities on specific themes. The structures of production (research in France) 14 In France, most research in the humanities and social sciences is funded directly by the Ministry of Education through 4-year contracts with the Universities, or with the CNRS (http://www.cnrs.fr/). American studies are virtually non-existent in the CNRS, which funds only one research group : the CENA at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/). The funding unit is the “research group”, recognized and certified on the basis of a particular project. There is also funding—albeit too limited —for outstanding researchers elected for 4 years to a prestigious chair (Institut Universitaire de France http://www.cpu.fr/Iuf/Default.asp). Those elected remain within their university but have a lighter teaching load and benefit from funds specifically awarded to conduct their research and aggregate colleagues and research students around their project. There are two IUF professors in American studies, one is Marc Chénetier (contemporary American literature) (http:// www.ufr-anglais.univ-paris7.fr/LISTE/c/Chenetier/Default.htm), the other Bernard Cotteret (18th century British and American history of ideas) (http://www.uvsq.fr/).
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15 At the national level, the French association for American studies (AFEA) (http:// etudes.americaines.free.fr/) has a professional role (in defending the profession) and a scholarly one that consists in : • organizing one conference a year with lectures and workshops, and a special one-day forum for doctoral students (“doctoriales”) who can thus present their work-in-the-making to senior researchers and peers for criticism, help and discussion; • publishing two scholarly journals, the RFEA (http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/rfea.html) and TransAtlantica (http://www.transatlantica.org/); • circulating information through a website and mailing list; • awarding scholarships to doctoral students and associates preparing for habilitation (the diploma required to get a full professorship) (http://www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/ saesafea.html).
16 A smaller national association, the Société d’études nord-américaines (SENA)—not to be mistaken with the CENA—is devoted to the social sciences. It organizes panels and brief conferences, and it awards a yearly prize for the best dissertation and MA thesis in American studies. Canadian studies are represented by the AFEC (http:// www.afec33.asso.fr/).
17 American studies thus remain essentially centered on English departments and on the few scholars working in history departments (Paris 1, with the only chair of North American history (http://ameriquedunord.univ-paris1.fr/v3/presentation/ presentation01.htm), Paris 8…), in the only CNRS laboratory devoted to the study of the United States (CENA at EHESS http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/) and at Science Po (http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/cerifr/cherlist/lacorne.htm). Most scholars of the United States coming from the other disciplines remain outside this network and little research if any is conducted in collaboration between them and the « core » of American studies. The reasons are numerous, one being that many only devote a limited part of their time or career to the United States or include the United States in broader comparative studies, another that the barrier of the disciplines is so strong that researchers working from within the « English section » often find it difficult to be recognized by traditional disciplines. This is undoubtedly a cause for weakness in the field. Other reasons are structural (the weight of teaching), financial (insufficient funding to conduct serious research in situ and be present at international conferences), intellectual (the paradigms issues discussed above) and political (the language of publications—French—greatly hampers international communication). But one thinks also of the insufficiency of European cooperation and of real exchange as well as the lack of recognition in the United States. Themes and objects 18 The reader familiar with American Studies in France may find the following inventory somewhat simplistic. Its purpose, however, is to provide a sense of the general architecture by outlining the salient features of the edifice. Specific themes are changing, sometimes rapidly, teams can appear and disappear because of new contracts or of the hiring or departure of a colleague. Since misunderstandings may result from an inventory that can never be fully comprehensive, occasional names and references should be taken for what they intend to be : examples for the non-French reader to find his way around, and certainly by no means a Prize list...9 Literature and literary theory
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19 The study of American literature is one of the strong points of American Studies in France. Narratology and psychoanalysis remain widely used approaches, often in linkage with epistemology and —mostly French—philosophy. Although “French Theory” is an American concept, and while Derrida and Deleuze are by all means major references, the search for and use of novel critical tools remain unabated. 20 Literary theory and cognition is the project conducted by Paris 8 ( http:// recherche.univ-paris8.fr/red_fich_equ.php?OrgaNum=16) 21 19th century literature is the object of study of the “Atelier dix-neuvième” (http:// www.univ-paris7.fr/recherche/pagetheme2.php?num=10301&numth=828) (Université Paris 7). The approach mixes literature and history of ideas. 22 Contemporary literature. Many scholars are engaged in the study of the most contemporary forms of literature, producing a respectable number of dissertations. They question new fictions and post-modernist writing, having recourse to a variety of methods, with a rather frequent philosophical accent. ODELA (Observatoire de literature américaine - http://www.univ-paris7.fr/recherche/pagetheme2.php? num=10301&numth=829), (Université Paris 7), led by Marc Chénetier, is one of the most active collaborative efforts in that direction, but other groups are active as well, in most universities. French literary Americanists have played a large role in the building of a serious public interest in American literature. They translated authors and promoted them through various publishers’ series, a tradition largely inaugurated by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the translator of Faulkner and Dos Passos in the 1940s and 1950s. A translation prize, founded by Michel Gresset bears Coindreau’s name and aims at diversifying the image of contemporary American literature that prevails in the country. 23 Faulknerian studies have given French American studies an indisputably international status (André Bleikasten, Michel Gresset, François Pitavy…). Their scope has now widely extended into « Southern studies » (they are part of the Southern Studies Forum.) One of the centers is the Fondation Faulkner (http://www.uhb.fr/faulkner/wf/about.htm) located at Université Rennes 2, under the management of Nicole Moulinoux. Developing interdisciplinary approaches, a small but active center is “Suds d’Amérique”, Université de Versailles-St.-Quentin (http://www.sudam.uvsq.fr/). It has opened the field of Southern studies to other periods and issues, for instance to the question of “frontiers”. 24 The literature (and culture) of minorities is another important field of investigation where literary studies have long integrated ethnological and sociological dimensions, without necessarily having veered towards a narrowly American version of cultural studies. Examples range from chicanos (Bordeaux 3 http://www.u-bordeaux3.fr/Rech/ page19.html), to Native Americans and the cultural productions of migrant societies and people (Paris 7 http://www.univ-paris7.fr/recherche/pagetheme2.php? num=10301&numth=827). 25 Afro-American studies hold a special place. Initiated in the 1960s by Michel and Geneviève Fabre, they are now organized nationally as the Cercle Inter-universitaire d’Etudes Afro-Américaines (with specialists across the country, the major centers, however, being Aix-Marseille 1, Bordeaux 3, Paris 7, Tours…). It is affiliated with a European network, the Collegium for African American Research).
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26 The work being done in the field of poetry is essentially concerned with 20 th century verse, with the expectable exception of Whitman and Dickinson. A major Whitman Conference was thus organized in July 2005 at Paris 7 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass. Philosophy 27 Some philosophy research groups study pragmatism (“Groupe d’études sur le pragmatisme et la philosophie américaine”, http://pragmatisme.free.fr/ ) (Paris 1), the philosophy of sciences (http://www-ihpst.univ-paris1.fr/rub.php? lng=fr&cat=_insti&rub=r01 and, more generally, American philosophy Epistemology is the special field of reserach at the Univbersity of Amiens (http://www.picardie.fr/) This discipline has become the locus of much interesting interdisciplinary work (19th century, Atelier XIXeme, the cinema, literature, etc.) Film studies 28 France has a long-standing tradition in film studies. Two major research centers are devoted to the study of American cinema (CICLAHO, Paris 10 http://anglais.u- paris10.fr/article.php3?id_article=67 ; and UMR Intermédia, Paris 3 http://www.univ- paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/intermedia/) as well as a professional association : SERCIA- http://sercia.u-bordeaux3.fr/)10. Many academics however, inside and outside American studies, write occasional articles on the cinema even though this may not be their main activity. The first reason for this situation has to do with the importance of American cinematography in the world, the second being that many look at the cinema essentially from the point of view of narrative and aesthetics (and less from that of an institution or system of production).11 Also many students choose to write their first research theses (MA and sometimes even MPhil) on movies and demand for tutoring in the field is great.12 Movie scholars in American studies work closely with specialists of other cinematographies. Some of them are also movie critics in major national publications (Michel Ciment, writing for Positif, now retired from Paris 7 is one of the most famous examples). Among the dominant topics of interest are the history of the cinema, authors, genres and style, Hollywood, the relationship between literature and the cinema, and of course the place of the movies in the history of representations.13 Popular culture 29 Despite its presence in American universities, popular culture (beside movies and media studies) as an academic field is virtually non-existent in France, except through the work of a few talented, but still isolated researchers (Jean-Paul Gabilliet in Bordeaux, John Dean in Versailles-St-Quentin, Eric Gonzalez in Rennes…) dealing with popular music and cartoons. Popular literature and material culture are sparsely studied. The conservatism of French academia is not the only cause. The « English studies section » (as defined above) is probably in this respect rather progressive and universities try to take into account a real student demand in those fields; but senior researchers able to supervise dissertations are still too rare and often have to be found outside the “section”; furthermore, funds to undertake essential field trips and collect documents are lacking (history, ethnology and sociology have identical problems). History 30 History is probably the best developed social science in the field of American studies. It grew on the basis of an older generation of historians in the 1960s and 1970s. It is beginning to be recognized in the United States; it has strong connections with the Organization of American Historians, and several prizes have been granted to French
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articles and books. One series is specifically devoted to publishing books on American history (Belin publishers). 31 History is present in the work of many centers, but the main research centers are EHESS (CENA http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/), Paris 1 (http:// ameriquedunord.univ-paris1.fr/v3/presentation/presentation01.htm), Paris 3- Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris 7-Denis Diderot. Each has one or several specialties. Thus one group at Paris 7 specializes in the early Republic (http://www.univ-paris7.fr/ recherche/pagetheme2.php?num=10301&numth=811) and economic and social history, as well as CENA ; the history of international relations (one of the most ancient fields of American history in France) is researched at Paris 3, Paris 1 and Science Po; historiography is still a relatively recent field in France (EHESS (http://www.ehess.fr/ centres/cena/recherche/axe1.html), Paris 7), but has seen the publication of two reference works14 and an ongoing research program on the history of American studies in France and in Europe; one may also mention the history of science and techniques (http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/recherche/axe4.html), and cultural history, a rapidly expanding, very interdisciplinary field. 32 In many other social sciences listed below research on the United States is conducted by competent individuals but rarely by structured groups able to support costly long- term projects. Their contribution is thus yet much below what is demanded by “society” and expected by students. Sociology 33 Sociology is present in many aspects of teaching, but hardly in research, due again to lack of funding. The same goes for ethnology, whose status is practically that of a terra incognita, due exception being made for Native Americans (Philippe Jacquin, Marie Roué (CNRS) et Michelle Therrien (linguistics, INALCO), and for Louisiana with Sara Le Menestrel (CENA http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/recherche/axe3.html). Some dissertations are in progress on such topics as music and religion considered from an anthropological perspective. Religion, a field located at the border of sociology, anthropology and the history of ideas, is represented by a few colleagues working in centers with broader interests (Groupe de sociologie de la religion et de la laïcité at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes http://gsrl.iresco.fr/), Centre Interdisciplinaire des Faits Religieux de l’EHESS (http://www.ehess.fr/centres/ceifr/pages/ presentation.html), Urban studies is a strongly interdisciplinary field, where a few individuals conduct research in close contact with United States researchers (http:// www.paris4.sorbonne.fr/fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=1389,). Such are Sophie Body- Gendrot and others. The same holds true of other sectors. Economics 34 Only one center specifically works on the US, the CERVEPAS (Paris 3 http://www.univ- paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/cervepas/), with a very broad approach from macro- to micro-economics and political economy. Its particular focus is on the effects and consequences of NAFTA. Many centers in economics departments, however, in think tanks and national institutions, such as INSEE, conduct important research on the United States economy (the CEPREMAP has a strong American program [http:// www.cepremap.ens.fr/~levy/usa.htm]) but contacts between American studies specialists and economists are still regrettably few and far between. Political science
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35 Most of the work is done at Science Po Paris (CERI, Denis Lacorne), Paris 2 (http:// www.u-paris2.fr/html/recherche/fiches_individuelles/fiche_ens.php?choix=217) with Jennifer Merchant and Science Po-Lyon (Vincent Michelot). « Current affairs » are but exceptionally represented by political science specialists, often covered by non- academics operating within a few think tanks or parties, or simply being utilized as “experts” by the press. Law 36 American law, often in a comparative perspective, has long been a subject of study (with dissertations on the topic throughout the 20th century). But despite the internationalization of the practice of law, at least in some sectors, little is yet developed. The Centre de droit américain (file:///Paris 2 http///www.u-paris2.fr/cda/) is active, and one should mention the work of Professor Gwenaelle Calves (Université de Cergy-Pontoise). Media studies 37 Outside the cinema (often studied as art form rather than as media), few researchers work in media studies, and they always do so in interdisciplinary structures. The centers are either part of a university (Metz or Institut français de presse (http:// www.u-paris2.fr/ifp/ in Paris 2)) or are public institutions such as INA ( http:// www.ina.fr/recherche/index.fr.html). Overview 38 As suggested in the above inventory, the major difficulty in American studies, except for literature, still lies in insufficient contact between social sciences and area studies. Intra-European and US-Europe exchanges through a learned society such as EAAS therefore appear of paramount importance. There are many reasons for hope. Our doctoral students are better trained through studies abroad programs (in the US and in Europe) and the modularity introduced by the Bologna process. Transdisciplinary research is now blooming, structuring a distinctive (European) voice in American studies which may well appear as decisive for the future. 39 The following directions for development would thus appear to be promising:
40 -The relationships between literature, philosophy and the history of ideas (often to be understood as cultural history) in the 19th century, Transatlantic exchanges, the representations of minorities, the question of identity. 41 -Intermédia (http://www.univ-paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/intermedia/), CICADA (Pau), 42 -The relationships between the arts (http://www.univ-paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/ vortex/). 43 -The study of images as a practice (technology, technique, usages et uses) and their emergence as a major cultural mode in the United States since the 19th century 44 On such possibilities and propositions, further bases for increased European exchanges could surely be found.
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NOTES
1. This article draws heavily from the following research papers and reports (in French): - François Weil. « Les études américaines en France : un essai d’analyse ». Bulletin du CENA-EHESS 5 (février 1999) : 95-100. Online at http:// etudes.americaines.free.fr/amstudiestoulouse.html.; - Papers on American studies given at the Toulouse Conference of the AFEA (http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/ amstudiestoulouse.html); - Jean Kempf, Rapport sur les études nord-américaines en France, 2002 (http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/rapport.pdf); - Société des anglicistes de l’enseignement supérieur. Serge Ricard. Rapport sur la recherche en civilisation des Etats-Unis (1996-1999), Daniel Royot. Rapport sur la recherche en littérature américaine (1996-1999), Dominique Sipière. Rapport sur la recherche en cinéma. (http://www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/rech2001.htm#rapports); - “Répertoire des thèses soutenues en histoire/civilisation américaine de 1970 à 2005” (http://www.univ- paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/thesesus.doc), as well as on the ongoing research project and seminar conducted at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales on the history of American Studies in France (http://www.ehess.fr/centres/cena/ recherche/axe1.html). I have not systematically attributed information to specific pages. I can only advise readers of French who want to know more to read them. 2. What the French call “scientifique» as opposed to pedagogical. 3. See Weil, 95 ff. 4. For national certification board see : http://www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/cnu97.rtf. For agrégation see : http://www.education.gouv.fr/bo/1999/17/perso.htm/ 5. Comparative literature departements exist in France, but they are relatively minor ones in size and importance 6. Conversely, the interest of social scientists for the American field—as well as for many foreign fields—is partly due to a certain lack of proficiency in foreign languages. 7. Obviously, one of the first questions in that respect is the type of link that should be developed with Canadian studies. As, except for a few colleagues who define themselves as both Americanists and Canadianists, the two fields have remained relatively separate so far. 8. This sort of center for advanced study has been gestating since 2002, under various administrative forms and has encountered some opposition on the part of the Americanist community. It is yet to be concretized by buildings, equipment and staff. 9. For a list of University departments and their webs sites see http:// etudes.americaines.free.fr/departements.html. See also http://www.univ-pau.fr/saes/ pb/equipes/equipes.html. The names of groups, however, can be misleading or opaque, since they often federate several research themes, as mentioned above. 10. On this matter, cf Dominique Sipière’s report to SAES (http://www.univ-pau.fr/ saes/pb/rech2001.htm). 11. In France many of the pioneers in the field of film studies were professors of French litterature. They brought to the study of movies the theoretical corpus of structuralist narratology and psychoanalysis already at work in the study of literature. 12. The interest in the study of the cinema is 1) a direct image of the personal culture of the students; 2) an indirect one of the paucity of access to primary resources in other fields and of research funds which make the study of movies one of the few fields, with
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literature, where early/junior research can be conducted without leaving one’s institution. 13. This last point is a source of many misunderstandings, especially among younger scholars, as many take American movies as a window on American society, a position that has come under considerable criticism in literature. 14. Jean Heffer and François Weil, dir., Chantiers d’histoire américaine. Paris : Belin, 1994. Claude Fohlen, Jean Heffer, François Weil, Canada et Etats-Unis depuis 1770. Paris : PUF, Nouvelle Clio, 1997.
INDEX
Keywords: Literature, philosophy, film, popular culture, history, sociology, law, economics, media
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Theorizing American Studies : German Interventions into an Ongoing Debate
1 In October 1988 the (Village) Voice Literary Supplement published a four-page comic strip, drawn by S.B. Whitehead in 1986 and entitled “Great Moments in Lit-Crit” (fig. 1). This comic strip offered a history of the issues that literary critics—or rather philosophers and writers concerned with the aesthetic forms and cultural functions of literature and the arts—have busied themselves since the stone ages. (“Stone age criticism is practical,” we are informed with a side kick to I.A. Richards.) Given its scope such history cannot be but reductive, even if, for me, the comic has proven to be extremely useful for teaching theory. With a twinkle in the eye its narrative traces perspectives on the relation of language and the world from the Bible—“[i]n the beginning was the word,” we may read in the first image, “without the footnote”—to a certain moment in the 1980s, a moment the Voice Literary Supplement made ample fun of. The comic strip’s final image, framed by (de-)construction workers employing their air hammers, visualizes the playful plurality of theoretical positions evolving in literary and cultural studies at the time as a “Lit-O-Rama,” a turbulent fair that offers an array of attractions, including a “bearded lady” displayed behind bars by Michel Foucault; a shooting range where Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Mary Helen Washington, and Henry Louis Gates fire away at the established literary canon; the “wheel of history” that Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson keep turning; the “tunnel d’amour” from which, all in one vehicle, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig evolve; and a performance of the “Yale brothers” who advertise
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“four man and a theory,” featuring Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and of course : deconstruction.
Figure 1 : S. B. Whitehead, “Great Moments in Lit-Crit,” 1986.
2 I employ this obviously polemic piece here not only because its irony reminds us of how urgent a matter theory—as well as the resistance to it—became for some time, both in American and German literary and cultural studies. Meanwhile, we may perhaps agree that we all do theory all the time, even, or most particularly, if we keep insisting we do not. I also make note of this particular intervention into an ongoing debate because many of the above mentioned attractions have significantly affected the field of American Studies, evolving a centrifugal multitude of critical perspectives, thus making the 1980s a major turning point in the process of theorizing American Studies. Or is it, I kept wondering as I worked on this essay, a ‘returning point,’ at least to a certain degree? Let me add that the preliminary answers I offer may be equally reductive, yet are not meant to be a comic strip (though I certainly wish I could draw). 1. Zooming In 3 I first envisioned this essay as a sketch of the directions the debates about methods and theoretical perspectives have taken within the field of American Studies in Germany during the last four decades. Needless to say, even a sketch of this development could easily develop into a three-volume book project. After all, if we talk about theories of American Studies in Germany we need to take into account that from the 1950s to the early 1990s German American Studies evolved in two different versions. Considering these two versions the question is not merely whether Amerikanistik as practiced in the GDR actually contributed to or impacted on the theoretical debates around American Studies.2 Acknowledging that German American Studies/ Amerikanistik meant two different things for most part of its history also makes obvious how ideologically loaded a field of inquiry American Studies in Germany has been. However, I will not take a
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comparative view, which requires much more insight than I can offer. Nor can I add another revision of the field to those that have been published throughout its history.3 In fact, the very desire to revise and historicize is a crucial aspect of theorizing American Studies in Germany.4 Instead I have come to consider this the preliminaries for a book that may or may not be written. I will therefore suggest a possible historical trajectory, highlighting crucial moments and shifts in the debate in addition to identifying some major participants and singular contributions (while omitting just as many or more).5 First and foremost, however, I intend to raise questions and point to directions where the enterprise of theorizing German American Studies could move. To my mind, such a project, on the one hand, has to relate a historical narrative, a necessarily reductive story about the course of an ongoing discussion, while, on the other, it has to conceptualize a nationally and culturally specific contribution to a debate that is as much concerned with conceptions of culture, nation, and ideology as with the self-conception of a field that—in the context of German academia—keeps insisting on its exceptionality and exemplary nature. These are the balls that I am juggling, and, needless to say, narrative juggles easier than national contribution. While central terms of the debate—such as the concept of interdisciplinarity—were imported from discussions in the United States, they have been recontextualized, oftentimes gaining in significance, in German academic contexts. At the same time throughout its history, German American Studies has critically questioned the parameters from which American Studies in the United States has evolved—and this goes as much for the debates on methods of American Studies in the 1970s as for the current insistence on European or international perspectives within American Studies.6 As a consequence, the methods and theories that German scholars of American Studies have privileged and employed at different moments in the history of the discipline bespeak more than the discipline’s self-conception. They also mark moments in the history of the sciences and dimensions of transatlantic, intercultural, and intracultural relations. 4 Before developing my argument, I would like to acknowledge the particular limitation of my view. First of all, I write this article as a scholar and teacher of North American literature and culture, not as a linguist, historian, or political scientist. Speaking for merely a part of the canon of disciplines engaged in American Studies makes a whole lot of difference to the narrative I relate. I also write this essay as someone who entered the university at a time when both ‘old historicist’ and structuralist models of reading cultural texts dominated the debates, even though the discussions about new methods of American Studies were in full swing; and I did so as someone who was way too ignorant to even notice. The time was the year Martin Christadler and Günter Lenz edited the special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies entitled Amerikastudien— Theorie, Geschichte, interpretatorische Praxis (fig. 2). Meaning to continue the debates begun in the Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1973, this volume made evident that in 1977 the field of American Studies was in the process of a fundamental transition, due to both an extended notion of textuality and a new proximity to the social sciences. The collection included, under the heading of theory, essays on women’s studies as educational strategy and new focus of American Studies (Hanna Beate Schöpp- Schilling), on new theories of American Studies (Günter Lenz), and on concepts of tradition in GDR Amerikanistik (Michael Höhnisch), in addition to explorations of “non- literary media” (e.g. Thomas Elsaesser and Winfried Fluck), and “socio-historical interpretations of literary texts” (e.g. Heinz Ickstadt). Almost thirty years after its
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publication it is worthwhile recalling the agenda set by the editors. In the preface, Christadler and Lenz define American Studies as a movement of scholars of literature and the humanities who are attempting to break out of the traditional methodological and institutional boundaries of departments of English philology and history and establish the study of “America” as interdisciplinary cultural studies (“interdisziplinäre Kulturwissenschaft”) (“Vorwort” 5). At the time, this enterprise called for modest cooperation between diverse disciplines as much as it envisioned a potentially integrating synthesis of different academic fields, crystallized by a common object of studies : American national culture. In any case, though, the project was meant to be exemplary : With their plea for a “true synthesis,” which not only “integrates the disciplines” (Christadler and Lenz, “Vorwort” 5), but also aimed at overcoming the limitations of individual fields of inquiry (Kühnel 129), German American Studies scholars claimed to address a challenge whose character was considered a general problem in the history of the sciences and its theories. How to actually do interdisciplinary work, though, was a question that had yet to be solved : Divided into three parts, the essay collection still split theory and practice, literature and other cultural practices into separate spheres. Or, as Heide Ziegler aptly put it in 1984, in the 1970s American Studies became “the starting point for a methodological discussion that influenced the selection of specific cultural texts—not vice versa” (58). More specifically, while the inclusion of work on “non-literary media” and popular culture foregrounds the inclusiveness of American Studies and its conception of national cultures, the structural separation of this work from the reflections on “Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte” foreshadows a tendency, within theories of American Studies, to marginalize media studies and explorations of popular culture—a tendency that is currently being readdressed. 5 In retrospect, I see the schism in my own early academic interest, divided as it was between (women’s) poetry and (poststructuralist) theory, in part as an effect of the very transformative moment crystallized by Christadler and Lenz’s collection and perhaps best circumscribed by Bloch’s concept of Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen, of a synchronicity of the non-synchronic (whose new prominence7 is itself an effect of the paradigm shift within American Studies it allows to conceptualize). This was a moment when parameters of difference such as gender, race, and (to a much lesser degree) class had begun to evolve a line of critical work which positioned subjects previously relegated to the periphery of culture—subjects, that is, in the sense of both concerns/ issues and persons—right center stage, reclaiming or rather producing previously negated histories and cultural identities, while at the same time poststructuralist theories, insisting on différance, gained more and more precedence. Even if, in the context of German American Studies, the Derridean term needs to be understood as a trope for a variety of theoretical positions of which readers’ response theory is as significant as Lacanian psychoanalysis, the question of how continental poststructuralist thought impacted on the practice of American Studies in Germany felt most urgent for many of us (who were then ‘younger’ scholars of the field).8 And impact it did, in multiple ways. In fact, as I will argue, with the emergence and growing dominance of parameters and politics of difference, on the one hand, and poststructuralist thought and notions of différance, on the other, the early debate on methods of American Studies, neatly tied as it was to the agenda of interdisciplinarity, transformed into discussions of theories of American literature, culture, history etc., dispensing with the ‘problem’ of interdisciplinarity on the way. Meanwhile, though,
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interdisciplinarity has returned with a vengeance. As theories of American Studies in Germany currently tend to refocus on literary studies and questions of aesthetics, interdisciplinarity has become the privileged approach for urgent—scientific as well as cultural—matters, an approach, though, mostly employed in areas other than American Studies. 6 Any revision of the processes of theorizing American Studies, therefore, has to trace the particular path taken when moving from a debate of methods of American Studies to an interrogation of theories of American literature, culture, and history, a move which itself entailed a revision of the plea for an interdisciplinary method. To reconsider these particular developments, interchanges, and transformations seems especially significant now that German American Studies faces a new shift within the field which seems to ‘rediminish’ its transdisciplinary potential to the practice of literary studies. While this shift in focus was an inevitable consequence of moving the debate from the (unsuccessful) search for one particular method of American Studies to interrogations of multiple theories of American literature and culture, it also underscores the fact that not only have American Studies always kept literary studies center stage. Theories of American Studies from the myth and symbol school to the New American Studies and (neo-)pragmatist approaches have capitalized on literary texts, thereby relegating to the periphery those media and technologies which, during the last fifty years, have changed cultural production and the social organization of culture dramatically.9 2. Clearing the Field 7 Any work that theorizes American Studies will have to rest on the assumption that there is a field that goes by the name ‘American Studies,’ a field delineated by more or less clear-cut boundaries. This, of course, is where problems begin. Or to put it another way : This is what theorizing American Studies is all about. “Theories are both models of explanation and attempts at legitimation,” Winfried Fluck writes in the opening paragraph of his essay Theorien amerikanischer Literatur (1987), “attempts at ordering or positioning cultural material in a hierarchy which usually become necessary when the status and significance of a particular phenomenon has become indiscernible and contested” (1).10 Accordingly, one of the main functions of the early debates about methods of American Studies was to establish and position as well as to protect the field—a field which remains an endangered species within an academic atmosphere of decreasing resources for the humanities and social sciences. In retrospect, however, both the amplitude and extent of these debates—and we may today indeed wonder about the sheer length of some of the central essays published11—foreground the fact that the methodological debates also crystallized and channelled much more comprehensive political and scientific debates. 8 Thus we need to remember that theorizing American Studies in Germany has always been a highly political—or politicized—matter. More specifically, the political ambivalence that the rise of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into American cultural identity was inscribed within the United States was retained, though recontextualized, in the framework of post-War German academia. Institutionalized during the 1940s and 1950s, at a time that is, when the United States rose to super power status and processes of nation formation were deeply informed by the Cold War and by attempts at cultural conformity and consensus, American Studies had emerged in the United States, as Leo Marx recalled in 2002, as a left-leaning
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critique during the time of Depression and New Deal.12 Accordingly, early discussions about the potential and limits of interdisciplinarity addressed concerns which were fundamental to the agenda of Marxist (literary) criticism, such as the question of how literature and society interdepend (see O. Hansen 131). In turn, American Studies in Germany was both perceived as an emancipatory mode of inquiry and subjected to a thorough critique, which was as much an interrogation of critical theory as it was a transatlantic dialogue.13 In its early stages doing American Studies and debating how to do it best clearly registered as a political practice and as part of the process of reconstructing German cultural and academic identity after the collapse of national socialism. This may explain, at least in part, why debates on the applicability of an American Studies agenda in Germany raised theoretical issues first as institutional questions—questions such as whether cultures should be studied as national or subnational phenomena (see Galinsky)—and why, generally speaking, methods of American Studies were discussed with a greater vehemence in Germany than within the American Studies movement in the United States. Whether explicitly or implicitly, theorizing American Studies has been one way to address as well as to drive the transcultural process known as ‘Americanization,’ a process that impacts on theory just as well.14 Thus theorizing American Studies in Germany meant negotiating complex cultural ambivalences : It acknowledged American culture—the culture of Germany’s significant other in post-World-War-II times—as Kultur, voiced a critique of the American way, and addressed, in a highly mediated manner, the significant other situated beyond the ‘iron curtain’ running through German culture (an other that intensely interrogated its own other through the practice of GDR Amerikanistik.) 9 At the same time capitalizing on the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences, in general, and between literature and society or culture, in particular, the early debates on methods of American Studies touch upon a whole range of matters that fall under the rubrics of the theory and history of sciences (Wissenschaftstheorie and Wissenschaftsgeschichte).15 Introducing their volume on American Studies in Germany : European Contexts and Intercultural Relations (1995), Günter Lenz and Klaus Milich put it this way : “The failure to develop a method that could have grounded American Studies as a ‘discipline’ must be conceived of in the broader context of the humanities and social sciences as part of the general crisis of modernity” (Introduction 9). Any exploration of what it has meant to theorize American Studies in Germany, therefore, needs to resituate American Studies in the context of C.P. Snow’s (Cold War) “two cultures” argument and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) 16 while also making note of a continuous crisis discourse that has punctuated the practice of theorizing American Studies. What was the particular function of American Studies at this moment in the history of the sciences? And how long can a crisis discourse sustain a discipline that, as Ickstadt puts it, continues to conceive of itself “as still and always in the process of self-discovery and self-becoming” (“American Studies” 545)? 10 The question of whether there actually is a field that goes by the name American Studies thus necessarily provokes the commonplace observation that, of course, American Studies has changed during the last fifty years. Central to this change is the shift in terminology I have already hinted at. Whereas early American Studies17 talked about methods of interdisciplinarity, later discussions of the analytical scope of the field use the term theory and either refrain from making interdisciplinarity an issue or, more recently, privilege the term transdisciplinarity, acknowledging the lack of a
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center from which scholarship on American culture could possibly evolve. This displacement of one privileged prefix by another is itself an effect of both poststructuralist thought and critiques of difference, which owe part of their prominence, at least in Germany, to American Studies. Due to the fact that theory has tended to travel fast lately, parts of continental thought have been received more immediately in the United States before being sent back to be levelled and reassessed by German American Studies. In this way American Studies has had a considerable impact on the status of theory beyond the boundaries of its own field. 11 Significantly enough, while the early debates about the proper methods of American Studies helped to make German universities safe(r) for American Studies, the growing significance of theory led to an ongoing questioning of its national framework and to what some (mostly American) scholars take to be the gradual demise of the American Studies agenda. “American Studies is dead,” an American colleague bluntly announced in mid-dinner conversation a few years ago. This ‘crisis’ of American Studies, marked most prominently by Janice Radway’s provocative and much-debated address to the American Studies Association in 1998, resulted in part from the impact of poststructuralist and postcolonial theories. Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, however, the situation looks somewhat different, despite the prominence of transnational perspectives (see Kroes). Around here scholars have taken many clues from transnational American Studies and “insist,” as Heinz Ickstadt does, “that American Studies should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary” (“American Studies” 554). Especially in view of the revitalization, since September 11, 2001, of American exceptionalism, cultural closure and self-referentiality, of new Anglo-American ties and processes of ‘nation-building’ as well as of new Cold War mentalities, (some) American colleagues’ dismissal of American Studies seem undoubtedly premature. In fact, against many odds, both economic and political, we like to believe, as New Americanists Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman do, that the significance of American Studies in Europe and Germany has increased since the end of the Cold War and, more significantly even, in post-9/11 times. Just like AIDS was the best thing that could have happened to the gay community, as some gay activists dared to claim in the late 1980s, the events of September 11 and their aftermaths gave American Studies a welcome, though short-lived boost. At the same time post-9/11 United States foreign policy may have done its share to increase the vulnerability of the field in a time of slim budgets. Currently well-travelled misconceptions about the limited scope and depth of American history and culture—misconceptions the American Studies movement in the United States and Germany has always been up against—prove to be as long-lived as the impact of the Frankfurt School and its perspective on (U.S.-American) cultural industries.18 Thus, American Studies seems to thrive first and foremost because we keep insisting that it does : engaging in certain scholarly work, in interdisciplinary dialogues, and in particular institutions (such as the German, European, American, and International Association of American Studies) (cf. Ickstadt, “American Studies” 552), redrawing disciplinary lines that we know have become quite brittle. 12 At the same time we need to distinguish between the ideal of American Studies as a platform for methodological and theoretical inquiries and its practice, which at most German universities has remained limited to Amerikanistik, the study of American language and literature (and culture, at best).19 Due to “[a] theory of literary history which was based mainly on a linguistic tradition,” Robert E. Spiller once explained (14),
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the study of literature was aligned with linguistics rather than history, economics, or law, establishing a tradition that reinforced the institutional limitation American Studies—both as an academic pariah and as an exemplary exception—has always been up against. Thus when we emphasize that parameters of difference have fundamentally transformed the methods of American Studies in the United States and Germany, we tend to forget that American Studies itself still constitutes a difference within “the manor house of ‘English’” and within more traditional ways of studying “History” (Galinsky 239). Accordingly, the boundaries of the field called American Studies have always been blurred and remain ever-shifting. From its very beginning the definition of American Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavour made American Studies, as Leo Marx recently reminded us, a “non-discipline” or, as he preferred to put it in the late 1960s, an “unscientific method”(“On Recovering” and “American Studies”). The desire, on the part of some American Studies scholars, to make American Studies even more radically transdisciplinary, including the natural sciences in its disciplinary canon, may in fact add to its status as non-discipline in jeopardy even if it is geared, at least in part, to make American Studies live up to its own program.20 In addition, American Studies has become more contested because, due to a general increase of theoretical inquiry within the humanities and social sciences, the field has lost part of its exceptionality and can no longer claim a monopoly, neither on a more comprehensive conception of culture(s) nor on a particular up-to-dateness with regard to methodological debates. Appropriating terminologies that evolved, at least in part, from feminist, gender, and African American Studies,21 postcolonial criticism and theories of New English Literatures meanwhile cover a lot of ground, including debates on multiculturalism, hybridity, and transnationalism, ground which is shared with the disciplinary scope of North American Studies.22 Unlike the New English Literatures whose interrogations thrive on theories of difference and diversity (cf. Isernhagen, “American Studies” 165), American Studies necessarily keeps returning to its specific national framework. In view of the current ‘rebirth’ of the nation, this may not be a bad idea after all. 3. Kultur, Culture, Trancultural Complexities 13 Even though German Amerikastudien had their beginnings in the 1920s, American Studies was clearly a post-World War II phenomenon, as Andrew Gross poignantly put it in conversation. Theorizing American Studies thus necessarily examines the complexities of post-war transatlantic relations and explores the field as an arena where differences of cultural and academic traditions have been played out without necessarily affecting the political relations they undoubtedly involve. And again, this may hold even more true for studies of American literature and Landeskunde as they were practiced in the GDR. American Studies/ Amerikanistik in Germany is certainly unthinkable without the work of those Americans, who from the 1930s on, turned against the methods that dominated English departments in the United States, some of whom became either major representatives of the American Studies movement or central figures in the study of American literature and culture like F.O. Matthiessen, Robert Spiller, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Chase, Leo Marx, and Leslie Fiedler. And yet the rise of American Studies in Germany was by no means a one-way enterprise. German academia, so goes the claim, had already prepared the ground for American Studies. “[L]ong before American Studies knocked at the door,” Hans Galinsky emphasized in 1964, area studies—Oriental, East European and Iberian studies—had entered German academia and fields such as cultural philosophy and cultural history aimed at the study of “whole cultures” (232). At the same time the American Studies
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agenda was in many ways incompatible with German notions of Kulturwissenschaft, partly due to nationally specific definitions of culture and Kultur. Thus, if American Studies meant to establish a form of interdisciplinary Kulturwissenschaft, theorizing American Studies would also mean to address this fundamental conceptual difference.
14 While some (American) American Studies scholars kept insisting that their German colleagues had particularly informed insights into the nature of culture—“[p]robably no national group of scholars,” Spiller claimed, “has so well considered and tested a tradition for the study of culture, whether as a whole or in its parts, as have the Germans” (12)—to many German academics American culture spelt ‘other’ and otherness, mind you, was not yet a privileged position. To institutionalize American Studies/Amerikanistik in Germany, therefore, meant to place a highly successful, yet supposedly inferior culture center stage, thereby necessarily renegotiating the privileged position of European and, more particularly, of British culture, as well as taking issue with perspectives on mass culture and cultural industry disseminated by the Frankfurt School. Thus, doing and theorizing American Studies in Germany not only meant to assert American culture as Kultur, but also to call into question clear-cut distinctions between high and popular culture.23 Any reconsideration of German American Studies and its methodological framework has to readdress and theorize these early debates, testing the complex concepts of transculturation we have evolved in the meantime. 15 The complexities involved here become even more evident once we remember that distinctions between high and popular culture had only recently been blurred by notions of a völkische Kultur propagated by German national socialist ideology, which rejected modernist art as degenerated and dismissed jazz as Negermusik. Despite obvious ideological differences American Studies and critical theory, by contrast, shared a formalist sense of art which fundamentally reevaluated high modernism (while neither cared much for Harlem Renaissance culture24). Given both the tendency of German political philosophy toward radical dissent and the dominance of critical theory’s modernist notion of Kunst and Kultur, it is evident why cultural studies did not get off the ground easily—if at all—in Germany, but has thrived in Great Britain. Much less concerned with working-class cultures and subcultures, American Studies still allowed for different notions of ‘classical’ literature and, eventually, for debates on race and ethnicity which entailed an—at least implicit—revision of Germany’s own ‘race problems.’25 In fact, it is noteworthy that American Studies/Amerikanistik in both parts of Germany have put a particular emphasis on the study of minority, first and foremost on African American and Native American, cultures, even if these studies were politically legitimized in different ways and performed from highly different ideological vantage points.26 If one reads this shared and continuous interest as a mediated interrogation of Germany’s own history of racial discrimination and genocide, yet another culturally specific function of American Studies in post-war German academia comes to the fore, highlighting the ‘darker’ dimensions of the interdependencies of German and American history, many of which remain to be explored and theorized. 16 Due to distinct histories American and German scholars clearly parted when it came to conceptions of national culture. At a time when American Studies began to construct an American past, including a canon of American literature ‘usable’ for national self- conceptions, German philology and area studies tried to steer away from a national
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agenda and developed a “preference for supra-national phenomena” and a sense that “‘culture communities’ cut[…] across national boundaries.”According to Galinsky, neither German Romance philology, which included European as well as South American literatures and languages, nor German studies ever “provided for anything similar to ‘American Studies’” (242-43, 241, 243). To make up for this deficit German scholars were expected to add their legendary skills in conceptual thinking. “Where theory was needed, it could be borrowed from German scholarship,” Spiller put it, venturing “generalizations about national character and national scholarship” when addressing the German Association for American Studies in 1959 : “You have, probably far more than any other people, a tendency to look at human experience in terms of absolutes and to clear your theoretical positions before proceeding to empirical practices.” This knack for theory, Spiller suggested, could do much good for American Studies : “The pragmatic approach of the Americans may help to bring the more nearly a priori approach of the Germans into closer bearing with the facts of the given situation in time and place, but the German approach should continue to offer, as it has in the past, much of the theory for the movement” (12, 11, 12-13). 17 Partly due to the occasion, Spiller calls upon Germany’s reputation as nation of “thinkers and philosophers” and projects American Studies as a German-American joint venture. Similarly, in a 1977 interview published in Amerikastudien, Henry Nash Smith confessed that “almost by instinct, in this country we are less, far less theoretical than the Germans” (qtd. in Lenz, “American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 54). While Olaf Hansen speaks of a “theoretical abstinence” pertaining to Spiller’s (and Nash Smith’s) essays on methods which position American Studies in a liminal space between “social and humanistic scholarship” (144), Lenz stresses that matters are not as clear- cut. Responding to Smith’s claim he observes that American Studies in the United States tends to increase the volume of theoretical debate when German scholars turn away from theory, thereby foregrounding “the significance of the interaction of theory and practice in the two countries” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 54).27 Interestingly enough, by the 1990s, in part inspired by American philosophers from Stanley Cavell to Cornel West to Richard Rorty, German American Studies scholars reengage American pragmatism and read, as Fluck and Thomas Claviez do in 2003, all practice of American Studies as (being informed by) theory (see Introduction x-xi). (In its final consequence such reassessment makes scholars who have explored the meaning of ‘America’ by illuminating readings of American literature and culture our most significant theorists. Theorizing German American Studies, in turn, becomes a highly comprehensive undertaking.) Unfortunately, though, this reassessment of theory, pragmatic and convincing as I think it is, drags behind it the familiar binarism : Raising “the interesting question whether—and to what extent—recent developments in American Studies have undermined the possibility for a more systematic analysis of ‘America,’” Fluck and Claviez hasten to provide their own answer : “[A]t present more than ever, the way in which non-Americans encounter American society and culture is not through multiple selves and happily hybridized border cultures but in a more systematic form” (xii). In an essay collection that prominently features work by Americans this claim may come as a surprise. It seems to voice a resistance against the fact that, as Ickstadt puts it, “[…] the idea of a particularly American difference” has been a creative resource that “has exhausted itself and is now being replaced by a drive toward ethnic [and other kinds of] self-assertion.” It may also be another way of saying that “institutionally speaking, American Studies, in a strict sense, has almost
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disappeared in the U.S.” (“American Studies” 550-51). Given the fact, though, that German American Studies scholars, like their American peers, have engaged “multiple selves” and “border cultures,” the distinction being made here also draws a fine line within German American Studies. Projecting an intra-cultural difference as a difference between (American and non-American) perspectives, the ‘interesting question’ the editors have raised unmistakably pinpoints the transcultural complexities involved in theorizing American Studies. 4. Are We Being Transdisciplinary Yet? 18 Aiming at the study of the interdependencies of literature, culture, and society, American Studies defined itself as an interdisciplinary endeavor and made interdisciplinarity part of its agenda as projected in the late 1940s. By the 1960s, though, interdisciplinarity seemed an ideal rather than an actual scholarly practice to German critics. Delineating the scope of the field in 1964 Galinsky, for instance, voiced his doubts about American Studies’ capacity to synthesize the “efforts and achievements of individual disciplines.” Instead he believed that “[t]he ‘unity’ of American Studies would seem to rest in the Americanness of the initial problem posed and in the cooperative effort to solve it, but not in the method applied to solving it” (Galinsky 237, 238-39). It comes as no surprise that once common notions of “Americanness” were no longer to be had, American Studies lost its bearings. In fact, though, American Studies seems to have been in constant peril. “In the 1960s,” Lenz explains, “this crisis arose out of a critique of the political shortcomings of American Studies and was related to a lack of ‘methodology’ or ‘philosophy’ that would integrate the perspectives of the various disciplines contributing to ‘the study of American culture, past and present, as a whole,’ (H.N. Smith) into an interdisciplinary project” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 57). Echoing American perceptions, the crisis culminated in the 1970s.28 “For the first time,” Lenz recalls in 1982, “American Studies was threatened in its very existence” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 57). When Lenz and Milich claim that “[s]ince its beginnings, American Studies inside and outside the United States have undergone a serious crisis of legitimation” (Introduction 9), they not only underline how central the term ‘crisis’ has been to theorizing American Studies. They also acknowledge the productivity of a term which deserves closer analysis. For if we trust that postmodern crisis discourse, as Jean Baudrillard argued, aims to reaffirm the reality principle whose loss it bemoans, a sense of constant crisis keeps reassuring German American Studies of its unquestionable significance. 19 Until the 1970s American Studies’ lack of a specific and singular method—a lack that Spiller in 1959 still interpreted as “one of [American Studies’] major strengths” (17)— posed itself as the central ‘problem’ of American Studies (Fluck, “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis” 111). Robert Berkhofer calls this ailment “methodenschmerz” (“Problems” 159). And even if the debate about methods indeed established the field, it failed to transform its programmatic plea for interdisciplinarity into a particular approach. Nor did it result in a predominantly interdisciplinary scholarly practice. While the assumption was that certain methods—somewhat ‘naturally’ or necessarily— lead to transdisciplinary approaches to American culture, their very discussion frequently culminated, as Lenz underlined, in the reaffirmation of “practical or substantive work,” the “identification of [the] rationale [of American Studies] with a few books by its major scholars” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 53). German Americanists, Heide Ziegler suggested, made American Studies “the paradigm for
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interdisciplinarity in the form of a hermeneutic method” (56). At the same time, the insistence on interdiscisciplinarity also foregrounds, as Olaf Hansen argued, “that the dichotomy between the Sciences and the Humanities (causal explanation [Erklären] vs. interpretative understanding [Verstehen]) has fundamentally influenced the discussion of theory and method in American Studies” (130). It forces us to see the impact of American Studies in the context of a new definition and reevaluation (Aufwertung) of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences and the social sciences (133). Part of the value ascribed to the humanities was their transdisciplinarity, the fact that they were less concerned with methods and theories, and not as much focused on particular technological and economic goals and revenues as the sciences and social sciences. Needless to say, this assumption has sufficiently backfired and successfully served to legitimize the consistent underfunding of the humanities and thus sealed what is perceived as their increasing irrelevance (Hansen 134).29 More significantly, though, in view of this belief, the rise of theory in the 1980s reads as a rise in authority and significance for literary and cultural studies. 20 Attempting to bridge the gap between the humanities and the social sciences, the early debate on methods of American Studies, Olaf Hansen argued, pointed into two juxtaposed, yet interrelated directions. On the one hand, American Studies seemed to favor the methodological ideal of the exact sciences [“scientifische[s] Methodenideal”], on the other, it attempted a synthesis that accounted for both traditional scientific standards and the function of (all) sciences in a democratic society (139).30 The very practice of American Studies thus was—and still is31—projected as a symptom of democratization (141, 142). (To interpret the rise of Anglophony, in turn, as a kind of [re-]colonization is tempting, yet certainly shortsighted. After all, its new prominence is partly due to the prominence of certain theories that American Studies helped to disseminate). In 1973, Hansen criticized the idealism and ideology entailed in this alliance of American Studies and democracy, projected by the ‘founding fathers’ of American Studies. “When seen against the background of this dichotomy [of sciences and humanities],” he wrote, “the first attempts to provide American Studies with a theoretical basis of its own by means of interdisciplinary synthesis (e.g. Tremaine McDowell) must be characterized as a form of optimistic idealism bordering on ideologically determined self-deception.” Moreover, Hansen emphasized that the desire to synthesize distinct disciplines fails to acknowledge the specificity of methods and opted for dialectics instead. Distilling from the work done in American Studies “five distinct paradigms of differing explanatory value”—the pragmatistic, functionalist, symbolic-interactionist, and historical-hermeneutical paradigm and that of “radical American Studies” (Hansen 130)32—all of which attempt to delineate the interdependence of literature, culture and society, Hansen claimed that “not a purely additive but rather a dialectically modified combination of the last three paradigms is most capable of providing American Studies with a suitable theoretical framework for the development of its methodology and practice.” I am quoting at length here, because I find it worthwhile to remember—once again (see Ziegler 59)—this insistence on dialectics as well as the distance we have travelled in the meantime. Dismissing a “self- sufficient contemplation of metatheoretical questions” Hansen aimed at a method which provided “a context for practical work in literary criticism” (130). Unlike theories which develop a system (or systems) of hypotheses to frame and explain natural or cultural phenomena, methods mean to enable scientific or scholarly work by projecting a systematic way of approaching a specific question or problem. In the field
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of American Studies this distinction is crucial; because the move away from methods, in the 1980s, on to theories also marked a movement away from the national paradigm. 21 While some scholars, like Galinsky, more or less dismissed the question of methodology and others, like Hansen, opted for a dialectical approach, Fluck aimed “to determine what has so far prevented American Studies from carrying out its interdisciplinary intentions,” yet focused on literary studies. Pointing to the discrepancies between debates on methods of American Studies and actual analyses of American culture, Fluck underlined that American Studies is not to become more interdisciplinary by displacing one method by another. Interdisciplinarity was not a matter of finding the right method. Nor was American Studies short of methodological inspiration. Its limitations, Fluck argued, were due to the effects of unacknowledged “contextualist” preconceptions and value judgments (“uneingestandene kontextualistische Wertprämissen”) (“Das ästhetische Vorverständnis” 110, 111).33 According to Fluck, the central obstacle to interdisciplinary work was that while attempting to move beyond formalist notions of text and context, American Studies relied on more than just “the notion of structural unity as indispensable.” It also projected this unity from the literary text “onto society rather than viewing the latter in its own right,” thus conjuring up an ideal rather than an idea of American culture (Fluck, “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis” 110, Theorien). Despite its “attempts to extend ‘new criticism’ towards a ‘new historicism,’” American Studies thus failed to open up for cultural contexts and erected disciplinary boundaries within a supposedly interdisciplinary field. In order to become truly kulturwissenschaftlich, Fluck claimed, the contextualism (Kontextualismus) of early American Studies had to be given up (“Das ästhetische Vorverständnis” 110, 128-29). Curiously enough, employed in this context the term “new historicist” (then associated with the work of Murray Krieger and Roy Harvey Pearce, among others) already foreshadows the New Historicism of the 1980s, which meant to rehistoricize literary studies and enable interdisciplinarity, yet tends to echo the fallacies of formalist literary analyses. 22 As contrary as Hansen’s and Fluck’s interventions may be, they are also complementary, as Ziegler noted (59), and comparable : Both still consider interdisciplinarity a central methological concern; both stress the significance of aligning explorations of aesthetic practices with complex conceptions of cultural and historical contexts while acknowledging that interdisciplinarity does not follow from a synthesis of methods; and both map the routes along which American Studies steered away from interdisciplinarity, one that turned to theories of literature, another that led to theory proper. Yet to do interdisciplinary work primarily means to approach a scientific or scholarly problem or question with a number of methods or theoretical perspectives and through the practice of more than one discipline. This, of course, requires us either to be familiar with the methods of several fields of inquiry or to allow other scholars to provide that expertise. Since very few of us are versed well enough in the methods of more than one discipline and communication across disciplinary lines continues to be a challenge, interdisciplinarity only rarely becomes a practice and oftentimes remains a theoretical ideal. “American Studies,” as Fluck and Claviez define the field in 2003, “is a joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present-day meaning and significance of the United States” (Introduction ix). The collection of essays on “Theories of American Culture, Theories of American Studies” introduced in this way, authored by scholars who teach in
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departments of English or at (English and) American Studies institutes, hardly lives up to this programmatic plea. Rather remembering that American Studies is meant to be a “joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor” has become a ritual we all practice, a refrain we keep repeating and conjure up as a mark of difference, while much of our work, focused first and foremost on either literary and cultural or historical analyses, tends to fall under the rubric of multidisciplinarity at best. As we keep acknowledging the necessity of approaching our object of study and research—United States American culture—from more than a singular disciplinary venue, we nonetheless situate American Studies in close proximity to current interdisciplinary research that cuts across the institutional boundaries between the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. American Studies may come closest to this kind of work when it examines new media technologies and popular cultures, to name only two fields of inquiry which project the future of American Studies while reconnecting with its innovative, emancipatory methodological “roots.”34 After all, there are not only interests shared by American Studies and the sciences, as I have argued elsewhere; there are also questions whose complexity require transdisciplinary research (see Sielke, “Science/Fiction”). American Studies may indeed profit from both consulting interdisciplinary work done way ‘outside American Studies’ and theorizing its own transdisciplinary practice. 5. Difference/Différance 23 Until the 1970s the search for a method of American Studies was first—both necessarily and understandably—guided by a desire to reduce the diversity of American multiculture to some degree of unity or consensus, a consensus that in the 1970s was questioned by pointing to the ‘realities’ and conflicts within that culture. However, as Lenz stresses, even though this critique of the ideology of American Studies, its alliance with Cold War politics and its tendency to perpetuate American exceptionalism transformed curricula and began to shift the emphasis to “American Culture Studies” (Lenz and Milich, Introduction 11; cf. Lenz, “American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 58), it had little impact on the formation of theories. Instead it was the rise of poststructuralist thought and the effects of a politics “from the margins,” which from the late 1960s onward impacted on the humanities and social sciences in general and American Studies in particular. This growing insistence on différance and difference, on the one hand, provided for the radical critique that was called for in the late 1970s and early 80s. On the other, it eventually caused yet another ‘crisis’ of American Studies in the 1990s, a ‘crisis of the crisis,’ if you like. Or as Lenz and Milich put it in 1995 : “[t]he crisis of legitimation has been replaced by a crisis of representation” (Introduction 9). After all, who could bemoan the lack of “methodological coherence at all three levels of theory, method, and technique” (Robert Meredith, in 1973) or “the absence of a coherent American Studies ‘philosophy’” (Sklar qtd. in Lenz, “American Studies— Beyond the Crisis?” 55, 59), when the very ideal of coherence had lost its potency? In fact, one seemingly paradoxical effect of the ‘rise of theory’ was that hopes for a ‘right’ approach to American culture were ultimately lost. Theories were diminished to particular, local perspectives on the world, to kinds of narratives which in turn resulted in a decrease of the ‘resistance to theory’ characteristic, for instance, for early feminist criticism (see Showalter). Theory became a way of making one’s positions clear, of acknowledging—as best as one can—the assumptions that underlie one’s interpretations of culture.
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24 This is not the place to elaborate on either the political movements of the 1960s and early 1970s or the fundamental shift in theoretical thought that goes by the name ‘linguistic turn’ and calls up the names Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, among many others. Suffice it to say that deconstructivist language philosophy, revisionist psychoanalysis, and discourse analysis interrogated established conceptions of self, identity, and author, experience and reality, culture and nation. Interrogating these conceptions—central to American Studies—they evolved new notions of subject, text, and world, which first affected literary and cultural studies before impacting on the study of the social sciences and, albeit to a much lesser degree, the sciences. Significantly enough, poststructuralism renegotiated terms such as experience, truth, and identity at the very moment when feminist and African American perspectives reclaimed positions of otherness as modes of identity. Accordingly, feminist critics and scholars of gender studies, in particular, wondered why at the very moment women and other culturally and politically marginalized groups asserted their own sense of self, body, and identity, these concepts —and the very sense of presence and authenticity they entailed—became highly contested.35 The fact that once women, African Americans, and other ‘others’ venture out in search of their bodies and selves, theory steps in and dismisses such endeavors as futile, easily appears as a perfect example of patriarchal plotting. 25 Meanwhile it has been pointed out in a variety of contexts that acts of (re)construction and deconstruction should not be seen as oppositional, but as interdependent processes. In fact only the gradual deconstruction, throughout the twentieth century, of the male philosophical subject and the insistence on the discursiveness of identity and history has enabled supposedly marginal figures to take center stage and rewrite themselves into history as subjects. The very insight that subjectivity is discursive, performative, and processural has done away with stability, yet allows for and invites a strategic use of subject positions and political vantage points to be claimed temporarily and for particular purposes. Accordingly, conceptions of gender, class, race, and ethnicity have transformed fundamentally. In fact, the interdependence of poststructuralism and revisionary literary history, of theories of différance and difference may become most evident once we call to mind what transformations the category gender underwent as we moved from women’s studies/feminist criticism to gender studies. First considered essential assets and part of the expressive register of particular social groups, parameters of difference and identity were reassessed as effects of specific discourses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Accordingly, the analysis of cultural practices no longer aimed at the ways in which literary and other cultural texts offer truths about the nature of American culture. Rather what these texts project as American culture’s presumed ‘true nature,’ in what ways and to what (political) ends became crucial questions for American Studies. 26 Even if the debates on difference and différance did not evolve from the center of an American Studies “community,” their privileged terms responded to questions American Studies had posed in the 1970s, questions at the core of which was the relation of text and world, on the one hand, and the heterogeneity of American culture, on the other. Accordingly the emergence of difference/différance fundamentally changed the agenda of American Studies in the United States and Germany while also being reflected upon critically—with (distant) continental perspectives on the American reception and recontextualization of (close-to- home) continental theory—in
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German American Studies. It is in part an achievement of American Studies and the ‘Americanization’ of cultural analyses, including conceptions of genre,36 that German scholars got familiarized with both the paradigm shift in theory and a politics of difference and multiculturalism. Most significant, though, may have been the impact of women’s and gender studies on theories of American Studies in the United States and in Germany as well as on public debates of gender matters.37 The scope of this impact may be assessed by recalling the German reception of Judith Butler’s work (see Gernalzick). Delivering lectures in Frankfurt and Berlin in the early 1990s, Butler confronted her audience with a rhetoric and mode of thinking foreign and unfamiliar to many of her listeners, some of whom sympathized with Butler’s feminist agenda, yet tended to resist her appropriation of ‘male discourse.’ As a consequence, the philosopher frequently felt obliged to clarify her arguments, commenting on the many misunderstandings caused by her public appearances in German daily newspapers. I do not mean to suggest that German American Studies scholars necessarily found Butler’s lectures transparent; however, we came prepared for the ride.38 27 Likewise noteworthy in this context is the prominence, within German American Studies, of theories of postmodernity whose concepts are inseparable from, yet by no means identical with, poststructuralist thought. Even if we have acknowledged postmodernism as a transnational phenomenon of globalization, the term was quite “unknown” (Ruiter 360) to literary studies in Germany before American Studies introduced German audiences to American postmodernist fiction. The project of theorizing German American Studies may therefore profit from reengaging (West) German scholars’ work on postmodern American literature and culture39 as well as the debate of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the GDR, a debate which emerged comparatively late, as Utz Riese admits, yet not too late to be remembered as part of a fundamental cultural and political turning point. What makes such revision particularly worthwhile is that it has to interrogate the affinities between certain literary and cultural writing practices, on the one hand, and certain theories of reading and their inherent cultural ideologies, on the other. Theories evolve from specific cultural contexts and in dialogue with privileged texts, which, after the new criticism, tended to be narrative rather than poetic,40 while the term poetics has in turn been appropriated to conceptualize the aesthetic and political effects of all kinds of cultural discourses. 28 Of course, there have been readers who resisted both deconstruction and parameters of difference. Fluck’s excellent essay Theorien amerikanischer Literatur (1987) may serve as case in point here. Providing a concise account of how American literature has been read, moving from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature across the myth and symbol school and their critics to poststructuralist approaches, Fluck convincingly reasons that deconstructivist readings tend to reduce literary texts to allegories of deconstruction itself and diminish the “play of the signifier” to highly uniform interpretations, to a singular allegory : the unreadability of all texts. At the same time, his own argument tends to reduce deconstruction to a method of reading literary texts, which, in turn, sets the stage for presenting his own reading method as a theory of American literature. If, on the one hand, we strip deconstructivist reading practices of their political potential while, on the other, letting the debates on canons and inclusions of minority literatures and popular cultures amount to little more than political moves, we are indeed left with a binarism which calls for more compelling analyses—analyses the author has certainly provided us with : Positioned, in 1987, as a
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mode of interaction between poetics and hermeneutics and as continuous with the work of the Constance School, Fluck’s theory of reading has evolved a most persuasive account of the changing functions and aesthetic effects of late eighteenth- and nineteenth- century narrative fiction (Fluck, Das kulturelle Imaginäre). I wonder, though, how this functional model of American literature would go about reading modernist and postmodernist texts which not only explode the consensus that nineteenth- century texts renegotiated, but also expose the aesthetic strategies that realist texts, in particular, aim to downplay. More significant, though, in this context : Why not acknowledge that theories, like literary texts in their particular contexts, have their own specific cultural functions? 29 Thus Fluck’s intervention, in fact, invites us to remember the distinct functions of poststructuralist theories and parameters of difference. If we take différance and difference as two sides of the same coin, theorizing American Studies could also mean to make more explicit the theoretical dimensions inherent in and fundamental to the canon debates, debates which are effects of a politics of difference (and which Perry Miller considered exhausted by 1962). While the revision of the canon has preoccupied literary studies in general, it has certainly dominated a significant part of the American Studies agenda from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, evolving new anthologies and a huge body of revisionary literary history.41 In the context of theorizing German American Studies such reconsideration moreover invites intracultural perspectives. While American Studies/Amerikanistik in both parts of Germany focused on ‘minority’ cultures, be they Native or African American, they obviously did so from divergent political vantage points and consequently ‘warred” with partly divergent canons of American literature. Denouncing the decadence of modernist texts, East German scholars of American literature at the same time celebrated Native American and African American literatures. Moreover, their search for a usable concept of an American literary tradition employed 1930s working-class novels, whose authors many American Studies scholars west of the ‘iron curtain’ may not have been all that familiar with. In 1977 it was still possible to argue that Americanists in the GDR framed their work “as part of a worldwide process of historical change” in the course of which “a cultural revolution will transform human ‘praxis’” and “national literatures will be transcended in the direction of a world literature” (Hoenisch, “Zum Begriff der Tradition” 104). Needless to say : politically, things turned out somewhat differently. Yet the concept of world literatures has survived, even if we privilege the term postcolonial literatures now. 30 The growing significance of such transnational perspectives has been a mixed blessing, though, for American Studies. Extending the perspectives of postcolonial criticism and New English Literatures to North America,42 the empire (of English studies) seems to write back indeed. But so does American Studies as it metamorphoses into global studies here and there.43 A particularly European vision of the futures of American Studies would be to take up the suggestion—put forth by postcolonial perspectives, debates on transnationalism, and the economic realities of NAFTA—to transform American Studies into a comparative enterprise (see Porter), thereby allowing for plural positions while at the same time acknowledging the particular (inter-)dependencies of these three nations. Taking Canada, the United States, and Mexico as mutual points of reference, the study of North American cultures can focus on paradigmatic moments and representations of a shared history and culture of colonization, nation building, immigration, multiculturalism, diaspora, and
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globalization. It can examine how these processes have played out differently in each of these cultures and, more specifically, how social and cultural hierarchies and ethnic differences are borderlines imposed on and within bodies in culturally and nationally specific ways. Focused on transdisciplinary micro-histories, it can, as Gesa Mackenthun suggests in a different context, keep in mind the “macrostructures of inequality and injustice that cut across boundaries” (235). Moreover, explorations of the (literal and figurative) borderlands in the South of the United States help to map the—entirely different—borderlands in the North more clearly. And the crossing of these borders, both the borders of culture and those of disciplinary conventions, will necessarily open up new perspectives on transatlantic relations. 31 Once again, though, these directions recently envisioned for American Studies constitute, to a certain degree, a return rather than a turn, taking up paths already outlined in the early 1980s, paths that even envisioned “turning American Studies potentially into World studies,” into an early version of global studies. “To be sure,” Lenz insisted in 1982, “American Studies has to become more ‘comparative’ and ‘cross- cultural,’ more ‘international,’ […] but this should not be mistaken for a new ‘philosophy’ that could per se give direction to American Studies and define its scholarly directions” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 60). Even Lenz’s advice still applies. If we transform American Studies into North American Studies we do, in fact, change direction. Since the United States, Canada, and Mexico offer different answers to questions of globalization, such change may turn out to be promising. A field called “comparative North American Studies,” however, would also require closer cooperation with English studies, Romance languages and literatures, and Latin American Studies. Can we indeed transcend these disciplinary borderlines? Can American Studies learn from Canada? Or from Canadian literature, which, as Ickstadt points out, positions itself “in terms of the national and—perhaps even—as the postcolonial”? Could American Studies achieve what Canadian studies, even in Canada, failed to achieve : the productive institutional alliance of English, American, and Romance studies? Or would we simply run the risk of “overextending the boundaries of the field” big time and experience the rise of new boundaries? (Ickstadt, “American Studies” 560, 553; cf. Claviez, “Whose ‘American’ Century?” 259). 32 In any case, the debates on a “new North American Studies”44 highlight that the most crucial effect of theories of difference/différance on the field American Studies amounts to the deconstruction of the term/concept/project ‘America’ and its reconceptualization as a transnational and global phenomenon, or, if we follow Baudrillard, as deconstruction (see Haverkamp). Having redefined America in this way we can recover American Studies as the force of a deconstructive—that is both destructive and inherently democratic—process that America itself cannot be but a part of. This does not mean that we have to do without American Studies. Yet it means that doing American Studies requires a large dose of negative capability. 6. “Always Historicize!”—But with a Difference 33 From its very beginning, history—next to literature and linguistics—has been the most significant discipline within the canon of fields that make up American Studies in Germany. However, notions of how history is defined and, as a consequence, how one is to ‘do’ history have changed, affecting the work of scholars of American culture and German historians concerned with United States history.45 In the field of literary and cultural studies this development may best be traced by following the transformations
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the term ‘context’ went through as we move from new critical to new historicist perspectives. While context meant (all parts of the) structure (of a literary text) to the new critic, it was identified with so-called external or factual reality in old historicist analyses of the 1970s (see Berkhofer, “Problems,” “New Context”). As poststructuralist perspectives reconceptualized texts and political institutions as discourses—“in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse,” Derrida famously wrote in 1966 (110)—context was redefined as a network of diverse cultural texts, including legal and medical documents as well as literature, in new historical analyses of Renaissance culture in the 1980s.46 Questions of aesthetic value—secondary since “the ever-critical French discover[ed] that everything always happens everywhere but it’s all the same” and “structuralism [was] born” (fig. 1)—became even less relevant. Accordingly, new historical perspectives accelerated the transformation of literary studies into cultural studies.47 Insisting on the textuality of history, scholars acknowledged the status of history as narrative, as a kind of fiction.48 History also ceased to be a singular narrative told from a supposedly consensual point-of-view and became many, oftentimes conflictual histories. Thus unlike Fredric Jameson, who urges his readers to “always historicize,” yet still favors “History with a capital ‘H’” (Lenz, “Reconstructing” 27) and therefore may conclude that postmodern culture has dispensed with subject and history, new historical perspectives force us to acknowledge that what postmodernity in fact dispenses with is historically specific notions of subjectivity and history. 34 This shift from old to new historicist perspectives coincided with a “reawakened interest in ‘history,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘society’” (Lenz, Keil, and Bröck-Sallah, Introduction 9) prominent, for instance, in the New American Studies, which readdressed conceptions of ‘America’ and its ideologies by rereadings of American literary texts, readings that were inspired, to different degrees, by a poststructuralist emphasis on rhetoric, theories of cultural difference, new historicism, as well as the new exceptionalism of the late 1980s (Lenz and Ickstadt). These novel tendencies in literary and cultural studies were promoted as enabling both a “historical and political turn” (see Fluck, The Historical and Political Turn ) and a new interdisciplinarity—Günter Lenz, Hartmut Keil, and Sabine Bröck-Sallah carefully speak of “the possibilities of an interdisciplinary discourse that has grown out of […] changing and more flexible approaches within the disciplines” (9). If we want to assess the impact of this “historical and political turn” of the mid- to late-1980s and early 1990s, though, we need to distinguish two different, in fact, opposite tendencies. While new historicist analyses employ poststructuralist perspectives for synchronic analyses of paradigmatic moments of cultural history, attempts to rehistorize also resisted what was perceived as the continuous sameness of critical analyses focused on écriture and processes of signification as well as what for some scholars of history appeared to be the concept of an increasingly fragmented American culture. 35 In a more general sense, though, the terms rehistoricization and repoliticization seem to imply that, unlike theories of difference, which appeared preoccupied with heterogeneous histories and (identity) politics, poststructuralism had veered away from ‘real’ history and politics. This, however, proved to be a highly debatable assumption, nurtured in part by the notion that deconstruction was merely a method of reading literary texts. In fact, though, poststructuralist analyses—be it the work of Derrida, Kristeva, Barbara Johnson, or Henry Louis Gates—have deeply transformed notions of the political, insisting that certain practices of writing and reading are in themselves historically specific and political (cf. Lenz, “Reconstructing” 32-40).
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Accordingly, the supposed “ahistoricity” of French feminist poststructuralism was the effect of misreadings rather than of naïve essentialist postulates on the part of its protagonists (see Sielke, Fashioning). In view of this political and historical dimension of theories of difference/différance, it always struck me as odd that New Historicism set itself up against (while at the same time echoing) nineteenth-century notions of historicism and new critical formalism, just as if the debates that separate Cleanth Brooks from bell hooks never even took place. Yet theorizing seems to require this kind of forgetting and misreading, which, time and again, allows to suggest that critical inquiries are taking a turn (for the better, of course), while in fact ideas, concepts, and terminologies are constantly being recontextualized and so-called turns turn out to be returns ever so often (though we are never taken to the same place twice, of course). 36 The term New Historicism itself was hardly new, originally associated, as Fluck points out in 1973, with the work of Krieger and Pearce, who aimed at overcoming the formalist agenda of the new critics.49 Arguing that the structures of literary texts ultimately reveal a deeper sense of an essential American reality characterized by paradox and polarity, Krieger and Pearce, though, as Fluck underlined, merely projected contextualist notions of literary form onto history or social formations (Fluck, “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis” 123-25). To a certain degree this contextualism of early American Studies is reproduced by Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of a poetics of culture which circulates social energies.50 Rather than engaging in interdisciplinary work, new historical analyses employ terms central to current literary and cultural interpretation for the analysis of legal or scientific discourses without testing, in a consequential manner, how far legal or medical concepts and methods may in turn push readings of literary texts. Ultimately, such practice of interpretation, thus, reaffirms the privileged position of both literary studies and particular, oftentimes ‘classic,’ literary texts, even if those texts are now seen as complicit, rather than adversarial to dominant ideology (cf. Lenz, “Reconstructing” 31). And even if new historical analyses dispense with synechdochal/metaphoric conceptions of the relation between text and context and embrace the metonymical figure of the chiasmus to delineate discursive exchanges and networks instead—thereby circumventing questions of cultural hierarchy and authorization—they do retain a closural sense of culture. According to Fluck, new historical perspectives, therefore, do not enable recontextualized readings, but lead to decontextualizations (“Die ‘Amerikanisierung’” 234-35, 246). Nor did they mean to inaugurate a methodologically innovative approach. The New Historicism, according to Fluck, was motivated and self-authorized first and foremost by a political self-fashioning of its protagonists, loosely grounded in the work of Foucault, and by a desire to increase the visibility and significance of literary studies by engaging in surprising interpretive performances. 37 Other critics feel more uncomfortable with the highly fragmented views of historical processes projected by new historical approaches, which resist teleological histories because they force processes of exclusion (see Reichardt, “The New Historicism”). Giving New Historicism credit for most attractive readings of arbitrarily connected cultural material, German scholars find the focus on synchronical analyses, which tends to relegate continuities to the periphery, too exclusive and call, as Ulfried Reichardt (“The New Historicism”) and Mackenthun do,51 for productive alliances of synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Historian Thomas Bender, keen to relate detailed analyses of social history to a general reassessment of United States history, confronted the preferred pluralism of cultures and critical perspectives characteristic
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for American Studies in the 1980s with his plea for a “new synthesis.”52 This desire to move beyond pluralism and regain a grip on the ‘big picture’ may indeed be one way that German American Studies asserts its cultural difference. Hans-Joachim Lang, for instance, detects a “need for synthesis” as the driving force behind Emory Elliott’s and Sacvan Bercovitch’s comprehensive literary histories (Lang 122-24). Whether we read these projects as an attempt at synthesis or as an act of revision of established canons and periodizations (as which they were explicitly intended) (cf. Elliott, xviii), whether their aim is to ‘make whole’ rather than ‘make new’ or ‘make over’ obviously lies in the eye of the beholder. Likewise, those who censor the desire to balance a new pluralism with new national paradigms—paradigms that meanwhile allow for contingencies and conflict—as an attempt at “pluralistic totalities” or new universalisms may in part be motivated by specific German anxieties (Klähn 427-30). However, apart from cultural sensibilities, the need to retain national paradigms and comprehensive perspectives may simply result from the particular institutional disposition of American Studies in Germany. American Studies will survive only if we violently defend both the specificity of United States cultures and histories and our particular approach to cultural analysis. It is most banal but blatantly evident, especially for those colleagues currently on the job market : As scholars and teachers of American Studies in the German university system, we cannot ride our hobbyhorses but need to be generalists—experts of “the study of American culture, past and present, as a whole” (H.N. Smith). 38 The scepticism Lenz voiced vis-à-vis “the […] process of a ‘repoliticization’ or ‘rehistoricization’ of American literary and cultural criticism”—a process of re- Americanization of literary and cultural studies after a strong European impact—“and the versions of a premature synthesis” is of a different calibre (“Reconstructing” 23; cf. “Multicultural Critique”). Lenz relentlessly disclosed the ahistoricities of new historical analyses, exposed the new exceptionalism in some work labelled ‘historical,’ and historicized the historical and political twists and turns, insisting that critical discourse is “a form of social action” and that differences between deconstruction and Marxist dialectics, for instance, should not be obscured. His very particular concern, though, was to underline how little energy has been spent revising “in a serious theoretical manner” the American traditions of critical thought after the new criticism (Lenz, “Reconstructing” 23-24). Lenz himself has spent a relentless amount of his intellectual verve working “toward a ‘historical reconstruction’ of American Studies,” a reconstruction not aimed at a “philosophy” of American Studies, but at resurrecting the “tradition of a radical cultural history that has been at the heart of the early American Studies” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 94, 101). Arguing that American critics oftentimes fail to recognize the radical traditions and the subversive potential of American creative and critical discourses, Lenz clearly affirms a cultural difference, which amounts to a difference in both theoretical thought and scholarly practice. Aiming at transcultural dialogues, he finds in feminist criticism, women’s and gender studies, African American theory, and new ethnographies a heterogenous field of interdependent cultural forces and models for transdisciplinary work (see “Reconstructing” 32-40, “Ethnographies”). In fact, throughout his work, Lenz dialectically and dialogically as well as pragmatically engaged with and tried to accomodate new and productive theoretical paradigms, in this way, affirming his own difference within the German American Studies ‘community.’ 7. Returning to Pragmatism, Undoing American Studies?
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He [the American Studies scholar] works, [sic] then in the heritage of Emerson and his philosophy of self-trust, and in the heritage of William James and his philosophy of pragmatism. Tremaine McDowell qtd. in O. Hansen 141 In its original form, pragmatism is a philosophical theory about truth. It attempts to undermine the traditional metaphysical quest of philosophy for a timeless truth that would correspond to the way the world ‘really’ is. In contrast, pragmatists claim that our thinking is always goal-directed. Thinking is a problem-solving device. Hence, ‘truth’ is practice-oriented, situational, provisional, experimental and processual in the sense that it is constantly emerging anew in never-ending processes of adaptation to experience and readjustment to intersubjective encounters. As a consequence, pragmatism can not only account for a plurality of coexisting perspectives; it also provides a philosophical justification of the inevitability of such a plural universe. Thus, pragmatism’s goal is not to pursue the elusive, ‘impossible’ question of philosophical foundations but to offer a method or mode of thinking for making our ideas clear. Fluck, Introduction ix 39 I am quoting at length here from Winfried Fluck’s introduction to a collection of essays, dedicated to “Pragmatism and Literary Studies,” because its first paragraph clearly foregrounds why, in the last decade, (American) philosophy has increasingly informed literary and cultural studies53 and why, more particularly, pragmatism has (re-)evolved as a theoretical paradigm for American Studies.54 While, on the one hand, formulating a critique of philosophy and its attempt to define absolutes and a priori truths, pragmatism evolves a sense of truth that allows for process and plurality, appropriates the scientific concept of experimentation for the evaluation of individual experiences of the world, and makes this plurality of experience, including aesthetic experience, the basis for novel conceptions of truth. Pragmatism, as developed, in different varieties, in the writings of Emerson, William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Hilary Putnam, has insisted that there can be no one formal system of knowledge, since knowledge is processual and mutable; accordingly, if we let our sense of the world be guided by our experience of it, our perspectives on the world will have to continuously shift. In some sense, pragmatist thought has indeed anticipated poststructuralist notions of difference/différance. Accordingly, Fluck acknowledges “striking similarities” (Introduction ix) between pragmatism and poststructuralism. While pragmatism as “one of the major attempts,” as Herwig Friedl puts it, “to overcome the tradition of classical Western metaphysics” (“Thinking” 469) accommodates (poststructuralist/postmodernist) pluralities (of subject positions, identity politics, ethnicities, truths etc.), it has at the same time revitalized concepts that poststructuralism appears to negate, first and foremost our sense of subjectivity
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and agency, experience, reality, and truth. In this way, Fluck claims, pragmatism “escapes the recent radical critique of essentialism in Western thought.” Whereas poststructuralism has taken the instability of truth, meaning, and self “as evidence for the all-pervasive power effects of linguistic and discursive regimes,” “pragmatism holds the promise of describing central aspects of cultural expression such as representation, rhetorical expression, meaning, aesthetic experience, and ‘self- fashioning’ in terms that do not have to ignore the constructive and creative dimensions of these acts” (Introduction ix). To a certain degree, current revisions of pragmatism, thus, reaffirm “the primacy of processes of perception over their object,” which Olaf Hansen, in 1973, described as central to the pragmatist paradigm of American Studies (148).55 Whereas Hansen’s discussion of pragmatist perspectives aimed at disclosing their idealism and ideology, though, current appropriations of pragmatism tend to set themselves up against critiques that appear to be ideologically motivated and against what Hansen labelled “the silent paradigm shift in the humanities,” which entailed the transformation of literary into cultural studies (cf. Kulturbegriff und Methode). They “disremember,” for instance, that long before the “pragmatist” and “ethical turn” feminist critics insisted on the “authority of experience” and that poststructuralist theory has explicitly acknowledged the interdependence of deconstructive and reconstructive or creative moves, arguing, for instance, as Teresa de Lauretis did in 1987, that the deconstruction of gender is its reconstruction (3).
40 Prone to forgetting, the tendency to revitalize pragmatist thought at the expense of more explicitly political perspectives or poststructuralist parameters may strike us as odd, occurring right after or synchronic with the so-called historical turn American Studies took in the late 1980s and early 1990s and characterizing even the work of scholars who certainly need not to be told to “always historicize.” At the same time “[t]his tendency to brush away history, and to start all over again into a pristinely unknown future,” Claviez argues, “is […] an integral part of both the pragmatic vein within American culture and of Pragmaticism as a philosophical approach” (“Afterword” 332; see also “Pragmatism” and Grenzfälle). Moreover, in recent theoretical debates these acts of forgetting—or outright dismissal—are inextricably linked with acts of remembering. In Fluck’s essay “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience,” for instance, the rereading of Dewey serves to call upon the “Constance school of reception aesthetics” as “one of the few of the so-called ‘Continental theories’ of the recent theory boom in literary and cultural studies in which the name Dewey functions as an important point of reference” (230). In this way, Fluck, on the one hand, reminds us of those German contributions to continental theory that have been marginalized by dominant poststructuralist paradigms. On the other, this act of remembering goes along with a dismissal of British cultural studies and ‘identity- criticism.’ Interpreting Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) as the major force behind the “elimination of the hierarchy between high and popular culture and his redefinition of the discipline of English,” Fluck acknowledges Dewey as a precursor of the work of Raymond Williams, whose The Long Revolution is partly based upon Dewey’s text. In a move analogous to that of Stanley Cavell, who argued that Emerson anticipated modern continental philosophy, Dewey not only becomes the proponent cultural studies avant- la-lettre (Fluck, Pragmatism 341, 328-29). Theories of cultural studies also become an American trademark. To be sure : My point here is not to question this observation or the argument it enables, but to challenge its underlying attempt at truth-telling and
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‘identity criticism,’ replete with the recovery of one’s own ‘roots’ and the reaffirmation of one’s own critical position at the expense of other views. Theorizing literary (and American) studies openly reveals itself as a form of identity politics—or “a politics of self-empowerment” (Fluck, “The Humanities” 218)56—here (which comes as no surprise, of course). 41 The most significant intervention into what some critics feel to be a critical impasse created by the dominance of poststructuralist thought is the reempowerment of a subject that in perceiving the world engages in its creation and the revitalization of the pragmaticism or pragmatist semiotics of Peirce. As Susanne Rohr has convincingly argued, Peirce’s “pragmatist-semiotics” are of such fundamental importance, because they provide us with an alternative definition of the sign and, as a result, of reality itself (“Pragmaticism” 294). For Peirce reality is “a ‘product of sign processes’” or “an ‘interpretive outcome,’” and therefore constantly being re-negotiated (Rohr, “The World” 96). Realigning subject, cultural artifact, and world, Peirce’s work targets a question that has indeed been central to all “great moments in lit-crit” and most crucial to American Studies. How can we explain the relationship between text and world, Rohr asks, acknowledging, on the one hand, how problematic notions of mimesis in fact are while, on the other, allowing for the fact “that fictional realities have something to do with their historical context, after all” (“Pragmaticism” 293)?57 Now poststructuralism certainly provided one reply to this question. Focusing on how discourses create our sense of the world, our concepts of reality and truth, poststructuralist thought has capitalized on the production and reproduction of meaning and cultural imaginaries. Focusing on our acts of reading and interpretation, pragmatism, by contrast, offers a reply that foregrounds the position of the (individual) subject in these processes of constituting the world, his or her power to add an individual to a cultural narrative, and the possibilities of intersubjectivity (Fluck, “Pragmatism” 241). Rather than judging which answer is more to the point, though, we may simply want to register which reply becomes prominent at what time. 42 Rohr’s own reply has been to propose “a new pragmatist, i.e. subject-oriented semiotic approach to literature and other forms of representation” (“Pragmaticism” 293). Intent to speak of the relation between literary text and world without merely falling back into pre-deconstructionist positions, she proposes a literary theory that reintegrates previously discarded concepts such as meaning and mimesis while maintaining essential deconstructionist insights concerning the openness, decenteredness and infinity of discourse, the cultural constructedness of the self, and the plurality of sign processes. Exploring Peirce’s notion of human cognition and employing his pragmaticism for a rereading of American literature, from classic American realism to contemporary neo-realism, Rohr has done most significant groundwork and has indeed found “new critical options” for literary studies (see Die Schönheit des Findens; Die Wahrheit der Täuschung; “Pragmaticism” 294); in fact, Katrin Amian already speaks of a “Rohrian approach” (see “Pynchon”). At the same time Rohr frames her argument by pinpointing the presumed inadequacies of a whole series of other theoretical paradigms, including “classical structuralist, but also post-structuralist, deconstructivist, New Historicist, race, class and gender theories.” Saussurian “semiotic theory,” she claims, “has monopolized theoretical thinking in literary and cultural studies for an entire century, operating with premises whose implications are now entirely predictable” and evolving “a dyadic model [which] cannot but force all arguments into figures of binary opposition” (“Pragmaticism” 293). And even where
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concepts of decidedly non- binary character (such as hybridity) are introduced, none of these theories, she claims, “have critically reflected their semiotic foundations.” These claims are, of course, quite comprehensive (even if we set aside the fact that Derrida, Irigaray, Butler, Gates, Homi Bhabha, Arnold Krupat, Lisa Lowe among others—and who else could be referred to in this context?—have certainly reflected the semiotic foundations of their theories, though this may not have been marked first priority on their critical agenda). They tend to operate with binary oppositions and antagonisms, conflict with pragmatist philosophy itself, fail to acknowledge that “race, class and gender theories” have come a long way, and to my mind misread poststructuralism’s renegotiations of established notions of subjectivity as a process of “emptying the position of the subject” (Rohr, “Pragmaticism” 294). 43 Thus while acknowledging the cross-routes between pragmatism and poststructuralism, current pragmaticist approaches to American literature do not travel these routes all that far. Judith Butler, for instance, has always acknowledged that neither are subject positions and views of the world imposed or inscribed upon the individual nor do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions.58 Moreover, throughout the 1990s, protagonists of the poststructuralist debate have interrogated the preconditions for an ethically and politically responsible agency (cf. Butler, The Psychic Life). As Butler’s reflections on subjectivity and agency return to Hegel, they become part of an analytic reexamination of some of the fundamental positions in modern continental thought currently underway and enter, from a distinct direction, a field where, as Mike Sandbothe points out, previously unacknowledged or under- appreciated pragmatic elements in thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein are being explored. At the same time for Butler, the agent remains an arena of ambivalence, the effect of powers that precede him or her as well as the possibility of a radically conditioned form of agency.59 Current uses of pragmatism, by contrast, may allow for the processual nature of reality and subjectivity, yet retain the sense of a consistent subject, of an individual who can make his or her ideas clear. Whereas Butler and Slavoj Žižek negotiate conceptions of subjectivity which account for contingencies and incoherencies, for the interdependence between discourses of power and the topography of the psyche, pragmatism tends to bracket psychoanalytical insights into subject constitution, thereby echoing a general discomfort American cultures has felt vis-à-vis psychoanalysis. Pragmatism remains unconcerned by intrusions of the Lacanian real, and, as Claviez argues, “naïve[ly] neglect[s] the problem of power—especially as it adheres in the subject-object-relation” (“Pragmatism” 359). Intended or not, the revitalization of pragmatism catalyzes the renaissance of an (Emersonian) American individual, ideas of progress, and the belief that aesthetic experience is the motor of both individual and cultural progress. (Kristeva made similar claims for “poetic practice.”60) Whereas poststructuralism emphasizes performativity, pragmaticism capitalizes on the “actor” or agent that fiction and art allow us to “become” (Fluck, “Pragmatism” 341). Experience of art or other aesthetic artifacts thus transforms into a future-oriented politics of change. Whereas the division between “social facts”/science and “aesthetic values”/humanities constituted a fundamental dualism in the early debates on American Studies methods (O. Hansen 144), we are now at a point where, after having reassessed facts and values, we recover “aesthetic experience” as a way of knowing the world, of bridging the gap between self and other (cf. Claviez, “Pragmatism” 353), of articulating “otherwise
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inexpressible dimensions of the self” (Fluck, “Pragmatism” 341), and of reconceiving intersubjectivity as consensual rather than conflictual. 44 To my mind, by contrast, the many cross-routes as well as the specific concerns of current theories of American Studies rather hint that we might fare best if we resist dividing pragmatism, poststructuralism, and politically informed cultural studies into separate camps where they do not belong. In the context of his “search for ecological genealogies in American culture,” Claviez, for instance, recommends that we reengage the methodological assumptions made by (early and later) American Studies (Marx, Nash Smith, Bercovitch, Lawrence Buell), reconsider critical theory (here Adorno), and realign American and European philosophy in order to arrive at “an alternative” to pragmatism’s denial of hierarchies of power and “a post-Romantic assessment of a possible marriage between self and world” (“Pragmatism” 359, 378). Likewise, it might be more pragmatic to consult, in matters that pragmatism relegates to the periphery, those theories that are really good on peripheral matters. What about, for instance, the fact that aesthetic experience can mean many things to many individuals? Pragmatism —especially if employed as a theory of interpreting literary texts—reempowers the reader. Who is that reader, though, and what is he or she reading? Most likely, he or she is a literary critic. So what does the critic read? So far, he or she is primarily engaged in a revision of ‘classic’ American texts. (In fact, pragmatism’s most obvious effect on German American Studies, at this point in time, has been to raise the status of and in fact Americanize the study of aesthetics and of canonical literature.) What about the reader who resists being empowered, who is there simply for the ride (see Eco 321)? What about a reader/listener/viewer who, as Christoph Ribbat puts it in this volume, does not want to hide his or her love forever? And what about the reader who prefers not to read and tunes in or interactively engages computer games? 45 Bringing these questions to bear on the new pragmatist paradigm, we may avoid returning to presuppositions of an early American Studies agenda and to becoming the kind of practitioner of American Studies whom Olaf Hansen considered “more a construction of a history of ideas than a concrete individual motivated by social contexts” (141).61 Just as shifts in theoretical perspectives have opened new dimensions of paradigmatic postmodernist fiction, foregrounding that postmodern texts, far from exhausting themselves in “language games,” raise moral and ethical questions as well (see Hoffmann and Hornung), a reemphasis of aesthetics (see Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics”) can do much good for readings of “ethnic literatures” (see Schiller), which more often than not ignore matters of form. Accordingly, the full potential of pragmatism for literary studies will come to the fore when it engages texts from the periphery or is employed by ‘peripheral’ readers. However, since there is no “body of knowledge called pragmatism” (Fluck, Introduction x) only a plurality of (neo-)pragmatisms, pragmatism can provide neither theory nor method for American Studies, even though it is noteworthy that the term method is being reintroduced in this context.62 Rather, in its final consequence, pragmatism undoes the very project of trying to circumscribe what American Studies actually busies itself with. At the same time, despite the fact that pragmatist approaches to American literature dissociate themselves from ideologically motivated cultural analyses, they tend to repeat these analyses’—explicit or implicit, and somewhat utopian—promises of (or aspirations toward) difference without hierarchy. Thereby, they come quite close to what has been labelled the core or heart of the American Studies agenda, “the pursuit of what constitutes democratic culture (Kessler-Harris qtd. in Ickstadt, “Americanization” 9), of
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an America that is “as yet unrealized” (Ickstadt, “Americanization” 155). Theorizing work on media other than literature evolving within German American Studies also remains yet unrealized; work, which capitalizes on American cultural productions, yet, does not necessarily conceptualize its disciplinary leanings. This may perhaps be an arena where pragmatism’s appeal to interdisciplinarity may come into play more prominently. 8. Theory as Practice, Practice as Theory, or : Futures for American Studies 46 In concluding, let me briefly return to the essay collection, edited by Fluck and Claviez in 2003, concerned with theories of American culture and/as theories of American Studies. Its significance is not so much due to the theories it discusses; in fact, there is much less of such debate than one might perhaps expect. Significant is how this deficit is sanctioned : all work in American Studies, the editors emphasize, is “grounded in a set of underlying constitutive views of American culture” and relies on “often tacit assumptions” which may not be systematically developed as theories, yet “imply generalizations about ‘America’ or the meaning of American history that have a systematic dimension, no matter whether this dimension is fully worked out or not” (Fluck and Claviez, Introduction ix). Aimed at making the implicit assumptions of our interpretations of American society and culture topical (xi),63 the editors’ agenda acknowledges how dramatically our conceptions of theory have changed. Whereas in the 1970s, explorations of methods and theories were legitimized by the practice they enable, we now do theory when engaging each others’ critical practice. And this in itself is an effect of the ‘rise of theory’ in 1980s literary and cultural studies. 47 At the same time, the practice of American Studies in Germany is by no means limited to literary studies—and this is, after all, at least partly an effect of (post-) structuralism and (Saussurian) semiotics. Work in the realm of popular culture and the new media— including visual cultures (photography, film, video, multimedia), new technologies (hypertext, CD-ROM, computer and video games), the history of the sciences, ecocriticism, performance studies, explorations of intermediality and reconceptualizations of time and space64—have suggested that we have meanwhile made a whole series of turns, turning out to be quite transdisciplinary after all. Therefore, it is indeed timely to note, as the initiators of the DFG-network on “The Futures of (European) American Studies” do, that most of the debates on theories and futures of American Studies easily do without figuring in explorations of popular culture and the new media. In fact, as Katrin Amian, Michael Butter, Elisabeth Schäfer- Wünsche, Ingrid Thaler, and their collaborators claim, despite their inclusion of cinematic discourse, “current theories of American Studies are dominated by the paradigm of print.”65 Addressing this Medienvergessenheit and extending our theoretical debates to theories of other media, they convincingly argue, allows to engage the interdependencies between new forms of cultural production and new political and economic challenges, including organized terrorism and the new American front(iers), home and abroad. Moreover, the practice of theorizing new media also adds another dimension to current attempts to internationalize American Studies. After all, the internationalization of our pursuits is as much the result of the globalization of certain technologies as it is indebted to the singular efforts of particular individuals located in particular places. Thus, if some of us redefine American Studies as media studies,66 we necessarily challenge the authority of certain texts and readers, by embracing a different, a processural sense of (inter)subjectivity instead.
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48 In a most general sense, such interrogation of critical practices for their conceptual significance clearly foregrounds that theory is not—and theories of American Studies have never been—a one-way street. Theory opens perspectives on the world while the readings of the world they enable hopefully, ideally, reflect back upon and readjust our perspectives. Readings of the world and its media, in turn, evolve paradigms which may challenge and extend our established ways of approaching cultural practices. Theorizing thus remains a highly dialectical matter. And as the transdisciplinary work of Žižek brings to light, moving between Hegel and Lacan, between the scenes of Hitchcock’s movies, the scenarios staged at Abu Ghraib, and the prospects of biogenetic intervention, it not only affirms theory as both practice and politics. It also foregrounds that dialectics does not necessarily mean thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Nowadays more often than not dialectics spells thesis, antithesis, contradiction. Thus, if there are futures for American Studies it seems that neither centrifugal pluralisms, as envisioned in Whitehead’s “Lit-O-Rama,” nor barriers between seemingly opposed camps will do. Because clearly separated camps often turn out contradictions too hard to acknowledge, let alone bear; because we are all in one boat (even if ours may not be the French feminist’s love boat) and, to add another truism, because the supposed others are always parts of our selves. To call on Žižek in this context, therefore, is not to suggest that the most interesting work on American culture is being done “outside of American Studies”67 or that “[t]o open up outside perspectives,” as Claviez claims, “[…] allow[s] for a distance” that American American Studies may lack (“Whose ‘American’ Century?” 258). It is to emphasize that distance, like clarity, is hard to be had. Žižek insists that we can do neither without a concept of the subject that acknowledges his or her fundamental instability and the (Lacanian) real as a fundamental part of the human condition and thus all cultural phenomena; nor can we abolish ethical thinking. Like Rorty, Žižek is highly critical of “[t]he multitude of particular ethics that spread nowadays (the ethics of ecology, medical ethics …),” not because they tend to reinscribe social and economic hierarchies, though, but because they hamper what he considers “the true ethic, the ethics of an act whose status is that of the real” (204). 49 The major contradiction that we need to bear is that, yes, the meaning of America has been deeply compromised since American Studies started to reflect its methods. And yet if we want to outweigh the “continuing process of self-deconstruction,” we should, as Ickstadt keeps insisting (“Americanization” 156), accept the name American Studies as the boundary, first of all perhaps because under certain conditions the national framework is not a boundary but an open vista. If we frame the transdisciplinary study of popular and visual cultures, for instance, by way of national perspectives, there may be many new methodological and theoretical challenges and more ‘great moments in Amst’ ahead. In fact, by rendering the “great moments in lit-crit” by way of visuals, the Village Voice makes exactly this point. At the risk of repeating myself : wherever we may turn next—American Studies is dead. Long live American Studies!
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NOTES
1.I thank Markus Fischer for excellent research assistance. 2.In this context, Robert Weimann’s work would be particularly significant. See Weimann, New Criticism, “Literaturwissenschaft” “Westöstliche engagements”; cf. also Riese. 3.Günter Lenz has provided us with indispensable work on the development of American Studies and its theories and methods, to parts of which I make reference throughout this essay, though I cannot do justice to its overall scope. As a general rule my own perspective is limited to theoretical discussions within German American
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Studies, even if this work, as I am well aware, evolves in dialogue with work done in the U.S. On the history of American Studies/Amerikanistik in Germany see Strunz and Haas. 4.Günter Lenz, in particular, has argued, that “[o]nly if the history of American Studies is taken seriously in its theoretical implications, and not just used as a negative foil for suggesting a new program, can their ‘crisis’ be understood and become consequential for a ‘philosophy’ of American Studies in the future.” In 1982 he suggested “that a ‘theory’ or ‘philosophy’ of American Studies will have to grow out of a systematic historical reconstruction of the development and the crisis of the American Studies movement” (“American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 63, 82). 5.This essay does not make any claims at comprehensiveness; in fact, for the sake of argument, I fear it turned out quite partial. I do regret, though, the omission of many German contributions to theorizing American Studies, I apologize for my tunnel vision, and beg for my readers’ mercy. 6.See, especially, Ickstadt, “American Studies”; Lenz, “Toward a Dialogics,” “Transnational American Studies”; Hornung, “Transnational American Studies,” which was the reply to Fishkin. See also recent projects which attempt to “foster,” as the journal Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives does, “a transcultural dialogue between the two hemispheres and, specifically, the nations of Europe, the Americas, and Africa” (cf. journal flyer). 7.See Huyssen as well as Brook, both of whom employ a conception of distinct, yet interrelated histories and subjectivities in place of more traditional linear, teleological conceptions of (cultural) history. Throughout, Lenz’s essays emphasize the interdependence of multiple critical positions or explicitly acknowledge the synchronicity of non-synchronic theoretical approaches; see, for instance, Lenz, “Reconstructing” 32. Similarly, this conception affected critical practice: In his study of postmodern poetry Ulfried Reichardt differentiates between the very particular, yet synchronic poetics of John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, Denise Levertov, and Adrienne Rich; see Innenansichten. Hartwig Isernhagen depicts the New English Literatures as characterized by a “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” (162-63). 8.This question in fact motivated the founding of the Post-Graduate Forum which, in 1989, was primarily conceived of as a network of doctoral candidates in American Studies and a forum for debates on what we then considered ‘new’ theories. Cf. also the first publication of the Post-Graduate Forum (Irmscher and Sielke). 9.This line of my argument is highly indebted to the research pursued by the network “The Futures of (European) American Studies,” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and coordinated by Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche. I will come back to this point at the end of my essay. 10.All translations from the German are mine. The German reads: “Theorien sind Ordnungs- und Hierarchisierungsversuche von kulturellem Material, die immer da notwendig werden, wenn der Status und Stellenwert eines Gegenstandsbereichs unklar oder umstritten ist.” 11.This goes as much for Adorno, as for O. Hansen, and Lenz “American Studies— Wissenschaftskritik.” 12.I make reference here to Marx’s contribution to the conference on “Theories of American Culture” at the John F. Kennedy-Institut in May 2002, published as “On Recovering.” 13.The significance of American Studies/Amerikanistik for the development of this dialogue should not be underestimated. In fact, as Gassert’s study Amerika im Dritten
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Reich emphasizes, American Studies emerged within and against the climate of a highly ambivalent perception of the United States (116-36). Schivelbusch’s recent study Entfernte Verwandtschaft, which perceptively discloses parallels between Italian fascism, German national socialism, and the American New Deal, may throw new light on these ambivalent interdependencies. 14.Fluck, in particular, has employed the term Americanization to delineate the impact of American perspectives on central terms of literary and cultural studies. Cf. his essays “The ‘Americanization,’” and “Die ‘Amerikanisierung’ der Geschichte”; see also Isernhagen, “Postmodern (Dis)continuities.” 15.See, in particular, O. Hansen, and Lenz, “American Studies—Wissenschaftskritik.” In 1973 the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Tutzing was dedicated to “American Studies als wissenschaftstheoretisches Problem.” 16.See Milich. O. Hansen, in his essay “American Studies,” adopts Kuhn’s terminology to distinguish five paradigms that, he argues, structured the debate about theories of American Studies at the time. 17.When I talk about ‘early American Studies’ in this essay, I am referring to the early history of the field, not to early American cultural history. 18.The success of Paul Nolte’s argument on mass culture may serve as an example here (Generation Reform). 19.This is due to the fact that, as Hans-Jürgen Grabbe emphasizes, American Studies was established primarily within established disciplines and first and foremost in English departments, which in turn needs to be registered as a success for literary studies (172). 20.See, for instance, Freese and Harris; Berressem; and Mayer. Work on ecocriticism, pursued by Christa Grewe-Volpp and Sylvia Mayer, for instance, also foregrounds that American Studies may profit much from engaging the natural sciences and their cultural history. 21.The work of Homi Bhabha, for instance, has gained a lot of mileage from recontextualizing the term ‘mimicry’ without giving feminist critique, far and foremost Luce Irigaray, much credit for it. 22.On the issue see Isernhagen, “American Studies.” Isernhagen suggests that regarding “American Literature as the first of the New Literatures in English” opens new perspectives on the question of what “American” actually means (158). 23.Cf. Christoph Ribbat’s essay in this volume. 24.Paul Lauter has shown that many literary texts, authored by female and African American writers and central to 1920s and 30s American cultures, were deleted from the canon of American literature in the 1940s and 50s (435-63). Adorno’s argument on jazz is legend, of course. 25.The complicated interdependencies of German and American racial ideologies and politics have been addressed, for instance, in the debates on the Americanization of the Holocaust. Cf. Rohr, “Playing Nazis,” as well as work by Heike Paul and Hilke Kuhlmann, among others. See also Isernhagen, “Roles of Native American Texts”; Sielke and Schäfer-Wünsche. 26.In fact the diversity of perspectives within African American Studies (cf. the work of Berndt Ostendorf, Maria Diedrich, Friederike Hajek, Werner Sollors, Elisabeth Schäfer- Wünsche, Sieglinde Lemke, among many others) and Native American Studies (cf. Gerhard Hoffmann, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Moss, Thomas Claviez, and Georg Schiller, to mention only a few names) attests to the centrality of these two fields within German
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American Studies (see Lutz). Likewise, it is interesting to note how early and how insistently, under the given economic constraints, African American and Native American texts were translated into German in the GDR (cf. van der Heyden). 27.This tendency also functioned vice versa, it seems: In 1984 Lenz notes a decrease of interest in an inter- or multidisciplinary American Studies and, if compared with the discussion in the United States, what he considers a “Theoriedefizit” (“Probleme einer Didaktik” 23). 28.Reference was, first and foremost, to Robert Sklar whose influential essay “American Studies and the Realities of America” (1970) argued that “American Studies, as an intellectual discipline, is in crisis,” in fact “has always been in crisis” (qtd. in Lenz, “American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?” 55). 29.This tendency holds true in the American university system as well; see Newfield. 30.According to Hansen the capacities of American Studies to synthesize different scholarly approaches showed, for instance, in their ability to redirect the humanities from analyses of the past to a consideration of contemporary literature and culture, a focus that was associated more strongly with the sciences (whereas the social sciences supposedly took a middle position). 31.This is still the case, for instance, in parts of Eastern Europe, Asia, and North Africa. 32.The definition of “radical American Studies” has changed and shifted, of course. In 1973 Olaf Hansen refers to the politicization of American Studies in the early 1970s, which was accompanied by a growing emphasis on the social sciences and effected by the work of critics such as Sklar and Gene Wise, critics who called the ideologies of the early American Studies into question and insisted that the field take account of the material social realities of American culture. From this perspective the centrality of literary studies was highly contested. “[T]he larger the difference between the promises of culture and the social realities,” Hansen writes, “the more problematic the occupation with literature becomes” (168). For a history of “radical American Studies” from the 1930s to the 1960s, see Lenz, “American Studies and the Radical Tradition.” 33.Contextualism is a term that Fluck derives from Murray Krieger, cf. Krieger. 34.I make reference here to the project proposal of the DFG-Network “The Futures of (European) American Studies.” 35.See, for example, Miller; and Hof, “Writing Women.” 36.Significant in this context is, for instance, the impact of poststructuralist theory on the study of autobiography. See Hornung, “American Autobiographies.” 37.For a more detailed analysis of the significance of conceptions of gender for American Studies, see Sielke, “Why Gender Matters”; see also Koenen; Reichardt and Sielke. As opposed to U.S. academia, German universities and their English departments have not really lived up to the challenge of feminist and gender theories, cf. Schabert; and Hark. 38.It is thanks to the work of Evelyne Keitel, Elisabeth Bronfen, Gisela Ecker, Renate Hof, Sigrid Weigel, among many others, that the insights of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, French poststructuralism, and the continuous redefinition of gender based on this work significantly enlarged our perspectives on the work that (American) culture performs and made us aware of American misreadings of well-travelled continental theories. See, in particular, Hof, “Einleitung”; and Keitel. For a historicization of French feminist theory see also Sielke, Fashioning.
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39.See especially the work of Heinz Ickstadt, Peter Freese, Gerhard Hoffmann, Alfred Hornung, Hartmut Isernhagen, Joseph Schöpp, Hanjo Berressem, Martin Klepper, among many others. Cf. Neubauer. 40.This is due in part to the fact that New Criticism capitalized on poetry, in part to the cultural function of early American Studies, which aimed at establishing a respectable canon of American literature. Thus, the myth and symbol school turned to romance and transcendentalism to coin the misnomer American renaissance. Poststructuralist approaches reengaged American romanticism and (post-)modernist texts while the New Historicism found in sentimentalist, realist and naturalist texts its most promising target. Each of these interactions redefine the relation between theory and cultural practice. 41.In Germany, this revision evolved the highly useful Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, edited by Hubert Zapf. 42.Theories of postcoloniality, apart from New Historicism, still remain marginal to the field of American Studies, which is partly due to the fact that postcolonial criticism employs the, albeit contested, distinction between settler and non-settler colonies. There are, of course, many exceptions to this tendency, among them Ruth Mayer’s study Artificial Africas. One may perhaps also figure in here attempts to ‘make use’ of Deleuze for American Studies, delineated by Schleusener. Against ideologically motivated readings which, according to Deleuze, cannot account for the affects and intensities of literary texts, Deleuze abolishes, as Schleusener argues, the fixity called America and offers the conception of ‘minor literatures’ to be contextualized within postcolonial critiques. 43.Accordingly, issues of globalization are central to current American Studies; cf. Bach, Bröck, and Schulenberg. 44.I make reference here to Siemerling’s study, which includes material from the United States and Canada, yet does not extend its project of retheorizing the field to Mexico. 45.Let me emphasize that I am not concerned with the development of the field of American history here, but with the changing definition of the historical as it impacted on the study of American literature and culture. 46.See Reichardt, “Poststrukturalismus”; and Hebel. In New Historicism, Moritz Baßler explicitly aims at making German historians familiar with new historical perspectives and provides a German audience with paradigmatic texts by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, and Svetlana Alpers, among others (see “Einleitung”). The editor includes Fluck’s essay “Die ‘Amerikanisierung’ der Geschichte” and acknowledges that this ‘method’ has first been productively employed in Germany in the context of “Amerikanistik” (24). 47.In 1983 the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Kiel focused on “Amerikastudien als Kulturwissenschaft: Modell- und Paradigmenwechsel.” 48.There are, of course, many historians who resist this redefinition as well as historians who reclaim genres or texts as historiographic, which recent theory had claimed to be fictional; see, for instance, Lehmkuhl. 49.Fluck himself was highly instrumental in making German American Studies familiar with the ‘new historicism’ in the 1980s and 1990s; see also Hebel; and Baßler, New Historicism.
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50.For a critical discussion of Greenblatt’s sense of “circulation of social energies,” see Haselstein. 51.To my mind Mackenthun’s essay seems to exemplify a general tendency within German American Studies, on the one hand, to embrace new historical perspectives and thereby revitalize, for instance, the study of the colonial period and matters of colonization while, on the other, resisting part of its poststructuralist foundations. 52.The term synthesis looms large, for instance, in the essay collection Reconstructing, ed. Lenz, Keil and Bröck-Sallah. Part of the volume is dedicated to ‘the problem of’ or rather “the need for synthesis,” as Thomas Bender puts it in his much-discussed essay first published in the Journal of American History (1986) and reprinted in Lenz, Keil and Bröck-Sallah. 53.In turn philosophers like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum engage literary practice for its ethical potential, a potential which is as new and promising to them as it is familiar fare to scholars of literary theory. In fact, Nussbaum employs a highly dated conception of literature, which puts a clear limit to the scope of her argument; see, for instance, Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice. 54.Fluck discusses the collections The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Dickstein; Pragmatism, ed. Goodman; and Pragmatism, ed. Menand, as examplary for the revival of pragmatism, yet “remain[ing] surprisingly weak and unfocused, in the area of art, literature, and culture” (x). In German American Studies, Herwig Friedl has consistently employed pragmatist philosophy in order to reassess crucial moments of American culture as well as the scope of American pragmatist thought without, however, necessarily positioning his argument within the debates around theories of American Studies. See, for instance, “Art and Culture,” “Thinking America,” “Global Aspects,” and “Thinking in Search of a Language.” Rorty’s neopragmatism has been explored by Reinhard and Schulenberg, for instance, in “Wanting Lovers.” 55.The German reads: “Primat des Erkenntnisprozesses über den Gegenstandsbereich.” 56.Fluck sees this “politics of self-empowerment” as the main goal of the cultural radicalism he finds characteristic for the current state of the humanities in the United States; see also Fluck, “The Role of the Reader.” 57.On the subject of mimesis and its ‘beyonds,’ see, for instance, Schöpp; and Ickstadt, Der amerikanische Roman. 58.This goes for Gender Trouble as well as for Butler’s essay “Performative Acts” which lays the groundwork for her later arguments. 59.The subject himself or herself is, we can read in the German original, “Schauplatz dieser Ambivalenz” in which he or she evolves “sowohl als Effekt einer vorgängigen Macht wie als Möglichkeitsbedingung für eine radikal bedingte Form der Handlungsfähigkeit” (Die Psyche der Macht 19). 60.This is the context for a revival of Emerson’s poet who reappears in Rorty’s “strong poet.” 61.The German text reads: “mehr eine ideengeschichtliche Konstruktion als ein konkretes, in sozialen Zusammenhängen motiviertes Individuum.” 62.See, for instance, the passage I quoted at the beginning of this subchapter. 63.Or as Fluck puts it in 1987: “[…] auch wo eine Beschäftigung mit dem Gegenstand nicht explizit von einem systematischen Begründungszusammenhang ausgeht, ist sie doch unvermeidlicherweise eingebunden in ein System theoretischer Annahmen, das die jeweilige Interpretationspraxis gewollt oder ungewollt, bewußt oder unbewußt leitet und sich daher auch aus dieser rekonstruieren läßt” (Theorien 5).
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64.Needless to say any list of references in this context cannot be but incomplete and partial. Cf., for instance, research that evolved in the vicinity of the Visual Culture Network (e.g. work by Christoph Decker and Ernst-Peter Schneck, among others); writing on popular culture by Karin Esders, Ruth Mayer, Christoph Ribbat, and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche; and work on hyperculture edited by Martin Klepper, Mayer, and Schneck. 65.I quote from the network’s initial project proposal. 66.Accordingly the 2006 annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Göttingen explores “American Studies as Media Studies.” 67.I make reference here to the summer school “Outside American Studies,” organized by Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman at Dartmouth College.
RÉSUMÉS
Partly due to the transdisciplinary agenda of the field, the development of American Studies has been accompanied by intensive debates about methods and theories. This essay relates a— necessarily reductive—narrative about how, throughout its history, German American Studies has intervened into and contributed to these debates; and how, with the emergence of parameters and politics of difference, on the one hand, and poststructuralist thought and notions of différance, on the other, the early debate on methods of American Studies transformed into discussions of theories of American literature, culture, history etc. In the light of what I perceive as the current division within German American Studies—a division between work that refocuses the theoretical discussion on literary studies and questions of aesthetics and analyses that engage other cultural practices and media by way of explicit theoretical perspectives, yet not necessarily in the frame of an American Studies agenda—my argument suggests that we take a more dialectical approach to the plurality of theories American Studies engages. While such an approach can no longer aim at syntheses and needs to allow for incoherencies and contradictions, it seems indispensable if we aim at futures for American Studies.1
INDEX
Keywords : Literature, history, interdisciplinarity, pragmatism, culture, transdisciplinarity, poststructuralism, aesthetics, pluralism
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(Re)Considering American Studies in Greece
1 In writing about American studies in Greece, one is tempted to consider for a moment the fact that the field, ever since it placed itself on the international academic map, has been in a constant process of self-discovery and self-becoming. Its openness, which may be taken as evidence for its vibrant existence and its ability to reconstruct and deconstruct itself, has led to new areas of research, new formulations, new critiques, as well as to an essential paradox : although we currently witness an increasing interest in American studies, as evidenced by the steadily growing number of American studies organizations all over the world, there seems to be no fixed definition of what American studies is or represents. In the context of the new global conditions, a number of scholars have argued that American studies should develop “new paradigms for thinking about the United States, through the shared critical dialogue of national and international perspectives.”1 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her Presidential Address at the American Studies Association (Nov. 12, 2004), pointed out the transnational turn in American studies, while Benjamin Lee, as early as 1995, spoke of the need for a “critical internationalism,” a continuous de-centering of “our preconceptions both of ourselves and of others.”2 In view of this turn towards the transnational, Heinz Ickstadt reminds us that “the study of American culture can have a national focus and a transnational perspective, since cultural identities are the result of complex cultural exchanges embedded in histories that extend beyond national borders.”3
2 With these in mind, and given the present de-centralized status of the field, one could argue that American studies can take various forms and have different faces all over the world, depending on diverse national interests, traditions, political and historical experiences. In Greece, the trajectory of American literature and culture seems to have been inextricably linked to the various political and ideological transformations that took place in mid-20th century. It was just a few years after the end of World War II, and with the implementation of the Marshall Plan in 1947, when American literature and American culture in general started making their presence felt in the Greek market. And with them, the American myth of equal opportunity for all, prosperity and progress began to penetrate the national consciousness of Greeks who were consistently encouraged to immigrate in search of their American dream. It was during
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that time that a considerable number of American authors were translated into Greek and numerous playwrights had their first Greek production. Nevertheless, as Savas Patsalidis argues, “the American literary canon, despite its appeal and promising financial prospects, hardly received proper academic and critical attention.”4 It would take quite a few years, in the early 1960s, before American literature was given a canonical interpretation by a number of Greek critics. This kind of literary criticism was mainly celebratory of American exceptionalism and nationalism without acknowledging the various social problems and divisions that the United States experienced at the time. 3 However, the shift in political and ideological orientation that pertained to the Greek governmental change from the seven-year dictatorship (1967-1974) to a popularly elected democratic government unleashed numerous discourses that began to promote more “radical” ideas. It was within this context that Greek intellectuals began to explore the significance of experimental or “marginal” voices in American literature. Suffering only a brief setback in the years between 1974 and 1976, when a strong anti- American feeling emerged as many Greeks blamed the United States for supporting the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, American literary works and cultural products held a prevalent position in Greek society and among the Greek readership.5 In the literary space opened up by the continuous inflow of American literature, Greek critics, intellectuals, and translators began to change their perspective and no longer searched only for the typology of the myth of the American dream, but also started to challenge the homogenizing rhetoric of the canonical literary works of the United States. As the decade wound down, Greek readers were consistently exposed to a multiplicity of texts and ideas becoming more and more aware of the complexities of American society and way of life as well as of its polymorphous literary production, canonized as well as marginal. 4 It was during those years that the English departments of the universities of Thessaloniki and Athens gradually released themselves from the long and firmly- rooted managerial control of the departments of Classics, the British Council, and the American Cultural centers, and were finally able to set their own independent academic programs. Coupled with the fact that the Greek government altered the (German) Chair system, thus allowing more holders of doctorates into academe, these changed policies resulted in a tremendous renewal of university curricula as well as in the creation of the first department of American Literature and Culture of the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1988).6 Launched with new orientations, ambitious future plans, and young scholars, the department aimed from the start at the promotion of the research and study of American literature and culture in Greece. As a newly born academic program, it faced a major intellectual challenge in its effort to map new areas of research, generate new concepts and questions, and stimulate new interests in the younger generation of students and future scholars. It is from this vantage point that the department of American Literature and Culture set out to explore the multiple meanings and complexities of America and its culture(s). 5 Recognizing that the field of American studies is an increasingly important site of knowledge, a place of crossings, hybridities,7 and fluidities, the department has embraced, along with the study of more traditional American texts,8 the dissenting voices of minorities and women, and has sought to interrogate, rather than reify and reinforce, visions of America, its ideological and political contradictions, ambivalences,
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aspirations and perspectives.9 A brief survey of the courses offered by the department can illustrate both the nuances and complexity of American studies in Greece. Following the historical trajectory of the development of an American national identity and culture, the students are introduced to a significant number of texts—ranging from Puritan writings to postmodern texts—which reflect the social, political, cultural, and ideological transformations that eventually led to the formation of the American literary tradition and the American conscience in general. 6 In a most interesting article on “Literary and Cultural Studies in the Transnational University,” J. Hillis Miller appears a bit skeptical about the rise of American studies and its academic discourse and considers it part of a larger attempt “to create the unified national culture we do not in fact have.”10 This idea takes us back to the emergence of American literary criticism in the 1940s when the first American studies scholars (mostly literary critics and historians), people like F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and others, opened up the floodgates for a close reading of American literary texts as a form of cultural analysis as well as for a critique of the American mythic structures. Although this paradigm was later heavily criticized by a younger generation of American studies scholars who feared that even a critical perspective on American myths and their hegemonic power implied ideological complicity, it stressed the importance of the interplay between literary works and their societal and cultural contexts. In the courses offered by the department, especially those focusing on the socio-politically turbulent and ideologically insecure years of the American revolution and the 19th-century years of cultural and economic fluidity, the concept of American culture and identity, as embodied in the “classical” texts of the period, is relocated in the tangible world of American politics and social conflict. Far from assuming an essential homogeneity of American culture, these courses welcome a reappraisal of what constitutes an American democratic thought not within the concept of a unified culture, but within the context of the plurality and heterogeneity of American society and identity. 7 As we try to probe, among other things, possible gaps between U.S. rhetoric and reality, we are tempted to look into the “naturalness” of various national and cultural definitions and discourses that promulgate an artificial sense of difference between “self” and “other.” What does it mean to be “included” or “excluded” from a dominant, as much as abstract, concept of “Americanness?” What role do gender, race, and ethnicity play as policies of inclusion and exclusion draw borders and demarcating lines? What role do these categories play in literary production? A multicultural approach to literature that has opened up new theoretical areas in American studies has shaken the foundations of the claim to a coherent national culture and one national literature. In an attempt to explore concepts such as nationalism and imperialism, and phenomena such as immigration and diaspora, a number of the courses taught introduce students to the multicultural complexities of American identity and the polyvocality of American literature. The study of texts by Mexican, Black, Native- American as well as Greek-American writers traces the catalytic effect that the rise of ethnic and minority literatures has on the development of American literature.11 Given the gradual cultural turn in American studies, the courses offered by the department are placed within an international, rather than a specifically American, context and try to explore the “other” discourses of performance studies, film studies, as well as the theories and practices of the current historical and socio-political condition called postmodernism. Some of these courses familiarize the students with the latest
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developments of postmodern aesthetics on the international stage, with particular emphasis on the American scene, while others, through the study of scientific and technological narratives, examine the cognitive shifts in the representation of material and biosocial bodies and on human identity.12 8 As the courses taught at the department of American literature and culture move towards different directions and are informed by various disciplines and contending discourses, it would be fair to say that their common goal is to grasp the particularities and (dis)continuities of American culture and ideology and finally reach a far richer and deeper understanding of America. The goal of local Americanists is to comprehend how the United States’ socio-political, cultural, and economic transformations have affected its own national image as well as its relation with Europe and the rest of the world. The department is currently in a process of reconceptualization of its study program and reevaluation of its purpose and structure. It is important to conceive of the United States as complexly situated within a global context and of American studies as defined in dynamic relation to other areas of study, thus broadening our scope and welcoming the work of border-crossing writers and artists, as well as literary and cultural forms that move along multiple regional and national traditions, without of course undermining those classical texts that have come to enrich not only local literature but also world literature. 9 In the English Department at National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, though there is no separate American studies program, there seems to be a clear tendency in the courses on American literature and culture that are offered to explore “America” and its discourses, its dominant myths, as well as its canonical and marginal texts. Courses focusing on American culture and the role of the frontier in American imagination, for example, or on the cultural war of the 1960s, or on American women’s writing, attempt to position a range of issues and texts within their specific social, cultural, political, and economic context. Furthermore, at Panteion University, Athens, and more specifically, at the department of European and International Affairs, the study of American culture takes a more political perspective. At a time when American foreign policy, according to Shelley Fisher Fishkin, is “marked by nationalism, arrogance, and Manichean oversimplification,” some of the courses taught at the department of European and International Affairs seek to examine the role and impact of American politics and diplomacy on world issues. In the same line, the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, in co-operation with the Department of Public Affairs of the American Consulate of Thessaloniki, organize the American Studies Seminar once a year in an attempt to offer a politico-economic perspective on American studies. The nature of the Seminar is essentially interdisciplinary and Greek and American scholars from the fields of sociology, economy, history, political science, information technologies, get together and share their views and perspectives with an audience consisting primarily of undergraduate and graduate students. The theme of the 2005 American Studies Seminar was “The Transformation of American Politics, Policy, and Society : 1960-2005,” and its talks tried to cover American politics from the Cold War to the “War on Terror.” 10 It is also significant to note that the research and study of American culture—past and present—in Greece has been greatly promoted by the activities of HELAAS (Hellenic Association for American Studies), which has encouraged the flow of academic and cultural exchange through its conferences and publications since 1990, when it was
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chartered almost contemporaneously with the founding of the department of American literature and culture at Aristotle University. The Association is based in Thessaloniki and has now 70 members in Greece and Cyprus who come from many fields : literature, history, art, theatre, philosophy, sociology, ethnic studies, gender studies, popular culture and others. Throughout all these years, HELAAS has organized various international conferences, has participated in and sponsored a number of academic events, while it is now looking forward to the next EAAS biennial conference, which will be hosted by HELAAS at Nicosia, Cyprus (April 7-10, 2006). HELAAS’ strategy of collaborative intellectual exchange involves one symposium in Greek and one international conference in English, which take place interchangeably every year. This division achieves a double purpose : through its international conferences, HELAAS encourages the conversation and collaboration of scholars from different parts of the world and different fields and disciplines, and contributes significantly to the cross- fertilization and transfer of ideas and perspectives. It should be mentioned that all of HELAAS conferences have attracted large numbers of speakers and participants. For example, The Flesh Made Text : Bodies, Theories, Culture in The Post-Millennial Era conference (2003)—co-organized with HASE (Hellenic Association for the Study of English)—reached the unprecedented number of 260 speakers and 600 participants. On the other hand, through its local symposia, HELAAS aims at fostering the development of a critical dialogue and debate between Greek and foreign scholars of American studies from various disciplines and theoretical fields and the Greek community. The latest symposium, titled “American Poetry in Greece,” had an exceptionally large attendance of academics, students, and the reading public, a fact which proves both the need for and the appeal of such cross-cultural explorations and conceptual orientations. All the conferences and symposia organized or co-organized by HELAAS have explored different aspects of American culture and ideology and have all led to the publication of some worthwhile volumes, which include, among their contributors, scholars from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world.13 11 The amount of activity of HELAAS is also reflected in the publication of GRAMMA, an interdisciplinary journal of theory and criticism published annually in conjunction with HASE. GRAMMA welcomes articles, both in Greek and English, of varying subject matter and approach as well as book reviews. The editorial board of GRAMMA includes names of distinguished scholars in Europe and the United States, such as Sue-Ellen Case, Sander Gilman, Michael Hays, Mary Jacobus, Thomas Laqueur, among others. GRAMMA invites the original work of scholars from various fields and each individual issue is devoted to a specific topic. For example, its 2002 issue, titled Theatre(s) in the Age of New Technologies, brings together a collection of essays by theatre scholars and practitioners who set out to explore the dramatic (mis)representations of science- technology in present-day life, the theatrical body as cyborg, digital scenography, etc. The forthcoming 2005 issue of GRAMMA focuses on Comparative Literature and Global Studies : Histories and Trajectories and seeks to provide a forum for debate on the usable pasts and the emerging futures of a “worlded” comparative literature. At this point, I would like to add that every issue of GRAMMA is sent to the libraries of European and American colleges and universities in an attempt to make our scholarly work known beyond the Greek borders. It is important that we take advantage of our “outside” position as we seek new paths towards more varied analyses of American culture and society. Our efforts, as non-American scholars of American studies who live in Europe, have been towards the construction of a native critical logos that would raise questions
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concerning American particularities, coherences, fragmentations, transatlantic and inter-cultural relations, and, wherever necessary, challenge former understandings and practices of both American culture and literature.14 Over the last few years, the introduction of a comparative perspective has been deemed necessary in order to expand the borders within which the study of “America” has been conducted, and explore the powerful interaction of the literary production between the United States and other nations/cultures. It requires that we start interrogating the borders both within and outside America and pay attention to the ways in which ideas, people, and culture circulate and interpenetrate. In this way, we will be able to filter our critique of American culture, ideology, and policies through our own historical and cultural background and consider the concept of “Americanness” within a larger framework that combines the domestic and the foreign, the national and the international : in short, American studies from a European perspective.
NOTES
1.I would like to thank Prof. Savas Patsalidis for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 48 (1996) : 479. 2. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Culture : The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American Quarterly 57 (2005) : 17-57; Benjamin Lee, “Critical Internationalism,” Public Culture 7 (1995) : 591. 3. Heinz Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,” American Quarterly 54 (2002) : 556. 4. Savas Patsalidis, “(Mis)Understanding America’s Literary Canon : The Greek Paradigm, in As Others Read Us : International Perspectives on American Literature, ed. Huck Gutman (Amherst : The U of Massachusetts P, 1991), 116. 5. At the same time, the English language gradually established itself as the nation’s most important second language. As Patsalidis himself admits, “I know of no other country that runs so many classes in English. Statistics show that in each four-member family there is at least one student of English, which means one prospective consumer of America’s cultural products.” Patsalidis, 123. 6. Initially founded as a University Institute of Foreign Languages in 1951, it acquired its present title of School of English in 1984. It now consists of four departments : Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, English Literature and Culture, American Literature and Culture, and Translation and Cultural Studies. 7. José Saldívar thinks of America as a place of “hybridity and betweenness.” Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America : Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, N.C. : Duke UP, 1991), 153. 8. At this point, I would like to stress that the study of a culture – even if diversity and fragmentation are its most salient characteristics – cannot be based on a study of
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dissent alone. It is impossible to recognize the “other” without recognizing elements of the “self” at the same time.
9. According to Homi Bhabha, it is through these ambivalences that a nation attempts to create a unified, consistent identity of itself. As Bhabha himself explains, “the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London : Routledge, 1994), 140. 10. J. Hillis Miller, “Literary and Cultural Studies in the Transnational University,” in John Carlos Rowe, ed., “Culture” and the Problem of Disciplines (New York : Columbia UP, 1998), 59. 11. Although Leo Marx, in his “Reflections on American Studies,” pointed out “what a diminished role literary study now has in American studies – and on the humanities generally,” it seems that the study of women’s, ethnic, African-American, Chicano, and Native-American literature can lead to a political, social, and cultural analysis of the United States. Leo Marx, “Reflections on American Studies, Minnesota, and the 1950s,” American Studies 40 (1999), 40. 12. Some of the undergraduate courses taught at the department of American literature and culture at Aristotle University are : Race and Ideology in 19th-century American Literary and Dramatic Texts, American Gothic Texts, African-American Women Novelists, Contemporary American Poetry, 1950-2000, Minority Discourse in American Literature, Ethnicity and Literature : The Greek-American Paradigm, Science Fiction, African-American Theatre, Experimental Theatre : Avant-Garde and Postmodernist Innovations, to mention just a few. 13. The titles of the conferences organized or co-organized by HELAAS are : 1991 : “The American West” Symposium 1992 : “Aspects of American Civilization” Conference 1993 : “Hellenism and the USA” Conference 1994 : “Toni Morrison” Symposium 1995 : “Ethnicity and Sexuality” Conference 1997 : “Women, Creators of Culture” Conference 1998 : “Popular Culture in the USA” Conference 1999 : “Ideology and Melodrama” Conference 2000 : “Culture Agonistes : Text Against Text” Conference 2003 : “Does the United States Subsume the Idea of America?” Symposium 2003 : “The Flesh Made Text” Conference 2004 : “American Poetry in Greece” Conference 2005 : “The 5th Biennial Symbiosis Conference” 14. Some of these volumes include : Nationalism and Sexuality : Crises of Identity (1996), Women, Creators of Culture (1997), Popular Culture Made in the USA (2000), Melodrama (2001).
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INDEX
Keywords: Cyprus, HELAAS, GRAMMA, hybridities, myth, politics, Poetry, theatre
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American Studies in Hungary
1 The beginning of American Studies as an academic discipline at Hungarian colleges and universities is basically coterminous with the watershed years of 1989-1990 when the country made a radical shift from state socialism toward parliamentary democracy and a free economy.1 This political and economic about-face, which came hand in hand with the undermining of foundationalist certainties and the generation of new anxieties coincided, more or less, with the radical transformation that American Studies was undergoing between the 1990s and early 2000s.2 Shaped by crucial scholarly debates in the US American Studies community since the 1970s, “paradigm dramas” (as diagnosed by Gene Wise in 1979) fomented New American Studies with powerful agendas of pluralization and de-centering—a most challenging project that shows striking resonances with changes in Hungarian society and culture since 1990.
2 However, the apparently easy parallel between paradigm shifts in Hungary on the one hand, and in American Studies scholarship in the US on the other, is misleading. Whereas dominant discourses of New American Studies demonstrate a markedly “leftist” commitment to effect social change by remapping the relationship between culture, power and social identities,3 current discourses in the highly charged political arena in Hungary demonstrate a shift toward conservative and/or populist agendas. To be sure, a country’s political climate (nowadays saturated with nationalist concerns and economic anxieties, real or generated) should not be confused with the politics of another’s scholarly community. What I seek to point out is the range of surprising discontinuities that a Hungarian Americanist is inevitably confronted with today when situating herself vis-à-vis subversive “post-Americanist” narratives about the transnational turn and critical internationalism typically dominating US scholarly dialogue today. 3 Rather than perceiving these discrepancies and discontinuities as frustrating obstacles in the way of internationalizing American Studies in Hungary, certain scholars conceive of them as re-energizing points of departure for getting things done in the profession. As a colleague from the University of Szeged in an Interroads debate suggested about his point of enunciation in the context of International American Studies, he “will always be practicing American Studies by nature from the outside, to be plain, as a Hungarian.”4 Speaking of positionality, Jane Desmond pursued a similar point in another context. She proposed that “our most pressing task at this time is not
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just to exchange research views on topics of mutual interest like American literature, or racial divisions, or foreign policy, or jazz. Rather, it is to collectively analyze the political and intellectual frameworks in which that work has been produced, along with its current configurations.”5 Indeed, the problematics of “internationalizing” American Studies, as we see it from this end, also seems to involve the task of interrogating the impact and meaning of American Studies as an intellectual import to Hungary, and of coping with the concomitant questions of how the object of study along with its critical dimensions are transformed in our teaching and researching American Studies in the national domain. 6 4 At this point of juncture it is also important to take a short detour of the European context from our vantage point. As a new member state of the European Union, we can’t but try to renegotiate a new positionality (or rather, an array of positions) and self-understanding(s) in the current course of “Europeanization,” when the United States seems to become, as John Borneman suggests, “Europe’s Other.” In an insightful essay invited by editor Virginia Dominguez to open a debate on a new collision course between “Europe” and “America,”7 Borneman claims that “[t]his new form of subjectivity, the ‘European,’ which looks more fragmented and incoherent the closer one gets to it, is nonetheless increasingly taking definition against the cultural practices of members of a particular other country, the United States.”8 As he suggests, today, contrary to the decades after World War II, when Americanization largely determined the trajectory of modernization, the conditions of globalization, and the spread of products and cultural values in Europe and elsewhere, Americanization/ Westernization is far from being a concept signifying a concerted Euro-American mission. Since West/Westernization and Europe/Europeanization have long been catchwords of a desirable Hungarian self-confidence and identity, this shift in the configuration of meanings may itself account for some of the increasing uncertainties— even anxieties—among Hungarians today. 5 For all the tendency of a growing divide between Europe and the US (as American and European participants of the AE debate ascertain), European culture, including Hungarian culture, is unquestionably Americanized. While four years ago my colleague, Tibor Frank’s diagnosis about the glaring differences between the fundamental parameters of life in America and Europe might have looked valid,9 by 2005, it is Berndt Ostendorf’s assessment that seems to apply to the Hungarian situation (especially, with reference to Hungarian political marketing, celebrity politics, personalized elections, economics, marketing and management strategies, the emerging US undergraduate— graduate division, along with the credit system). As he succinctly claims, “[i]ronically, one trajectory of Europeanization is precisely Americanization. Often the US way of doing things becomes the only common denominator that all European partners are prepared to agree on.”10 Elsewhere, Rob Kroes discusses the same tendency when reflecting on America’s national symbols that turned into free-floating signifiers in Europe: “Not only have we cracked American cultural codes and come to read them flawlessly, we have also appropriated these codes. They have become part of our collective imaginary repertoire.”11 Since the young generation, our students themselves, have already been socialized according to this collective imaginary repertoire, it is small wonder that they show great interest in courses attempting to interrogate the imbrications of the local into the international (and vice versa) in their
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own cross-cultural and transnational setting, that is, in their own Hungarian American experiences.12 6 With reference to the history of American Studies in Hungary, let me resort to a brief story stressing the importance of the 1970s.13 Hungarian American Studies was represented by increasing Hungarian participation in the activities of EAAS, and as a result, the 1986 EAAS Conference was held in Budapest—the first of its kind in a socialist country.14 The Hungarian Association for American Studies (HAAS) was established in 1992 and has been a member association of EAAS since 1994.15 7 Since the 1970s, especially since the landmark political changes of 1989-90, the number and focus of scholarly publications (including scholarly series, monographs and university textbooks) indicate a lively pluralization and growing interest in the study of the United States.16 8 New American Studies itself, as we know it today, with its dialogic dynamics of critical internationalism, has been one of the tangible benefits of the country’s political transformation : removing the Iron Curtain and pulling up the intellectual floodgates caused the sudden influx of most heterogeneous intellectual discourses and cultural and academic enterprises, including the appearance of American Studies professors and books about American Studies scholarship in our universities. Though Hungary had previously been regarded as the ‘happiest barracks’ of the communist camp in Eastern Europe, where, from the 1970s, the political and intellectual pressure was considerably lessened (making traveling and even studying abroad relatively free compared to other satellite countries), the euphoria evoked by the political, military and intellectual liberation of the country in 1989-1990 is still remembered with nostalgia. Rightly so, since the world has suddenly opened up for us, and the vigorous circulation of new ideas and perspectives, the introduction of issues only tangentially dealt with before, the articulation of (gender, ethnic and racial) sensitivities basically dormant before 1990, opened a new page in our history. 9 It goes without saying that the project of democratic restructuring was bound to affect higher education, specifically, the institutional and academic hierarchies of universities. Indeed, as politicians—irrespective of their ideological commitments or personal interests—did not cease to repeat it, Hungary was to become a strong, “knowledge-based democracy” fit to take center stage in (East) Central Europe. This noble social project was crucially to hinge on the increased participation of universities and colleges as major sites of knowledge production in shaping the contours of a robustly developing Hungarian society. By 2005, however, at the threshold of a ‘new age’, a year before Hungarian higher education is expected to operate in harmony with the Bologna Agreement as a proud member of the EU academic community, these optimistic prospects, especially at my home institution, ELTE, seem to be in shambles. Exploring the causes of this fiasco is beyond the scope of this short essay. So let me only tentatively hint at three here: the profound cynicism of politicians in view of prioritizing higher education and research in budgetary decisions, wholesale inadequacy in fiscal policy (within and without the university), and die-hard old- guardism in university management. 10 As regards American Studies scholarship, on the other hand, there were promising signs from the very beginning of a radical breakthrough largely due to committed Hungarian Americanists who wished to take the initiative and establish American Studies departments in two major universities, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE),
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Budapest (establishing the first American Studies department in 1990) and József Attila University, later the University of Szeged (starting the first American Studies program in the country).17 Kossuth Lajos University (later the University of Debrecen) with a traditional commitment to the study of American literature and language since the invaluable academic and publishing activities of the late Professor László Országh,18 established a North American department ; so, by the early 1990s, there already were three strong seats of teaching American Studies at three major universities at three different, geographically strategic locations in the country. These universities also offer graduate training in American Studies where students can earn a Ph.D. in American Studies, though typically “doctoral schools” operate under the auspices of “doctoral schools of Literary (or English Literary) Studies.” Besides the universities just mentioned, other sites of teaching American Studies as part of English Studies sprang into existence in the cities of Pécs, Veszprém, Eger, Nyíregyháza, and Szombathely. Despite budgetary constraints, considerable efforts have been made at university libraries, especially in Budapest, Debrecen and Szeged, to establish or enlarge American collections. 11 As of today, American Studies has been unacknowledged as a “serious” area of study by the Hungarian Scientific Academy (still a major institution to affect decisions about what is to be considered academically creditable and worthy of scholarly attention— and funds). Yet American Studies departments and programs with integrated and inter- and multidisciplinary courses on the USA have, from the beginning, regarded themselves as major sites of innovative efforts in course design, pedagogy, research, and various scholarly activities. Since the mid-1990s, there have been increasing efforts to map out New American Studies involving its Hungarian reconceptualizations in a Cultural Studies and Comparative/International American Studies perspective. This involved successful attempts at de-centering American Studies from its traditionally assumed ‘core’ constituted of ‘high’ literature and (consensus) history in order to embrace new themes of study and research relating to US foreign policy, cognitive linguistics, emigration and ethnic studies, film, visual culture, popular culture, African American literature and culture, multiculturalism, canon debates, as well as new methodologies derived from cultural anthropology, feminism, sociology, and critical multiculturalism.19 12 Given the fact that the majority of Hungarian Americanists were trained in English literature and language/linguistics or history and received no formal education in American Studies, old or new, launching, maintaining and developing integrated programs of American Studies courses initially required considerable effort and meant a highly demanding task with regard to the financial implications of this commitment. (Due to low remunerations, Americanists, like other academics, also took up a second— oftentimes a third—job to make ends meet.) Since sabbaticals are unknown in our system, scholarships and fellowships to the US (ACLS or Rockefeller), Germany (Stuttgart Seminar, JF Kennedy Institute in Berlin), Austria (Salzburg Seminar) and other West European countries were, and still are, the most rewarding ways of promoting research and teaching abroad. 13 There are Hungarian Americanists who regularly teach at prestigious American and West European universities. By now, a growing number of students can also take advantage of studying in the United States and in Western Europe within the framework of student exchange programs such as Erasmus or the ELTE-Graceland
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College exchange program; private foundations (such as the Kellner, Fulbright, Hungarian-American Enterprise Scholarship Foundations) also offer invaluable support to students who wish to study in the US. Two prestigious foundations that have significantly contributed to the raising of the educational and academic standards in American Studies programs, the Salgo and the Fulbright, also deserve mention here. For seventeen years the Salgo Professorship made it possible for distinguished American scholars to come and teach at ELTE; the Fulbright Foundation is still active in facilitating the exchange of American and Hungarian scholars. 14 For all the popularity of American Studies departments and programs among liberal arts students, the current restructuring of higher education as part of the Hungarian version of the “Bologna Process” clearly signifies a baneful turn in the career of independent American Studies programs and departments. By 2006 we will have lost hold of the institutional space and growing significance we have fought for and attained since 1990. There are troubling signs of old-style disciplinary rigor gaining the upper hand over independent American Studies programs. Indeed, departments of American Studies seem to be seriously imperiled by agents of re-colonization, i.e., by outmoded “modern philology”—“English” in particular. As a result, there will most probably be no B.A. training in American Studies, but only English Studies with American Studies concentration. At this stage of institutional and curricular restructuring, there seem to be efforts made, however, to save American Studies in the form of American Cultural Studies in three tiers at the M.A. level, involving American Culture with concentration on 1) American Literature, 2) American History and 3) Visual Studies. 15 Among the main grounds of intellectual testing and collaboration in American Studies scholarship are the biannual conferences of the Hungarian Association for American Studies (HAAS, founded in 1992). The latest conference was held last November at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, structured around the central theme of “American Studies as Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice” (www.geocities.com/haas_budapest). 20 16 American Studies essays and books are published by university presses such as JATE Press and the University Press of Debrecen, as well as by certain major mainstream publishers. Pioneering in publishing about US culture was the series, Topics in American Studies, launched by the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. 21 The Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen publishes the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies twice a year. HJEAS is an internationally circulated, peer-reviewed journal edited by University of Debrecen Professor, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy. 17 The Hungarian Society for the Study of English (HUSSE) is the second major forum of collaboration and exchange addressing English as well as American Studies issues at biannual conferences held in odd-number years (whereas HAAS holds its biannual conferences in even-number years.) 18 In conclusion, as suggested above, American Studies in Hungary has been a dynamically developing area of study since the 1970s with various research aims and agendas, including a strong affiliation with critical International US Studies. Fostered by the political restructuring of the country, the emergent American Studies programs and departments developed into lively sites of academic experimentation and innovation within the walls of conservative Hungarian academia. What the future holds for us
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depends, in large measure, on how we make use of yet another about-face known as the Bologna Process, which offers the fringe benefit of redefining ourselves as Hungarians in a transnationalizing global world.
NOTES
1. I want to thank Tibor Frank for his helpful comments on the first draft of this essay. 2. See, for example, Donald Pease, ed., National Identities and Postnational Narratives (1994), Cary Nelson, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1996), John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (2000), Giles Gunn, Beyond Solidarity (2001), Gary Y. Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (2001), Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle, eds., Rereading America (2001), Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (2002), Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, Jeffrey Rhyne, eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (2002). 3. Resentment felt over the (un-American) political implications of American Studies with Cultural Studies agendas is also voiced by American scholars. Steven Watts, in the special Cultural Studies issue of American Studies, for example, claims that there lies an enormous gap between New Americanists and the general political sentiments of American society: “In case no one has noticed, since at least 1980, and more probably since 1968, the great bulk of Americans have rejected just about everything the left has proposed and moved steadily to the right” (91). Let me note only in passing here that the reverberations of 9/11 and the US’s “war on terrorism” seem to further complicate the picture that was thematized, among others, by the 2004 Working Conference of IFUSS (International Forum for US Studies), “Looking North: Latin American Scholarship on the US and Comparative Perspectives,” in Rio de Janeiro. For Watts, see “American Studies and Americans” in American Studies 38/2 (Summer 1997): 87-93. 4. See Bálint Rozsnyai’s Response to the discussion, “Internationalizing American Studies: A Non-US Perspective, or A View from Turkey” at http:// crossroads.georgetown.edu/interroads/rozsnyai.html 5. See Jane Desmond, “’Mapping American Studies’ Across National Boundaries II: The Politics of ‘Politics,’ the Politics of Knowledge, and the Limits to Collaboration” in Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 7/1 (Spring 2001), 128. The talk was given at an international conference hosted by the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, which revolved around the theme of “Theory in American Studies.” Besides Jane Desmond, among the distinguished speakers were Virginia R. Dominguez and Donald E. Pease. 6. See, for example, the interpretation of ‘America’ and American Studies from a Hungarian perspective, in “Dangerous Liaisons: Politics and Epistemology in Post-Cold War American Studies” by Enikő Bollobás in American Quarterly 54/4 (Dec. 2002): 563-579. 7. For the whole debate, see American Ethnologist, 30/4 (2003): 485-503. 8. American Ethnologist, 488.
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9. “The teaching of American Studies in Europe is made particularly difficult by the fact that some of the fundamental parameters of life in America such as time and space are, or seem to be, different when compared to Europe.” See “Time and Space in the American Mind,” HJEAS, 12 10. Berndt Ostendorf, “Is the United States Europe’s Other? Is Europe the United States’ Other? Yes and no” in American Ethnologist, 492. 11. Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: European and American Mass Culture. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996), 277. 12. For the syllabus and course material of a research seminar (Cultural Studies Research Seminar: American Culture in Hungary) I am currently conducting on this theme, see http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/FedermayerEva/index.html 13. Let me refer here to Sarolta (Charlotte) Kretzoi first, who was successfully fighting for the existence of university courses about the USA in a most unfriendly academic and political climate. Her 1976 book, Az amerikai irodalom kezdetei /The Beginnings of American Literature/ meant a new beginning of Hungarian American Studies scholarship in the 1970s. Translating, teaching, popularizing, explicating matters of American interest especially relating to American literature and history were Péter Egri, Tibor Frank, István Géher, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, Bálint Rozsnyai, Aladár Sarbu, Ferenc Takács, Lehel Vadon, and Zsolt Virágos. 14. See the conference proceedings, The Early Republic: The Making of a Nation, The Making of a Culture. Ed. Steve Ickringill, co-edited by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and Aladár Sarbu (Free University Press, 1988.) 15. For a summary of the early achievements of Hungarian American Studies as a trailblazer in East Europe, see Tibor Frank and Zoltán Kövecses, "American Studies in Hungary", (European Association for American Studies [EAAS] Newsletter, No. 32, March 1994, p. 5). 16. See the wealth of publications since 1990, including Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, Mai amerikai irodalmi kalauz (Guide to Contemporary American Literature/ (Intera, 1995), László Országh-Zsolt Virágos, Az amerikai irodalom története /History of American Literature/ (Eötvös, 1997), Tamás Magyarics, Az Egyesült Államok külpolitikája /US Foreign Policy/ (Eötvös, 2000), Zsófia Bán, Amerikáner (Magvető, 2000);Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford UP, 2002), Tibor Frank, ed., Discussing Hitler: Advisers of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934-1941 (CEU Press, 2003), and Enikő Bollobás, Az Amerikai irodalom története /History of American Literature/ (Osiris, 2005). 17. See Bálint Rozsnyai, “Twenty Years of American Studies in Szeged, Hungary” at http://primus.arts.uszeged.hu/american/americana/rozsnyai.htm 18. See the memorial albums in honor of Országh László, ed. by Vadon Lehel (Eger, 1993;1994). 19. For courses and activities related to American Studies departments, see a few web sites: http://seas3.elte.hu/, http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/american, http://ieas.arts.unideb.hu/ , http://www.btk.pte.hu/tanszekek/angolirod/. 20. The proceedings of major American Studies conferences in the past were published as Studies in English and American Culture, vol. 4, ed. by Tibor Frank (Eötvös University, 1978);The Origins and Originality of American Culture, ed. by Tibor Frank (Akadémiai Kiadó,
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1984); and High and Low in American Culture (Department of English, ELTE, 1986), ed. by Charlotte Kretzoi. 21. Books appearing in the series published in the 1990s include Voices of Friendship: Linguistic Essays in Honor of András T. László, ed. by Zoltán Kövecses; Values in American Society, ed. by Tibor Frank; New Approaches to American English, ed. by Zoltán Kövecses; Carmen Saeculare: American Philantropy, ed. by Jenő Bárdos.
INDEX
Keywords: film, popular culture, sociology, multiculturalism, Feminism, Emigration, American literature, ethnic studies, cognitive linguistics, cultural anthropology, critical multiculturalism, Bologna Process, American History, Visual Studies., foreign policy, African-American literature and culture
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American Studies in Italy Part 1 : State of the Art of American Literary Studies in Italy
1 Almost a decade ago, upon discussing the question of the study of multiculturalism in Italy, Mario Materassi stressed the literary nature of American studies in this country and added that most academic members of the Italian Association of North American Studies (AISNA) taught American literature as part of the offerings of the English or the modern languages departments. He also pointed out, besides the impact of “prevailing generational ideologies” upon Italian research, “the peculiar role that Italian specialists in the non-mainstream aspects of American culture can play within the large picture of American studies, vis-à-vis today's push toward national or group self-affirmation.” (American Quarterly, 48.1, March 1996). Today things have become different : the 2003 AISNA Conference held in Rome, “Ambassadors. American Studies in a Changing World” has updated the picture with the offer of an overview of Italian approaches to American studies.
2 In the literary, as in each humanistic disciplinary field, the global debate has kindled lately on questions of nationalism, transnationalism, and postcolonialism, center and periphery, identity, gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion and the role those elements play in the representation of culture. Across literary genres, moreover, aesthetics has been linked, after 9/11, with the theme of destruction, on which a special issue of RSA- Journal came out in 2002. Such nightmare, one should add, has kept its tragic relevance in the wake of destruction and terrorism connected with the war in Iraq. 3 By the time “a view of world literature” (New Left Review 1, 2000) was called into being at the turn of the century (or should I say millennium) by Franco Moretti, who subsequently argued against the West having “a monopoly over the creation of forms that count” (New Left Review 20, 2003), a different outlook of American Studies started being envisaged in Italy, with the cultural and methodological paradigms being approached spatially from an intercultural and transnational perspective, across boundaries, in their dialectical interrelationship with different traditions, and from a non-hegemonic point of view—in one word, “globally”. The collection America at large. Americanistica transnazionale e nuova comparatistica (ed. Donatella Izzo, Giorgio Mariani, Milano 2004), while aiming at dropping the idea of “uniqueness” and “exceptionalism” as characterizing the U S nation, propounds a radical revision of the cultural and
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methodological paradigms upon which American studies rest. The way is cut for a re- examination of what it means to study the literature of the USA. 4 Such recent perspectives in academic research have impacted on current ideologies as well as on teaching methods, considering also the five-year process of restructuring so far undergone by the Italian University system. I will not dash into the field of the “new” educational policy to participate in the polemical debate about credits, modules, the duration of courses, or the length of the dissertation. I just wish to acknowledge that the reformed system gave us teachers of American literature and supporters of American studies as a disciplinary area in its own right, the possibility of organizing, within our respective University Faculties, a three- or five-year course inspired by a hemispheric approach to America, with Anglo-American literature [and Spanish- American and/or Brazilian literature] as major subjects. This is something that the first Department of American Studies (originated at “La Sapienza”, later at Roma Tre) had auspicated since its birth in the early nineteen-eighties, and so far almost exclusively a prerogative of Ph. D. programs. 5 Having considered the present state of affairs as a new departure for future studies, let me record which targets have been hit since the mid-nineties. Today American studies display a more congruous variety of the “interdisciplinary approaches” called for by Materassi, and can count upon the research of political scientists, philosophers, ethnologists and ethnographers, anthropologists, architects, musicologists, and specialists in the visual arts—all focusing their research on things American (as is evident from the exceptional nature, in some cases, of the contributions to the four- monthly international journal Acoma, founded in 1994). Inspired by the same dynamic opening, much of what was exquisitely “literary” has definitely entered the cultural knot in such a way that an amalgam of disciplines cross-fertilizing one another has taken shape, causing contaminations and transformations within a plurality of methodologies. On the other hand, however, in spite of Moretti’s call for a "text-free literary scholarship" the philological inquiry into the literary text is sound and alive, and is considered, as Gayatri Spivak’s claims, the best practice of old comparative literature, a discipline based on plurality and diversity in opposition to a unified system (Death of a Discipline, 2003). The refusal to lower one’s attention for the textual and linguistic aspect of the literary work in favour of a totalizing view of “literature”— as is clearer and clearer from the hottest disputes over the new critical approach—is undoubtedly due to the tradition established, and encouragement offered to their disciples, by those scholars who held the earliest chairs of American Studies in Italy. Today’s heritage was implanted by them as a seed for future scholars to cultivate, within the diversity due to their backgrounds, by Agostino Lombardo, Alfredo Rizzardi, Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli, Rolando Anzilotti, and Sergio Perosa. 6 In the Italian post-war panorama, divided between the devotees of artistic prose and engagés writers, Izzo has recalled in her obituary following the untimely death of the “father” of American studies in Italy, Lombardo—a Communist intellectual and militant critic—who devoted his philological efforts to translate such elitarian and metalinguistic a text as James’s Art of the Novel, thus revealing the exquisitely political and historical value of what would appear to many an exasperating product of aestheticism. The way was thus cut for James’s studies in Italy, while the idea of a fully anglicized artist was definitely dropped. James’s “Americanism” would soon be fully
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investigated upon thanks to Perosa’s efforts, and continuously re-discovered and re- invented by scholars of the following generations. 7 In today’s grown-up—in size and in awareness—modern Europe the processes and implications involved in transatlantic connections haven’t and aren’t being ignored by Italian Americanists. Facilitated by low-cost airlines, e-mail correspondence, and European programs such as Erasmus/Socrates, European Americanists look at each “other” and look at the USA as “Other”, envisaging possible patterns for collective (self-)definition or reciprocal reflection, and importing-exporting models developed in literature but also in cinema, theatre, mass media, and all those expressions of popular culture that find their way into the written or oral language. As Izzo reminded us in her address to the AISNA members in taking up her office as President of the Association, our discipline is no more, or perhaps has never been, relegated to the academic environment. On the contrary, it provocatively emerges on television, in the newspapers, in bookshops or at the cinema, thereby stimulating scholars to a fruitful interaction with the extra-academic world, and, simultaneously, enriching the quality of their critical and analytical instruments. 8 Within such dynamic framework, the concept of “nation” is undergoing re-vision, as is clear from works such as La formazione di una cultura nazionale : la Letteratura degli Stati Uniti dall’Indipendenza all’età di Jackson (1776-1850) (ed. Alessandro Portelli, Roma 1999), Storie di fondazione. Letteratura e nazione negli Stati Uniti postrivoluzionari (by Salvatore Proietti, Roma 2002), and Rinascita di una nazione. Le scrittrici americane e la guerra civile (by Sara Antonelli, Roma 2004). Reflections on the ensuing intercultural debate are gathered in : Mappe senza frontiere. Cartografie letterarie dal modernismo al transnazionalismo (by Paola Zaccaria, Bari 1999), “Intersecting Discourses in the American Renaissance (and Beyond)” Anglistica A.I.O.N. (ed. Donatella Izzo and Mario Corona, 2002),and Culture a contatto nelle Americhe (ed. Bottalico and R.Maria Grillo, Salerno 2003). Multicultural studies have exploded alongside ethnic and emigration studies, all having obtained full recognition. The stress is often on, but not limited to, Italian-Americans (cfr. ’Merica. Forme della cultura italoamericana, ed. Nick Ceramella and Giuseppe Massara, Isernia 2004). African-American, Jewish-American, and Asian- American, besides Chicano, Caribbean, and Native literary studies have all received critical attention. Among the profusion of work in that direction, I will mention the individual work of many specialists—Maria Giulia Fabi (whose Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel was published by Illinois UP in 2001), Alessandro Portelli, Sara Antonelli, Paola Boi, Maria Giulia Fabi, Giordano Di Biasio, Elena Mortara, Mario Materassi, Michele Bottalico, Luigi Sampietro, and Gabriella Morisco—and Lina Unali’s establishment (a few years ago) of the Asia and the West Conference. In addition, critical developments of Native literature have led to the following outcomes : Gli Indiani d’America e l’Italia (Alessandria 2002) and Indian Stories, Indian Histories (Torino 2004) both co-edited by Fedora Giordano ; Voci dal Sudovest. Terra e identità negli scrittori indianoamericani (ed. Laura Coltelli, Pisa 2002) and the Native American Poets series directed by Coltelli, Le radici della memoria (Urbino 2002) ; and Giorgio Mariani, La penna e il tamburo. Gli Indiani d’America e la letteratura degli Stati Uniti (Verona 2003). 9 Among the initiatives promoted in the field of women’s studies are a national research on nuns’ literary-historical writings (directed by Caterina Ricciardi), and a national project focused on the on-going international debate on modernism and the twentieth- century canon which re-reads the multifaceted relationships between art, life and
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history, the results of which are gathered in Networking Women : Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890-1939. Towards a Re-writing of Cultural History (ed. Marina Camboni, Roma 2004). Contributions to the ongoing research on feminine writing are nationwide : among them, Gianfranca Balestra on Edith Wharton, Camboni on H.D., Bianca Tarozzi’s Parole scolpite. Profili di scrittrici degli anni ’90 (Padova 998), and Liana Borghi’s edition, Passaggi. Letterature comparate al femminile (Urbino 2001). Lastly, I’ll mention a collection by colleagues honoring Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli at her retirement : Donne d’America (ed. Giorcelli, Palermo 2003). Another factor that has been widely investigated upon is the interconnection, within the theme of identity, between identity and gender. It is developed, by Italian Americanists, in the series Abito e Identità (ed. Cristina Giorcelli, Roma) which revolves on fashion and clothing ; it also springs, to quote just a few critical works, from work undertaken by several scholars in search of the many faces of Margaret Fuller, from Mario Corona’s explorations of Whitman’s, Kerouac’s, and Baldwin’s writings, from Maria Vittoria D’Amico’s inquiries into Paul Bowles’ writing and “translating”, and from analyses of gay literature. 10 The question of space in terms of the urban, suburban, and “natural” realities has attracted many scholars wishing to re-visit the cultural-historical-geographical tradition of the sense of place, or walk into the trajectory of progress and technology to detect its ecological foundation. After the seminal interdisciplinary Conference on Città reali e immaginarie del Continente Americano (Roma 1997), the debate on the city was continued at subsequent AISNA Conventions, and papers appeared in America Today (ed. Gigliola Nocera, Siracusa 2003) and America and the Mediterranean (ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangelo Castagneto, Torino 2003), many of them dealing with the urban/suburban space surrounding man. On New York 1890-1929 focuses the more recent Public Space, Private Lives (ed. William Boelhower and Anna Scacchi, Amsterdam 2004), where the city is investigated upon right through its heart and at the crossing of its intercultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religious tensions. The two volumes of Riscritture dell’Eden. Il giardino nell’immaginazione letteraria angloamericana (ed. Andrea Mariani, Napoli 2003 and 2004) are centered on the garden as a synecdoche of the world, a dimension for the blooming of textual interactions, a sign to be interpreted and re-interpreted across time and space as across the different cultural perspectives, and a metaphor for the exploration of the American imagination. The river, on the other hand, is the protagonist of Mario Maffi’s study entitled Mississippi. Il grande fiume : un viaggio alle fonti dell’America (Milano 2004). 11 In the visual ambit, research has followed different paths, from the studies concerning women art collectors in Before Peggy Guggenheim (ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi) to Literature and the Visual Arts in 20th Century America (ed. Michele Bottalico) which examines the interrelationship, within diversity, of formal and conceptual images, and, not last, film and theatre studies (the latter not neglectful of the aspect of performance) that have thrived sparsely in recent years. 12 Such a brief and limited account of today’s ferments, however, has not distanced, and— luckily—will not distance, scholars of literature who strongly believe in the practice of close reading, from the text. Literature in verse is a fecund terrain for the assessment and re-assessment of textual practices, as is evident from the analyses undertaken by various scholars on major figures such as Poe (like Fantastico Poe, ed. Roberto Cagliero, Verona 2004), Dickinson (whose poetic persona has been interpreted by Barbara Lanati and Marisa Bulgheroni), Eliot, Pound, W.C.Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore,
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Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen, Denise Levertov, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell, Mina Loy, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, poet- performer Anne Waldman, Puerto-Rican poet-performer Pedro Pietri, and many others. Textual case-studies on some of those poets are published, besides individual monographic studies, in the periodical Letterature d’America, and in collections such as The Idea and the Thing in Modernist American Poetry (ed. Cristina Giorcelli, Palermo 2001) and City Lights : Pocket Poets and Pocket Books (ed. Maria Anita Stefanelli, Roma 2004), the latter accounting for the widespread influence of writers coming to maturity in the fifties and sixties. An 80-page introduction is provided by Bacigalupo in Antologia della poesia Americana (ed. Antonella Francini, Roma 2004). 13 The Bible is the subject of a 2003 issue of Letterature d’America. Concerning prose, giants such as Emerson, Stephen Crane, and Thomas Wolfe have been recently reassessed in collective works edited by Giorgio Mariani, Sonia Di Loreto, Carlo Martinez, Anna Scannavini, and Igina Tattoni (Roma 2004), by Biancamaria Pisapia, Rubeo and Scacchi, (Roma 1998), and by A. Lombardo, M. Faraone, M. Melloni, and I. Tattoni (Roma 2004), respectively ; additions to the Emerson scholarship are by Giuseppe Nori. Extensive work has been done on Melville (Letterature d’America 2003) and James (among which, the monograph Izzo’s Portraying the Lady. Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, Lincoln 2001) ; monographs have come out on Poe (by Ugo Rubeo, Roma 2000), Hawthorne (by Valerio Massimo De Angelis, Roma 2004), Thoreau (by Gigliola Nocera, Milano 1998), and Flannery O’Connor (by Alessandro Clericuzio, Roma 2003). Essays have appeared, among others, on Faulkner, Hemingway, Philip K. Dick, John Barth, Raymond Carver, Paul Bowles, Mary Caponegro, Paul Auster, and Don De Lillo. Music and cinema have been investigated upon by Franco Minganti and other authors, while Hollywood western heroes are evoked in Musi gialli e berretti verdi, by Stefano Rosso (Bergamo 2003), a book on the Vietnam war. Theater studies have been enriched by Teatro e censura (ed. Annalisa Goldoni and Carlo Martinez, Napoli 2004), and several contributions on individual authors (among others, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and women of the Harlem Renaissance). On James’s hesitation between narrative and drama revolves ‘Quella rara intensità’ Henry James tra narrativa e teatro (by Mirella Vallone, Pescara 2003) ; on James have recently written, among others, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Alide Cagidemetrio, and Stefania Piccinato. To a Jamesian scholar at his retirement is dedicated the miscellaneous A Goodly Garlande in onore di Sergio Perosa (ed. Mamoli Zorzi and Cagidemetrio, Venezia 2003). 14 Before concluding this hurried account of U.S. literary studies in Italy I wish to mention, with contributions by most of us, Voci dagli Stati Uniti. Prosa, poesia & teatro del secondo Novecento (ed. Ricciardi and De Angelis, Roma 2004), and last (but not least) Anna Scannavini’s work on the languages of the United States in their regional, ethnic, and social variants ; their use in communication on the part of the speech community, and their representation, on the writers’ part, in literature (Giochi di giochi. Parole e lingua nella letteratura angloamericana, Roma 2003). A fuller review of Italian scholarship can be found in the Italian section of Duke U.P. American Literary Scholarship (completed, in the last decade, by Algerina Neri, for 1996 and 1997, Andrea Mariani, for 1998 to 2000, and Maria Anita Stefanelli, for 2001 to 2004).
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INDEX
Keywords : interdisciplinarity, Poetry, theatre, multiculturalism, Visual Arts, Acoma, AISNA, women’s studies, urban space, fiction
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American Studies in Italy Part 2 : U.S. History in Italy at the beginning of the 21st Century
1 In the early 1990s, introducing the Journal of American History’s internationalization project, Maurizio Vaudagna urged his Italian colleagues1 and all “non-English-speaking American historians in Europe […] to abandon the melancholic but somewhat comfortable situation of being marginal in both worlds.”2 More than a decade later, now that studying American history has been enormously complicated by the seismic changes connected with the end of the Cold War, the tragedy of 9/11, and the attendant reshaping of Atlantic relations3, the questions posed by Vaudagna’s remarks still defy unambiguous answers. Yet it seems safe to say that some limited, but unmistakable results in terms of research and scientific work have been achieved along lines of interaction and exchange4 probably not so remote from those Vaudagna wished to see. For all the difficulties encountered by the humanities5 in Italy and elsewhere in this current recession, the very small group of Italian historians of the U.S.—in all 26 people with official tenured appointments6 plus another dozen scholars dealing in various ways with U.S. history but not officially classified as such, some of them still waiting for their chance to break into the academic system—have taken advantage of the opportunities for conversation and joint projects available both at a European and American level.7
2 This line of development clearly emerges if we look at the practitioners still raising the flag for the now long waning sub-fields of colonial, Revolutionary and Civil War studies. Old Guard scholars such as Raimondo Luraghi and Tiziano Bonazzi, Americanists of the so-called “third generation” who came of age in the 1970s such as Luca Codignola, Susanna Delfino, and Ellen Migliorino Ginzburg, and their younger colleague Marco Sioli—all participate actively in international research networks and educational programs connected with their specific areas of inquiry.8 The pursuit of a transnational and comparative approach is even more evident if we glance at the three main lines of research that, with remarkable continuity, have emerged as predominant in the past fifteen years. Such is the case with migration studies, which make up one third of the monographs published during this period, a development reflecting the interplay between a current domestic concern (the emerging condition of Italy as an immigrant country) and an over-long-neglected story of Italian emigration and the “Italian workers of the world,” to quote the title of the most important research joint-venture
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of scholars of Italian descent on both sides of the Atlantic.9 Increasingly shrinking financial resources at our universities may have also played a part in prompting students to turn to migration studies, given the recent availability of more easily affordable sources in such national repositories located in Rome as the National Archives, the State Department and the Vatican Archives10, as well as in local repositories. Matteo Sanfilippo has provided an exhaustive review of the substantial body of work covering the most diverse areas of the migratory experience. Carried out largely under the tutorship of Anna Maria Martellone, this work includes the enquiries conducted by Bruno Cartosio, Elisabetta Vezzosi, Susanna Garroni, and Ferdinando Fasce on immigrant labor, Maddalena Tirabassi’s study of Italian women and the complex process of “Americanization” they engaged in at the turn of the century, Nadia Venturini on the relations between Italians and Afroamericans in the interwar years, Matteo Sanfilippo on religiosity, Stefano Luconi on Italians in U.S. politics, and Simone Cinotto on Italian-American cuisine as a vehicle for negotiating a hybrid cultural identity within American society.11 3 Some of the aforementioned archives have also been instrumental in shaping the studies of international relations, which make up one quarter of the monographs published since the early 1990s. Inspired by the dramatic reconfiguration of the Italian and European role in the age of globalization and international terrorism, such studies have been nurtured by constant exchanges at several institutions including the European University Institute, the London School of Economics, the Cold War History Project at NYU, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. Placing Italian-U.S. relations against a larger European and transnational background, they range in scope from Wilsonianism to cultural diplomacy in the interwar age, from the Marshall Plan to the question of Americanization. They include Federico Romero’s pioneering research on the role played by the unions on both sides of the Atlantic in bringing about European Reconstruction, his student Mario Del Pero’s insightful scrutiny of the relations between the U.S. and the Christian Democrats, Italy’s leading party and the main partner of the U.S. administrations in the post-World War II era, Daniela Rossini’s analysis of the “Wilsonian myth” in Italy in the aftermath of World War I, and Antonio Donno’s work on American Cold War policy in the Middle East. 12 Besides filling important gaps in historical knowledge, these studies have also contributed to reinvigorating the larger field of the history of international relations, a discipline that lately in Italy has witnessed a sharp drop in the number of publications.13 4 International contacts and collaboration also underlie the third stream of research, which might be called “new dimensions of political history,”14 in the broadest possible sense, in the twentieth century. Comprising one third of the most recent monographs and reflecting current widespread concerns about democracy at a time of deep economic and cultural disruption, this composite cluster of enquiries has branched out into the study of political and public culture (Raffaella Baritono, Oliviero Bergamini, Daniele Fiorentino, Daria Frezza, Marco Mariano, and Arnaldo Testi), race and gender issues (Alessandra Lorini, Vezzosi, and Baritono), and mass society and the politics of consumption (Cartosio, Fasce, Cristina Scatamacchia).15 In the process its practitioners have addressed the interplay between “Private and Public”, to borrow the formula from the most important recent national collective enterprise of research, which has brought together Italian historians and literati of the U.S.16
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5 The brainchild of Vaudagna, this project is the culmination of a series of research and educational initiatives, open to European and international collaboration, as well as in close cooperation with Italian modern and contemporary historians17, that Vaudagna has been developing since the early 1990s around the Bairati Centre in Turin. Drawing on both private and public financial resources, the Bairati Centre has knitted together research, public initiatives aimed at a wider audience than the academic one, and educational activities. In its wake other centres have sprung up, such as the Centro di Ricerca in Studi Canadesi e Colombiani and the Centro Studi Euro-Atlantici (CSEA)18, founded and directed by Luca Codignola (with Massimo Rubboli) and Valeria Gennaro Lerda, respectively, both at the University of Genoa. They have recently been joined by the Centro interuniversitario di storia e politica euro-americana (CISPEA), a broader and more ambitious consortium comprising Bologna (Bonazzi and Raffaella Baritono), Florence (Romero and Alessandra Lorini), Piemonte Orientale (Vaudagna), and Trieste (Vezzosi and Ellen Migliorino Ginzburg). Addressing “The Atlantic Connection” to “unravel the complexities of political, social, cultural, economic, and international history”, in July 2005 the CISPEA held its first summer school, entitled “The U.S. and the European Nations: The Issue of American Exceptionalism.” 19 6 It remains to be seen whether and to what extent U.S. history in Italy will be able to confront its long-standing challenge of combining cultural authority and institutionalization in a changing academic environment. Over the past decade this environment has undergone a complex process of reform, whose impact is difficult to gauge, given its still largely unfinished nature.20 Predicated on the autonomy of the individual universities and on a drastic reconfiguration of the structure of degree courses, with a curriculum overhaul beginning in 2001, the reform has yielded a demand for shorter and more basic courses, at least as far as the B.A. degree is concerned, a demand that will probably tend to increase the importance of the more important and more established topics and disciplines such as modern and contemporary history. Increasingly dark financial prospects, especially for the humanities and the historical disciplines21, may reinforce this selective tendency, making it harder to carry out research in extra-European area studies. Yet the active presence of Italian Americanists at an international level, as well as their efforts at heeding any sign of “cosmopolitan” curiosity that may arise from the larger historical community in the country22, bode well for the survival and growth of U.S. history in Italy.
NOTES
1. U.S. History is used here in the strictest sense of the term, leaving aside American literary studies, on which see above, Maria Anita Stefanelli, “State of the Art of American Literary Studies in Italy”. The relationship of fruitful cooperation and exchange between the two fields goes well beyond the confines of the present article. On this relationship, see the websites of the Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord- Americani (AISNA) and of Acoma (edited by Bruno Cartosio, Giorgio Mariani, and
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Alessandro Portelli), the main periodical based on a collaboration between historians and literary scholars. 2. Maurizio Vaudagna, “The American Historian in Continental Europe: An Italian Perspective,” Journal of American History, 79 (September 1992), 541. Bibliographical data on the era 1945-1992 can be found in Tiziano Bonazzi, “American History: The View from Italy,” and Ferdinando Fasce, “American Labor History, 1973-1983: Italian Perspectives,” both in Reviews in American History 14 (December 1986), 523-541 and 601-608, respectively, and, more recently, in Luca Codignola, “From the Witness Stand: A Prosopography of American History in Italy in the Post-war Decades, 1945-1978 ”, and Matteo Sanfilippo, “American History in Italy After the Bicentennial Celebrations, 1978-1992: A Discipline in Search of an Identity”, forthcoming in Massimo Bacigalupo and Gabriella Ferruggia, eds., Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World. Proceedings of the Thirtieth Anniversary 17th Biennial Conference of the Italian Association for North American Studies. Rome 6-8 November 2003 (Turin: OTTO Editore, 2005). 3. Federico Romero, “Dalla convergenza alla divaricazione: l’America nell’immaginario dell’Europa occidentale”, in Tiziano Bonazzi, ed., Quale occidente, occidente perché (Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2005), 189-201; Massimo Teodori, Maledetti americani. Destra, sinistra e cattolici: storia del pregiudizio antiamericano (Milan: Mondatori, 2002). 4. On this approach, see Francois Weil, “Do American Historical Narratives Travel?” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 329. Bender’s book is the most thorough and insightful discussion on the current state and future prospects of U.S. history from a transnational perspective. See also Michael Kammen, “Clio, Columbia, and the Cosmopolitans: Beyond American Exceptionalism and the Nation-State,” History and Theory, 42 (February 2003), 106-115. 5. John Paul Russo, The Future Without the Past. The Humanities in a Technological Society (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005) explores skilfully the fate of the humanities in our times. 6. For these data, see htpp://php3.sp2.cineca.it/murst-dae/pers_docente/ ricerca_docenti/php.3, accessed on 31 January 2005. 7. Anna Maria Martellone, “Italian Historians and the History of the United States: A Difficult Journey”, forthcoming in Massimo Bacigalupo and Gabriella Ferruggia, eds., Ambassadors. To strengthen her argument Martellone also points to the rolls of the Organization of American Historians foreign-language book and article prizes, featuring several Italian scholars among the winners in both categories. 8. Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996); Tiziano Bonazzi, “Tradurre/Tradire: The Declaration of Independence in the Italian Context,” Journal of American History, 85 (March 1999), 1350-1361; Luca Codignola, "The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America, 1486-1760,” in Karen Ordahl Kupperamn, ed., American European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995), 195-242; Ellen Migliorino Ginzburg, Donne contro la schiavitù. Le abolizioniste americane prima della Guerra Civile, (Manduria: Lacaita, 2002); Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Neither Lady nor Slave. Working Women of the Old South, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Marco Sioli, “Breaking into the Trans-Mississippian Frontiers: Thomas Jefferson’s Expeditions to the West,” in Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia Hilton, eds., Frontiers and Boundaries in U.S. History (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 69-88. A student of Loretta Valtz Mannucci,
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Sioli is also a member of Valtz Mannucci’s influential Milan Group in Early American History, a network that, after two decades, recently relocated to Montpellier renaming itself the Milan-Montpellier Group. It is also worth mentioning Valeria Gennaro Lerda’s active role in the formation of the Southern Studies Forum, a pilot international network created at the 1988 EAAS Conference in Berlin, which held its inaugural symposium in Genoa, where Gennaro Lerda has been teaching both U.S. and Canadian history for over thirty years now. See Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorf, eds., The United States South: Regionalism and Identity (Rome: Bulzoni, 1991). 9. Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World. Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 10. The Vatican Archives were first used by Luca Codignola as a vantage point from which to look at Canadian and early North American history. See Tiziano Bonazzi, “American History: The View from Italy,” Reviews in American History 14 (December 1986), 532. 11. Matteo Sanfilippo, Problemi di storiografia dell’emigrazione italiana (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2005). 12. Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra, (Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1999); Federica Pinelli- Marco Mariano, Europa e Stati Uniti secondo il New York Times. La corrispondenza estera di Anne O’Hare McCormick 1920-1954 (Turin: OTTO editore, 2000); Daniela Rossini, Il mito americano nell’Italia della Grande Guerra (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000); Mario Del Pero, L’alleato scomodo. Gli USA e la DC negli ani del centrismo (1948-1955) (Rome: Carocci, 2001) and “American Pressures and Their Containment in Italy during the Ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce, 1953-1956,” Diplomatic History 28 (June 2004), 407-439; Antonio Donno, ed., Ombre di guerra fredda. Gli Stati Uniti nel Medio Oriente durante gli anni di Eisenhower (1953-1961) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998). 13. Michele Nani, “Storia contemporanea ieri e oggi. La produzione della contemporaneistica italiana nello specchio delle riviste (1987, 1994, 2001), ” Novecento, 11 (July-December 2005), 28. 14. See Meg Jacobs-William J. Novak-Julian Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 15. Oliviero Bergamini, Un esercito per la nazione. Elihu Root e la nascita del moderno sistema militare degli Stati Uniti (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1996); Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race. American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Bruno Cartosio, Da New York a Santa Fé. Terra, culture native, artisti e scrittori nel Sudovest (1846-1930) (Florence: Giunti, 1999); Marco Mariano, Lo storico nel labirinto. Arthur M. Schlesinger jr. tra ricerca storica, impegno civile e politica (Milan: Angeli, 1999); Ferdinando Fasce, La democrazia degli affari. Comunicazione aziendale e discorso pubblico negli Stati Uniti, 1900-1940, (Rome: Carocci, 2000); Raffaella Baritono, La democrazia vissuta. Individualismo e pluralismo nel pensiero di Mary Parker Follett (Turin: La Rosa, 2001); Daria Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano 1880-1941 (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Elisabetta Vezzosi, Madri e Stato. Politiche sociali negli Stati Uniti del Novecento (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Daniele Fiorentino, Le tribù devono sparire. La politica di assimilazione degli indiani negli Stati Uniti d’America (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Cristina Scatamacchia, Nellie Bly. Un’avventurosa giornalista e viaggiatrice americana dell’Ottocento (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2002); Arnaldo Testi, Trionfo e declino dei partiti politici
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di massa negli Stati Uniti, 1860-1930, (Turin: OTTO editore, 2000) and Stelle e strisce. Storia di una bandiera (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004); Antonio Donno, In nome della libertà. Conservatorismo americano e guerra fredda, (Florence: Le Lettere, 2004). 16. Raffaella Baritono, Daria Frezza, Alessandra Lorini, Maurizio Vaudagna, Elisabetta Vezzosi, eds., Public and Private in American History. State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century (Turin: OTTO editore, 2003). 17. David K. Adams-Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Transatlantic Encounters. Public Uses and Misuses of History in Europe and the United States (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000); R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American Century in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 18. CSEA publications include Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Roberto Maccarini, eds., Canadian and American Women. Moving from Private to Public Experiences in the Atlantic World (Milan: Selene, 2001) and Valeria Gennaro Lerda, ed., “Which Global Village”? Societies, Cultures, and Political-Economic Systems in a Euro-Atlantic Perspective (Westport: Praeger: 2002). 19. See [email protected]. 20. Giliberto Capano, L’università in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000); Giunio Luzzatto, 2001: L’odissea dell’università nuova (Milan: RCS, 2001); “Università, una via per evitare il naufragio”, Reset (May-June 2004), n. 83, 35-52; Il Mulino 53 (May-June 2004), special issue on the University reform. 21. Massimo Firpo, “Sulla riforma universitaria,” Rivista storica italiana 113 (Spring 2001), 242-262. 22. See the session on Italy-U.S. relations organized by Federico Romero at the 2002 Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History (SISSCO) conference “The World seen from Italy”, now in Agostino Giovagnoli and Giorgio Del Zanna, eds., Il mondo visto dall’Italia (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 2005), 419-429.
INDEX
Keywords: Emigration, international relations, political history, exceptionalism, Wilsonianism
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American Studies in the Netherlands1
Doeko Bosscher
1 In The First Salute, a book first published in 1988, Barbara Tuchman (whose maiden surname was Wertheim) analyzes the relations between the newborn United States and France, Britain, and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. The title of her book refers to the very first time the United States, which had just declared their independence from Great Britain, received international recognition. The place was the tiny island of Saint-Eustatius, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, and the day was 16 November 1776. An American ship named Andrea Doria, which was part of the recently founded U.S. Navy and whose commander was Josiah Robinson from Philadelphia, had arrived at the island’s harbor, to acquaint the Dutch with what had happened in the thirteen colonies—among other things. The Andrea Doria saluted the Dutch garrison in Fort Orange with eleven shots fired from the ship’s cannons. The Dutch replied in kind, which was regarded as the first token of the kind of recognition the United States were yearning for.
2 That is how formal relations between America and the Netherlands started off, and that was the moment when Dutch interest in America, as a country separate from other countries and in many ways unique, began.2 Only in 1782, however, did real diplomatic recognition follow, when the Dutch government accepted John Adams as the first American envoy to The Hague. Before World War II 3 In the nineteenth century many Dutch people emigrated to the United States. Some of them went there to seek a greater degree of religious freedom, others merely to survive economic hardship. The economic refugees turned their back on the home country, but the religious refugees stayed in touch. The Dutch in New York and New Jersey, whose presence in the New World dated back to the seventeenth century, and the more recent immigrants in many cases kept sending their sons who wanted to become ministers to the Netherlands for education. This ended once new theological institutions had been established in the United States, like Queen’s College, later called Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.3 As far as the Dutch were concerned, they did not harbor
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strong feelings about far-away America. Its democratic character was well-known and celebrated, but its culture seemed strange and shallow to the conservative Dutch public. 4 In the twentieth century this situation of—culturally speaking—reciprocal non- interference and disregard gradually changed. America’s participation in World War I made it an entity of the greatest importance in world affairs, a development which also had effects in the realm of culture. Political power immediately draws attention to the cultural foundations that support it. Even though America withdrew, to a degree, from the world scene after 1920, it had made its mark. Across the globe people had been alerted to the American promise, and many of them wanted to know all about it. 5 The Dutch, however, were a “neutral” country at the time. There was no German invasion and the Netherlands escaped participation in World War I. This can help to explain why we were rather slow in recognizing the importance of the American appearance on the world scene. After that war, a badly damaged country like Belgium received funds from Hoover’s relief commission, and one of the things it did with that money was the establishment of a Belgian American Educational Foundation. No such initiatives occurred in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, even as a neutral country, the Netherlands was aware of its past as a relatively great power and of its responsibilities as the seat of the International Court of Justice, and recognized that it had a stake in international peace and stability. This provided an important motive for trying to wise up to what was going on across the Atlantic. One particular reason for the Dutch to keep abreast of political developments in the United States was American “ownership” of the Philippines, a colony that neighbored on the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch colonial establishment watched with dismay as America granted her Philippine subjects more freedom, fearing that their own Indonesian subjects would demand the same. The Dutch view of America, whether critical or positive, was not cast in one mold, however. As the Netherlands was to an extreme degree a “pillarized” or “columnized” (i.e. segregated along denominational lines) country, in which different sectors entertained their own particular ideas about the world, conceptions about America diverged widely. Those who, on the basis of economic doctrine, political ideology, or cultural orientation were inclined to be critical, thought of ways to counter the threatening colonization of the entire world by American mass culture, commercialization, and capitalism. Other people thought rather highly of the United States, for instance because it guaranteed freedom of religion. 6 Yet on the whole America as a country, apart from what it produced in the field of popular culture, remained basically unknown to the Dutch, and more generally the European public. They watched American movies and sometimes dreamed about the country that produced them in such amazing quantities, but Dutch newspapers paid little serious attention to these movies, or the cultural backdrop against which they were made. If they did, they tended to speak scathingly about these cultural exports. They held Russian, French, and German movies in much higher esteem.4 Scholarly interest in the United States did not really thrive either. In Dutch universities nothing even vaguely resembling an American Studies program was taught. Students in high school learned English as a required language, and university students could study English at an academic level (the greater part of those who studied a language to become a teacher were female), but America as such was not on the agenda. Area studies were not part of the curriculum anyway. Only traditional disciplines were.
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Post 1945 7 World War II, of course, brought major changes, but to say that Europe, or the Netherlands for that matter, fell in love with America is putting it far too simply. The fairly unspecific ideological rift between the two continents and systems that had existed before the war had not disappeared. On the contrary, it had become more distinct and more complicated. Take the danger of communism. Whereas America had maintained and even built-up its hostility towards that “unnatural” doctrine, European electorates were much more divided on the issue. Although Europe had learned to appreciate Americans as liberators, they were not (yet) generally looked upon as “kin” or “friends.” On the whole people lacked the self-confidence they had had before the war and also the self-understanding one needs to understand “strangers.” Europe was in a kind of limbo. Americans were not. For them, the world in 1945 did not differ as much from the world in 1939 as for Europeans. This implied an important cultural divide to deal with. After the war several years passed by before Europe was won over to the view that the world had to be interpreted as a dichotomy; that communism constituted a mortal danger; that the American side was their side. Only after the coup d’état in Prague (1948) was the general public converted to anti-communism.5 8 How did this contrast occur? Even before 1939, few people in Europe had regarded communism as something “alien” to the continent, or had talked about it in terms equivalent to the description of “un-American activities” in the official American political (and politicized) language. The war increased, not decreased the mental separation between America and Europe on this issue. When Nazism disappeared from the scene in 1945 and with it the one political canon every decent person was opposed to, many people at first did not know what “ism” to love or to hate. As a result of the war, Stalin and his ideology had become popular among many by 1945. After all, the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the Nazi aggression and had suffered enormously doing the right thing. Capitalism was still compromised by the lingering memories of the great depression with its many social injustices. America took the lead in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Why side unequivocally with America? Linked to the moral and political uncertainty was an unclear self-image. At the time, there was no concept of Europeanness to speak of. Some people would say such a concept still does not exist today, after more than fifty years of European unification, we might add. In most of Europe people identified solely with their own nation, but during the war so much had happened to make people less proud of their country and to fuel a rethinking of nationalism that this identification was now relatively weak in many countries. For want of a strong sense of self, the idea of Americanness also remained rather vague. Only at the end of the 1940s did notions of “freedom” versus “slavery,” “communism” versus “capitalism,” and “Europe side-by-side with America” become less abstract. 9 Whatever the reservations, after World War II American popular culture spread rapidly across the whole of Western Europe, in the wake of the soldiers. In every country the impact of this cultural tsunami was different. Reactions to America’s presence on the scene were as diverse as Europe. Varieties of anti-Americanism occurred everywhere, along with a widespread admiration of everything American, and in some countries the anti-American mood was even fairly strong. France, for one, struggled to be recognized as a great power, discovered that America was an obstacle, and reacted bitterly. The French government, and the French cultural elite, had trouble distinguishing between politics and culture. In general, however, Europe underwent a shock of recognition of a
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common heritage and of America’s uniqueness, and gave up the old, solidly embedded myth that American culture derived from, and depended on the European example. It slowly and gradually opened up its mind to the New World’s writers and philosophers. 10 In the Netherlands, a country of traders which had much less to lose and whose orientation had traditionally been relatively international, the mood was more moderate—and receptive. Military, economic, and cultural politics intertwined. The Dutch gave up neutrality, became recipients of both economic and military aid in the Cold War and joined NATO in 1949, as one of its founding members. This was long before critics would describe the Netherlands as “the Albania of NATO,” but at the beginning of the 1950s few people questioned our “friendship” with America. Even so, nothing remotely resembling a comprehensive American Studies program found its way into our academic curricula. Therefore in his inaugural lecture on “American Studies in Europe” of 4 October 1955, the newly appointed lecturer in English literature (which included American literature!) at the University of Groningen, E.N.W. Mottram, saw no reason to call this country an exception when he described his personal feelings as those of a “deserted desert islander,” dramatically conscious as he was “of the almost universal academic suspicion and ironic disdain of American Studies.”6 Looking for an explanation for Europe’s disdain, this is what he said: “After all, a former colony doing well, if not better, than its parent, is an unpleasant reminder, the black sheep who becomes, all too soon, the president of a bank…. The family’s alarm and awkwardness is first passed off as surprise, and this soon turns into accusations of corruption; finally the black sheep becomes, if not quite a whited sepulchre, certainly an object lesson in progress; but never an example of culture.”7 Awakening 11 This call from Groningen provided just one, and very marginal example of a more and more widespread awakening. As a result of the surge in the general public’s interest in the United States after World War II, it had become logical, if not necessary, to study America also at the academic level. Amsterdam paved the way. Foundations for the establishment of a chair at the University of Amsterdam were laid in Amersfoort concentration camp. The need for a Dutch America Institute was discussed among the intellectuals interned there. The University of Amsterdam was the first to follow suit, thereby getting an edge on its competitors it never abandoned. A. (Arie) N.J. den Hollander, born in 1906, partly trained as a scholar in America, and one of the prisoners in Amersfoort, was appointed professor of sociology in 1946 at this university, his alma mater. In 1947, American Studies was specifically added to the fields his chair was supposed to cover. As far as America was concerned, his scholarly interest in this point in his career—he had written extensively about “poor whites” in the South before the war—related to perceptions of America in other nations, and European nations in particular. He became a pioneer in what was almost regarded as a new discipline, called “imagology.”8 More often than not, he said, ideas people develop about other peoples and nations say less about these strangers than about themselves. As such, perceptions of the United States developed in Europe are expressions of Europe’s own identity and part of Europe’s cultural history. The Den Hollander tradition of focusing as strongly on images of America as on America proper is still visible in the current Amsterdam American Studies program. 12 This slight Amsterdam emphasis on images is not unique. Most Dutch universities, in fact most European universities offer courses that one way or another deal with
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European perspectives on America. Given the obvious strengths and advantages of American universities in all kinds of specialized fields of research, trying to compete with them in those areas would be like an attempt to carry coals to Newcastle, or as the Dutch would say, “to carry water to the sea.” In addition, we should realize that all scholars from whatever country who are active in this field, are one way or another working within a distinct national mold, defined by distinct cultural pressures. American “Americanists” are not as free from their own particular preoccupations as some people seem to think. At any given moment since the time, before World War II, when “American Studies” began to flourish in America as a more or less separate area of research and teaching, “identity politics” have played a role of some importance. But if the emergence of comprehensive American Studies programs at (at first, primarily) East Coast universities in the inter-war years was basically just another attempt at national self-definition, so were the classes and courses offered at universities across Europe. To study the history of America was for European scholars no less than for their American counterparts a means to better understand oneself and one’s own country’s history and identity. Their contribution to American Studies turned out to be not without merit, even from the American perspective, as looking at yourself through other people’s eyes—something American scholars could do when they acquainted themselves with the observations of De Tocqueville’s twentieth-century successors—is always helpful to anyone who is craving for a depiction of reality, warts and all. What goes for that period of time still holds true nowadays. It seems that the one most valuable contribution European scholars can make to American Studies in general is the very distance from which they view America when they deal with it in their research and teaching. Instead of trying to duplicate American approaches they offer the added value of the mirror of America’s “rejected past,” held up by the Europeans who were still living, in a way, in the midst of this rejected past.9 Thus, to engage in an international division of labor in American Studies between scholars from various countries, including the United States and also including the Netherlands, is to a degree a sensible thing to do. Let all Americanists in the world approach the subject from the perspective and with the mind-set which suit them best, and appeal to them most, and American Studies will benefit. 13 By “division of labor” I do not mean to suggest, however, that historians from abroad should not do their utmost to develop a thorough understanding, indeed a feel for what moves and motivates American scholars and vice-versa. A mixture of perspectives will only be fruitful if scholars are capable to at least speak each other’s language. Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez were right on target when they argued, in their now famous essay “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism” for a joint effort by all scholars, from everywhere, to embrace a “paradigm of critical internationalism” in American Studies, but such a paradigm is only imaginable if a Babel-like confusion can be avoided.10 14 This said, we should admit that in 2006, theory and practice are still at odds with each other. The absence of foreign scholars’ perspectives in the inwardly oriented American debates is conspicuous. Apparently, there is a noticeable lack of communication between American Americanists and their European colleagues. Or must we, ten years after Desmond’s and Dominguez’ call to arms, still speak of lack of interest? In his extensive essay on recent developments in American Studies (in the Currents in American Scholarship Series), Bernard Mergen of George Washington University says that “despite some protestations to the contrary, most American Studies scholars in the
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U.S. remain unaware of much of the work being done by their colleagues in other countries.”11 He lavishes praise on the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) sponsored series European Contributions to American Studies (originally a Dutch venture, founded by Rob Kroes) and grants special mention to some of the recent publications of Dutch editors. “American Studies [in America] remains inwardly focused,” he observes. “The awareness that American culture exists in a global context has yet to take hold among most U.S. American Studies scholars.”12 15 Den Hollander’s career in American sociology and American Studies blossomed, and he became the president of the European Association for American Studies. When he was not too far from retirement, at the end of the 1960s, he witnessed increasing anti- Americanism in Dutch academe and suffered the pressures his students (and some politically correct colleagues and university administrators) put on him. After an incident in the classroom that occurred in 1969 and which made headlines in the papers, the students declared war against him. He remained director of the Amerika Instituut of the University of Amsterdam until his death in 1976. He was succeeded by Rob Kroes, one of his former students and not one of the leftists who dominated the scene in many universities in Europe. Kroes had to run the gauntlet of, again, anti- American feeling in the Netherlands before finally being appointed. He managed to steer his scholarly activities clear of controversy, and reached the same position Den Hollander had held: that of godfather of American Studies in the Netherlands. He founded the association of Dutch Americanists, the NASA (Netherlands American Studies Association) in 1977. This was still, at the time, an undertaking that required diplomatic gifts and some courage, as the anti-American feeling that had recently created so many problems for the Amerika Instituut in Amsterdam was still fairly strong. Some more years had to go by before it subsided.13 Rob Kroes has retired in the fall of 2005, but his successor Ruud Janssens had been appointed quite some time ahead. In the inaugural lecture he gave in October 2003, Janssens said that “American Studies should encompass understanding American politics, but more fundamentally it should try to understand and interpret what is so American about American politics and culture.” In his view this approach is the Amsterdam tradition, as it emerged in the first activities of the Amerika Instituut.14 16 The University of Leiden is also strong in American Studies, with a special emphasis on American history. It has, in fact, the only chair in U.S. history in the Netherlands. Theoretically this tradition goes back in time even further than everything Amsterdam has accomplished. The famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who published two renowned books about America (one before and one after he had spent two months in that country in 1926), was, after he gave up his chair in Groningen, a Leiden scholar.15 After World War II Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt represented Leiden’s stake in American history and culture. He taught at Leiden from 1963 until his retirement in 1983, since 1966 in the position of professor. Alfons Lammers succeeded him and retired in 2002. His fields of interest were twentieth-century U.S. political and cultural history. Currently Leiden’s chair in American history—now an endowed chair, funded by the philanthropist Raymond Sackler and named the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in American history—is held by Adam Fairclough, a British historian, who specializes in the Civil Rights Movement.16 That the Civil Rights struggle is in Leiden’s focus is part of this department’s heritage. Schulte Nordholt, the professor who put Leiden again on the map of American Studies, was rather famous for his scholarly work on African American history and African American literature. The Leiden American Studies
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program, which constitutes a specialization in the curriculum of history or English and is not an independent BA/MA program, still bears the evidence of Schulte Nordholt’s personal interest. Curricula Compared 17 Let me try to summarize the elements in the American Studies programs in the Netherlands that can be said to constitute the highest common factor in “Dutch American Studies”: the Dutch “canon” in the field. 18 In Amsterdam, Groningen, and Nijmegen full-fledged, comprehensive study programs attract a growing, or even mushrooming number of students, both in the BA and in the MA program. Utrecht and Leiden also teach the disciplines that are relevant to understanding America’s institutions and the most important aspects of its culture. These courses comprise a consistent program in American Studies. Everywhere American literature and American history are core elements in the curriculum. 19 Among Dutch universities there are many differences in emphasis as to what subjects are important to teach and in the theoretical foundations of the curriculum, but all programs deal with the main social, economic, and political issues in American history, and in addition pay ample attention to the reflection of these issues in the American literary production. Most programs allow (in differing scales of course) for the study of American diplomacy and foreign relations through the ages, for the study of legal (including constitutional) history and of the legal system as such, for classes about women and issues of gender, for courses on religious affiliations in the United States, and on the educational system. 20 The perspective is, as stated above, in most cases (and I earlier mentioned the University of Amsterdam with special emphasis) to a great degree European, which does not entail that all that America stands for is presented as unfamiliar or strange. It only means that, inasmuch as it does not make sense to merely emulate what is being taught in American universities to American students, the European perspective is taken as the logical approach in programs taught mostly by Europeans to European students. As such, it is not an article of faith but to a large degree a matter of practicality and expediency. In all but one Dutch American Studies curricula students are strongly encouraged to spend at least one semester in an American university and take home in credits the equivalent of a full Dutch semester.17 Every time a Dutch university has the privilege of hosting (or hiring) an American scholar to teach in our programs, subjects and outlook change accordingly, and students enjoy the benefit of being taught, in addition to what and how they are taught by Dutch professors, from an American perspective. 21 What, then, is making up the highest common factor? It all started most frequently with combining American literature courses and American history courses, and this genesis can still be discerned in some programs. As far as history is concerned, all programs offer at least one course in which the American Revolution and what it led to (its settlement, completion, and practical implementation) are dealt with. This is regarded as one of the two most important and pivotal events in U.S. history. The same applies to the U.S. Civil War, and events that flowed from it, such as the constitutional history of the Fourteenth Amendment, one of the two or three most important episodes in American legal history that we want our students to know about. Dutch universities tend to teach constitutional history in its social and political context, rather than offering courses in American political theory. (Some universities do, however, have
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courses in political theory.) In view of Europe’s plight in the unification process, which was recently even further complicated by the rejection of a “constitution” by the French and the Dutch populace, it is small wonder that we acknowledge that the federal implications of the American constitutional arrangements are also of particular interest to students in any European Union country. 22 All universities have courses on the American West. Although relatively little attention is paid to the pre-Columbian period, we follow the trend that was set long ago by American universities to help students give up the idea that the United States of America began their existence when the continent was discovered (well, when Columbus went ashore) in 1492. In some Dutch universities, more than in others, there are courses that include Indian-European relationships, including cultural and political exchanges between native Americans and newcomers from Europe, whether immigrants or temporary visitors. As such, this kind of courses goes way beyond an approach which merely focuses on the paradigm of conquest or “victorious” settlers versus vanquished Indian victims. 23 Few institutions offer courses that could be labeled “demographic,” but all include in their programs serious attention to the idea of a nation of nations, to the melting pot, the salad bowl and the concept of multiculturalism. Patterns of migration and assimilation, or the lack of it, are part of this. As in other fields in American Studies, American problems and solutions in this area are relevant for Europeans and noteworthy for our students. Most universities have courses on aspects of American philosophy, of intellectual history, and of “the American mind.” No university would think of glancing over Dewey and pragmatism, but the approach seems to be rather eclectic. Many fairly specialized single-topic courses are offered that only focus on typical examples of American thinking about society and how it should be organized. The freshman and sophomore courses provide the general overview; courses at the higher levels rightly or wrongly assume that students have in-depth knowledge and understanding of the big picture. 24 I think we can say that on the whole, the arts are rather marginal in the Dutch canon of Americana (i.e. what I called “the highest common factor”). Utrecht, which has persistently offered courses on modern art and American pop music, is the notable exception. We Dutch do realize, however, that the United States have sufficiently important schools of painting and sculpture; renowned music composers and performers; and dramatists, essayists, and poets. Courses on these subjects would be worthwhile, in fact indispensable, but it seems that, while we certainly do not lack the interest, or even fascination, so far we have not found ways to squeeze them into the program. 25 The approach of American Studies at the University of Amsterdam is traditionally more pure than programs elsewhere (in the Netherlands and other countries in Europe), in the sense that unlike other programs it has always been interdisciplinary, combining history, social sciences and literary studies in its methods and style, instead of primarily deriving from the historical and/or literary disciplines. Amsterdam looks at the United States both from the outside, from an international and comparative perspective (something that can be called the Rob Kroes approach) and from the inside, along the lines of what Kroes’ successor Ruud Janssens seems to be strongly interested in: American perceptions of their own position in world affairs. Since recent years the Amsterdam program pays ample attention to the issue of globalization, as a way of
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evaluating the role the United States have assumed in the international arena. It is clear that Professor Janssens’ personal interest in international relations bears fruit. 26 The Amsterdam program expresses its distinct comparative approach in the following way. Students are required to read and write about the United States as an international presence, about the way this country affects other countries and cultures politically, economically, militarily, and culturally. In addition, they study the ways in which American and European intellectuals have interpreted America as critically different from European traditions. To do this means that they study both European intellectual history and the concept of America. The third element in the Amsterdam program is the American cultural presence in European mass media (film, radio, television, photographs, fashion, and advertizing). The nature and scope of American culture, the Americanization of Europe, the European debate about American mass culture, and the relation between Americanization and globalization is a central theme. The Amsterdam program’s core courses have the following contents: 27 The first course focuses on a few of the scholarly debates about American history that historians have engaged in. Exploring “classic” texts about the topics of American foreign policy, the American presidency, slavery, and the origins of the American Revolution, students will become acquainted with not only the major facts and aspects of these themes of American history but also with the presuppositions (theoretical and otherwise), the stated and tacitly implied biases, and idiosyncracies and singularities of the individual historians involved, and get a sense of the developments within scholarly debates. 28 The second course is described as follows. “Since World War II in particular, the United States have been a presence in Europe, economically, militarily, and politically. Yet its cultural presence, though, antedates its physical presence by centuries. ‘America’ has since its discovery stalked through the European imagination, in either positive or negative guises, but always seen as crucially different from Europe.” 29 The third course, about American-European relations, looks at the various policy options of governments on both sides of the Atlantic. It takes a historical approach, mostly studying the period since World War II, and in addition to diplomacy, trade, military relations, and cultural exchanges are studied. Finally, it tries to answer the question if and how transatlantic relations need to be improved. 30 This is what the study guide says about the fourth course. “After reading one of the current theoretical introductions to the topic, Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, we will look into the nineteenth-century debate about the issue on the basis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Henry Adams’s novels on domesticity. Before moving to the more recent debates about, for instance, the personal nature of politics, we will study Freud and go into the discussion between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann about the role of opinion leaders and the status of individuals in a democracy.” 31 Amsterdam pays special attention to “the urban phenomenon” in the United States, including urban planning, architecture, ethnicity within the urban-environmental context, race relationships, and the ideas of a wide range of “public intellectuals” about urban problems. “Public history,” an area of specialization Amsterdam is particularly interested in, also emerges in this context, and a comparison with Europe is part of the themes being dealt with. Students who participate in this course round it off with a
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field trip to one of the urban areas in the United States that are especially suited to illustrate its subject-matter. Cultural Turn? 32 What to say about reflections of the American “culture wars” in Dutch universities, and the University of Amsterdam in particular, when we talk about the teaching of American history? At the April 2005 conference in Middelburg people witnessing the discussions might think that the great majority of European universities made “the cultural turn” of the post 1960s era as profoundly as some of their peer institutions in the United States. History as traditionally taught by “traditional” historians was said (by some) to be fighting a rearguard action against an enemy consisting of zealous proponents of vaguely defined explorations of cultural phenomena in old and modern American society. They argued that solid research on politics and economics has borne the brunt of a frivolous shift in emphasis towards the study of “meaning.” Reality is no longer of any interest to those who believe that we cannot identify what is real, caught up as we are in perceptions and social constructs. Has the study, I asked Rob Kroes recently, of processes and practices of meanings won a victory over old-fashioned historical research in Amsterdam as well? “No,” he replied. Amsterdam keeps track of these developments with amusement, but without really feeling involved. As a sociologist by training Kroes recognizes in the carping on social constructs certain ideas that were propagated by the Chicago School in its glory days during the early twentieth century and with which he was confronted when he was a student; he is surprised about the diligence with which the wheel is being reinvented. “We do not feel any urge to take sides,” he said. “The squabbles and bickerings are objects of our attention and research, but in our view they have little relevance for methodology.” 33 The Leiden program is not very different in this respect. It offers courses on American popular and consumer culture, African American history, problematic neighborhoods in the United States and the Netherlands, Native American languages and cultures, and the history of thinking/philosophy in America, alongside American literature and a survey course in history. It seems that most of the obsessions which we are now used to calling typically postmodern, and which the culture wars have brought to light—and stimulated—have not to a significant degree touched Leiden. 34 In Utrecht, American Studies was established as an interdisciplinary major by the Faculty of Arts in 1987.18 The English and history departments formed the pillars of this multidisciplinary program, while additional courses were furnished by the departments of art history, film studies, and women’s studies. The Utrecht program from the start was modeled after similar curricula in the United States. It explores the unique quality of American culture and history in their multiple manifestations. American Studies at Utrecht strives to employ a broad definition of culture; in addition to “high” art expressions in literature, film, and the visual arts, the program makes a point of treating expressions of popular culture as legitimate subjects of study. This requires in-depth discussion of problems of cultural hierarchy, mass culture and mass media. This “cultural” focus notwithstanding, political history is an important element, side by side with cultural history. Utrecht’s curriculum also explicitly deals with the political and cultural interaction between social and ethnic groups within America, and on the global spread of American culture. The teaching methods used within the program borrow from the cultural history and literature programs, although the
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graduate program aims at an integrated American Studies approach that is influenced by American traditions in the field . 35 What follows now are some personal observations of Jaap Verheul, an Utrecht historian and Americanist, concerning the place of the historical discipline in the Utrecht curriculum. 36 American history is an essential part of the new, integrated American Studies program. On the undergraduate level, however, courses tend to be offered from the disciplinary perspective of history, literature, women’s studies etc. Yet even in the undergraduate courses, attempts are made to offer students a wider perspective by pointing at cross- currents between history and culture et cetera. In the undergraduate program student interest is remarkably focused on minorities. It takes a real effort to draw students away from literary authors such as Toni Morison, Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, and Louise Erdrich. And the same goes for American history, which witnesses an uneven interest in topics such as slavery and Reconstruction, Native American history, the civil rights movement, the 1960s, multiculturalism, and gender issues. Students seem to have embraced the “race, class, and gender” aspect of the cultural turn almost more emphatically than their instructors. 37 In Utrecht, American history, together with American topics in general, enjoy huge and steady popularity among students. An undergraduate survey course on American history will easily draw 120 students. The student demand is not met, however, merely by supplying courses. American topics do not rank high in the perception of all colleagues, however. Department chairs tend to be more enthusiastic about programming esoteric topics than in meeting the student demand for courses on the American sixties, or Native American history. America is not easily recognized for its high culture or canonical history. Also, when threatened with budget cuts, departments will concentrate on their “core activities,” which tend to be disciplinary, and walk away from “innovative”or “experimental” programs that attempt to build bridges across the departments. In such an atmosphere interdisciplinary cooperation is often accused of siphoning away students, funds, and energy—they claim. This is an ongoing battle. Ironically, American Studies programs sometimes are looked at with envy because of the large audience they draw from students. In Utrecht one department chair proposed to eliminate the enormously popular course on “American History and Culture after 1900” because of fears that it would draw students away from more “important” topics. Also, the contrast between student demand and limited faculty references leads to an enormous pressure on faculty members to keep courses on offer by sacrificing their research time, making the program vulnerable to outside reviewers.19 38 At Radboud University Nijmegen, where Gerardus A.M. Janssens was the first Dutch professor to hold a chair in American literature, a full-fledged American Studies program was launched in 1987.20 39 In its early years the Nijmegen curriculum in American Studies, while reckoning with the specific intellectual foreground and career perspectives of a Dutch (European) student body, was closely modeled on the practice of American Studies in universities in the United States. It was developed in close cooperation with the American Studies program at the University of Iowa, with which it has maintained frequent staff and student exchanges over (almost) twenty years. In 1996, Janssens’ chair in American literature was transformed into a chair in American literature and American Studies, an institutional recognition that by then American Studies in Nijmegen had evolved
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into a flourishing program with a student-body outnumbering many traditional programs. Janssens’s successor, Hans Bak, has aimed to strengthen the interdisciplinary character and international comparative orientation of the Nijmegen program, by strongly developing the political-economic dimension of the American Studies curriculum (side by side with a cultural approach), and incorporating Canadian Studies. 40 Since 2000 Nijmegen offers a comprehensive American Studies program, both at the BA and MA levels. A firm grounding (in the first two years of study) in American history, literature and politics (both domestic and foreign) has constituted the intellectual multidisciplinary base on which an interdisciplinary exploration of issues in American culture could be taught in more advanced undergraduate and graduate years. The Nijmegen “mission statement” reads, in part, as follows: “A professional Americanist will have the scholarly competence to analyze and evaluate contemporary social, political, cultural and economic developments in the United States, to understand them from a broad historical and cultural perspective, and to consider them in the light of a specific American ‘psyche’ as well as in the light of the regional, ethnic and racial diversity of the United States. He/she will be aware of the cultural differences between the Netherlands (Europe) and the United States in these manifold areas and be able to form a critical comparative judgment of the social relevance and applicability of American developments, policies and solutions for Dutch (and European) society, and vice versa. Indispensable for a professional Dutch Americanist is a near-native command, in writing and speaking, of (American) English. … Building on a long tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship in the United States, but conscious of the necessity for evolving a distinguishable European scholarly perspective on North- America, the Nijmegen program offers students a solid scholarly foundation in the study of the United States and Canada from a diversity of disciplinary angles, a firm theoretical and methodological insight into the practice of interdisciplinary thinking and research, and the competence to apply these theoretical and practical skills in independent scholarly research as well as in a wide variety of professions and positions.” 41 Starting from a combined first year in English and American Studies (including a solid training in American English language skills, a survey of American literature, and an Introduction to American Studies in which students explore core-issues in American culture and history, and make a first theoretical and practical acquaintance with working and thinking in an interdisciplinary fashion), students move on to a core- program in American Studies encompassing a combination of multi- and interdisciplinary courses in American history, literature (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), popular culture (film, TV, radio, photography, media, music), the American political system (in an international comparative perspective), and American foreign policy. Building on this base, students can opt to pursue either a “cultural” or a “political-economic” stream, at both the BA and the MA levels. In the cultural stream students take courses in American art and architecture, theater and film, history and film, gender and popular culture, preparatory to an MA-variant build on a “cultural studies” methodology, comprising courses in cultural representations of “otherness,” multiculturalism in the United States, contemporary American and Canadian fiction, and interdisciplinary seminars on varying topics (the Beat Generation, African American literature and culture, the American West, the American sixties, etc). The political-economic variant (popularly referred to as the “business and politics” variant)
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offers courses in urban politics, history and society, the history of U.S. business, and American and Dutch business culture, preparatory to an MA-variant with a strong international, comparative focus: “Global Shift: International Political Economy,” “America and the World: Cross-cultural Management” and “U.S. Constitutional Law in International Perspective.” Students in both the cultural and political-economic streams take advanced seminars in “Transatlantic Ties: Europeans and America” and in the theory and praxis of American Studies as practiced in Europe, the United States and across the globe. Overall, the Nijmegen MA program is rooted in an exploration of the cultural, economic and political impact of the United States on the global scene. It also seeks to reckon with the fact that two-thirds of Dutch American Studies graduates end up in a position with a Dutch or international business company or in a position having to do with international relations or diplomacy. Nijmegen graduates in American Studies are qualified to become teachers of English at the Dutch high-school level. In addition, the program offers the opportunity to look at the United States from the perspective of Canada by offering a minor in Canadian Studies, comprising courses in the history and literature of Canada, as well as an interdisciplinary seminar on Canadian politics, business and society. 42 Then finally Groningen, where until recently there was no full professorship in American Studies. Wil Verhoeven for a few years had an endowed chair in American culture sponsored by the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg. Besides that, my chair in contemporary history, including the history of North America, was the only one that had America mentioned in its mission statement. Since 2006, however, Wil Verhoeven is full professor in American culture. He currently chairs our American Studies department, where we have no lack of students—to put it mildly—and which runs both a BA and an MA program in American Studies. 43 We teach about America’s global impact, about America’s culture being the world’s only “super-culture,” and of course about what makes America. The program regards it as hardly conceivable that anyone could effectively understand the power relationships in, and the complexity of today’s world without a thorough analysis of the history and culture of America, the nation which has in various degrees impacted on our way of life and our thinking about the world and ourselves. 44 In a way, the Groningen program is the most influenced by the cultural turn in American Studies that was described above, but within the limits of a traditional “salad bowl” of disciplines, taught separately and independently, however intertwined the curriculum presents them. What now follows is the language of the study guide. Exploring the cultural domain called “the United States of America,” our program starts from the premise that “America” was shaped as much by its literature, arts, folklore, music, film, philosophy, commerce, entertainment, media, education, science and religion, as by its Constitution, its laws, political treaties and wars. Part of our program is the traditional exploration of the question of what constituted America’s common national identity. We integrated the paradigm shift of the 1960s, when increasing attention was paid to America’s racial, ethnic, social and regional diversity, as well as to exploring and theorizing the cultural and ideological processes that have generated, mediated and institutionalized this diversity. We study and analyse both “high culture” and the aspects of the culture of everyday social practice—film, music, fast food, the media and other forms of “popular culture.” Our program tries to create awareness that none of the academic monodisciplines (history, literature, sociology, art
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history, philosophy, and so on) is sufficiently equipped to offer a comprehensive account of the complex dynamics of American culture. Interdisciplinarity is therefore a key defining characteristic of our program. Our focus aims at representing new developments in the broader field of cultural studies. 45 We try to comply with the mission statements and bench marks drawn up by programs at universities in America, and the aims of the program have been formulated in accordance with the Agreed Aims and Objectives for American Studies of the British “Quality Assessment Agency of Higher Education” (QAA). The aims of the Groningen MA program can be summarized thus: to equip students with multidisciplinary and, where appropriate, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical insights to enable them to develop an informed and critical understanding of the culture and society of the United States, past and present; to allow students to engage with the highest quality up-to-date research on the United States in a variety of disciplines; and to encourage students to apply multi- and interdisciplinary paradigms in independent research. 46 In short, the program’s central unifying principle is “The Dynamics of Cultural Change: Nationhood and National Identity in the United States.” Approaching the idea of culture as “the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life,” the program aims at offering students broad theoretical insights into the idea of culture in general. 47 So much for what the study guide has to say. The historians at our school are not in every respect happy with the apparent emphasis on “meaning,” but that is not to say that there is a culture war raging in Groningen. The program is still developing and under construction, and there is, and for a certain time to come will be, a lively debate going on about the degree to which traditional disciplines, and the way they are being taught, must be integrated. Integration as such is not the issue. Research 48 So far, research in the Netherlands in American Studies was only referred to in passing. Each university taking itself seriously as a stronghold in this field provides its staff with opportunities to do research, but the degree to which research in American Studies is truly stimulated differs. The numbers of students are on the rise —there is a fascinating correlation between critical thinking about the current administration in the United States and a desire the study everything American—and so are teaching loads; university officials are not always ready to make up for research time gone up in smoke. 49 Theoretically every university offers PhD programs, but for lack of funds (research grants for graduates) this theoretical stream is in many a case just a trickle in reality. Although Nijmegen, Utrecht, and Groningen do produce PhD’s in American Studies on a regular basis, Amsterdam and Leiden are somewhat ahead of the pack when it comes to numbers. As far as dominant themes are concerned, students are free in their choice of subjects, so it is pretty hard to discern patterns when we try to analyze the issues (e.g. what is typical for Amsterdam?) that they deal with in their dissertations. In general these themes do not stray far from the dominant issues in the pre-graduate curricula.21 50 Apart from the universities with their American Studies programs, the Netherlands has the privilege of possessing the Roosevelt Study Center (RSC) in Middelburg, which works at the frontiers of our scrutiny of America, and which hardly needs recommendation to anyone who knows about American Studies in this country. The
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RSC, an independent research institute on U.S. modern history and European-American relations, was founded in 1984 and has been in operation since 1986. Affiliated with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990, it is the home of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA, introduced above), if only because it hosts the annual NASA conference and many other conferences where scholars in “Americana” from both sides of the Atlantic meet and discuss all kinds of themes of common interest. Well-known is its series of biennial conferences for European historians of the United States. More importantly, thanks to its inviting research facilities and its broadly oriented holdings of archival source material—with an emphasis on everything having to do with the times of the Roosevelts, whose ancestry reaches back to the Dutch Province of Zeeland—it attracts researchers from many countries. In addition to its own research on Dutch-American relations produced by its senior staff, the RSC has initiated several PhD projects on the basis of matching funds together with Dutch universities, among others with Nijmegen on the theme “Magazines and Periodicals as Instruments of Twentieth-Century American Culture” and with Utrecht and the Kampen Theological University on post-World War II Dutch- American relations.22 Conclusion 51 In conclusion of this essay it seems reasonable to say that although “American” historians in the Netherlands nowadays are more concerned with cultural history than before the “cultural turn” in American Studies (and scholarship in general), they are still free to teach and to do research as they see fit. The fact that they now sometimes focus on suburbia, shopping malls, mass entertainment, and “low” art and literature, is just an indication of innovation, much more than of their being forced to give up their turf and pay lip-service to the fashion of the day. In short, there is no victory for a “culture mafia,” in past or present. In some universities, however, colleagues see reasons to be worried about a future that might be less bright, as all faculties have to cope with financial cuts, and faculty boards in many cases regard integration of “study- paths” and curricula as the magic solution. It is our common challenge to make sure that integrated programs will still offer elements of the historical discipline that deserve to be taken seriously as such. The problems ahead will not be easy to solve, but we should not allow the administrators, or those who propagate more “cultural turns,” to become our despair. And if there is despair, let it also give courage.
NOTES
1. The author wishes to thank everyone who provided information on Dutch study programs and curricula. He also acknowledges that he has used the language of study guides and information leafets in many cases, not only in those where quotation marks indicate a direct quotation. This essay has originally been written as “The Study of U.S. History in the Netherlands” for the book by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past,
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Present and Future (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007), 175-193. The editors of that book have generously agreed to make this essay also available for EJAS. 2. This scene is described not only in Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute (New York: Knopf, 1988), but in many other articles and books as well. An extensive description including much historical background is ofered by Wim van den Doel, “Nederland en de Verenigde Staten,” H.W. van den Doel et al., Nederland en de Nieuwe Wereld (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1992), 179-312. 3. Alfons Lammers, Americans in Leiden (Leiden: Centrum voor Moderne Geschiedenis, Universiteit Leiden, 2001), 8-9. 4. Nico J. Brederoo, “The Lost Battle: The Dutch Film League versus the American Dream,” in Doeko Bosscher et al., eds., American Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 19-20. 5. In many countries the communists at frst joined coalition governments of the popular front model. After 1948 they had been thrown out everywhere except Iceland. Walter Laqueur, Europe since Hitler: The Rebirth of Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 158. 6. E.N.W. Mottram, American Studies in Europe, Inaugural Lecture (Groningen: Wolters, 1955), 3. 7. Ibid., 4. 8. Alfons Lammers, “Amerikanist van het eerste uur. A.N.J. den Hollander,” in Klaas van Berkel, ed., Amerika in Europese ogen. Facetten van de Europese beeldvorming van het moderne Amerika (Den Haag: SDU, 1990), 186. 9. Robert W. Rydell, “Re-entry: NASA and the American Studies Orbit,” in Hans Krabbendam and Jaap Verheul, eds., Through the Cultural Looking Glass: American Studies in Transcultural Perspective (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999), 24. Rydell quotes Leiden Professor in American history Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt. 10. Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 48.3 (1996): 475-490. 11. Bernard Mergen, American Studies Bibliography (2003), 43, http:/ exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/. For a list of the European Contributions to American Studies series, see www.vu-uitgeverij.nl and click on “series.” 12. Ibid. 13. Rydell, “‘Re-entry,” 23. 14. Ruud Janssens, Of Mice and Men: American Imperialism and American Studies, Inaugural Lecture (Amsterdam:Vossiuspers UvA, 2004), 21-22. 15. Wessel E. Krul, “Moderne beschavingsgeschiedenis. Johan Huizinga over de Verenigde Staten,” in Van Berkel, Amerika in Europese ogen, 89-103. Huizinga’s two books on America were translated in English and published in one volume: Johan Huizinga, America: A Dutch Historian’s Vision from Afar and Near, translated with an introduction and notes by Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Haper and Row, 1972). Huizinga was not
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the frst Leiden professor who lectured on America. In this he was preceded by Reinhart P.A. Dozy. Laurens Vredevoogd, “Introduction,” in Lammers, Americans in Leiden, 9. 16. Professor Adam Fairclough’s previous university professorship before being hired by Leiden was at the University of East Anglia. 17. In Utrecht this is recommended, but optional. 18. The following information was provided by Jaap Verheul, who in his turn borrowed from the faculty’s study guide. 19. Jaap Verheul’s observations in an email to me (5 July 2006), almost verbatim, but edited for abbreviation. 20. The information on Nijmegen was provided by Hans Bak, whose text I reproduce in a shortened and only slightly edited version. 21. The following list of monographs published in English in the period 1990-2006 by Dutch scholars on U.S. history and culture subjects gives an impresson of the variety in the felds of interest: Hans Bak, Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); Erik van den Berg, “Claim on Memory: A Political Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., 1914-1988” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2006); Babs Boter, “Fabrication of Self: Girls of Color Coming of Age” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2005); Marc Dierikx, An Image of Freedom: The Netherlands and the United States, 1945 to the Present (’s- Gravenhage: SDU, 1997); Iris Dorreboom, The Challenge of Our Time: Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne and the Making of Modern America (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991); Mel van Elteren, Imagining America: Dutch Youth and Its Sense of Place (Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 1994); Mel van Elteren, Americanism and Americanization: A Critical History of Domestic and Global Infuence (Jeferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006); Annemieke Galema, With the Baggage of the Fatherland: Frisians to America, 1880-1914 (Detroit and Groningen: Wayne State University Press and Regio Projekt Groningen, 1996); Frances Gouda with Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia: US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism, 1920-1949 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002); Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Ruud V.A. Janssens, “What Future for Japan?” U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942-1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995); Joke Kardux and Eduard van de Bilt, Newcomers in an Old City: The American Pilgrims in Leiden, 1609-1620 (Leiden: Burgersdijk and Niermans, 1998); Jaap Kooijman, … And the Pursuit of National Health: The Incremental Strategy toward National Health Insurance in the United States of America (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999); Hans Krabbendam, The Model Man: A Life of Edward W. Bok, 1863-1930 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001); Rob Kroes, The Persistence of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers in Amsterdam, Montana (Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Rob Kroes, Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World
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(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Rob Kroes and Robert W. Rydell, Bufalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Marianne van Leeuwen, Americans and the Palestinian Question: The US Public Debate on Palestinian Nationhood, 1973-1988 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); Adrianus A.M. van der Linden, A Revolt against Liberalism: American Radical Historians, 1959-1976 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996); Catharina Maria Megens, American Aid to NATO Allies in the 1950s: The Dutch Case (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1994); Joris Meijaard, Decision-Making in Research and Development: A Comparative Study of Multinational Companies in the Netherlands and the United States (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1998); Cornelis A. van Minnen, American Diplomats in the Netherlands, 1815-1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Cornelis A. van Minnen, Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confdant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Ruth Oldenziel, “Gender and the Meaning of Technology: Engineering in the U.S., 1880-1945” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1992); Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine; Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Diederik Oostdijk, “Karl Shapiro and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1950-1955)” (PhD diss., Radboud University, 2000); Ferrie Pot, Continuity and Change of Human Resource Management: A Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Global Change and Cultural Continuity on the Management of Labour between the United States and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1998); Mathilde Roza, “Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Career of Robert Myron Coates (1897-1973)” (PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen, 2005); Derek Rubin, “Marginality in Saul Bellow’s Early Novels: From Dangling Man to Herzog” (PhD diss., Free University Amsterdam, 1995); Derek Rubin, Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer (New York: Schocken, 2005); Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Guido van Rijn, The Truman and Eisenhower Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs, 1945-1960 (London: Continuum, 2004); Walter H. Salzmann, A Market to Explore: A History of Public-private Partnership in the Promotion of Trade and Investment between the Netherlands and the United States (Amsterdam: The Netherlands Chamber of Commerce, 1994); Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, The Myth of the West: America as the Last Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995); Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002); William Uricchio and R.E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); August J. Veenendaal, Slow Train to Paradise: How the Dutch Helped Build American Railroads (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003); Nanna
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Verhoef, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Jan Voogt, “The War in Vietnam: The View from a Southern Community” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2005); George Welling, The Prize of Neutrality: Trade Relations between Amsterdam and North America, 1771-1817 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1998); Usha Wilbers, “Enterprise in the Service of Art: A Critical History of The Paris Review, 1953-1973” (PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen, 2006). 22. For information on the RSC’s activities and research programs, see www.roosevelt.nl.
AUTHOR
DOEKO BOSSCHER Doeko Bosscher
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American Studies in Norway: Past and Present
1 Norwegian “studies” of America started really more than a thousand years ago, when Leif Ericsson landed in Vinland, his name for that part of New Foundland where his party made quarters around the year A.D. 1000. However, it was not until 1825 that modern mass emigration from Norway to America started in earnest, when a small sailing vessel, the sloop Restaurationen, left the little village of Tysvær on the west coast of Norway, near Stavanger, for New York, carrying a load of 52 Quaker emigrants led by the legendary Cleng Peerson. From 1825 until mass emigration petered out a hundred years later, more than 800,000 Norwegians had left for American shores. Today there are about as many people of Norwegian descent in the United States as in the Old Country, and only Ireland has yielded a higher proportion of its population to America than Norway.
2 Consequently, Norway has had a close relationship with the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and these relations were strengthened by World War Two and the Cold War years that followed, when Norway’s location as neighbor to the Soviet Union made the country strategically vital to the United States as a spearhead of the NATO forces, whose North Command Headquarters were located in Oslo. For these and other reasons America has always held a strong fascination for Norwegians, and it was only natural that when the American Studies movement was introduced to the Nordic countries after World War Two, it first took a firm hold in Norway. At the University of Oslo, the literary scholar Sigmund Skard was appointed to the first chair in American literature in Scandinavia in 1946. And two years later he founded the American Institute at the University of Oslo and acted as its chairman until his retirement in 1973. History Blazes the Path 3 Initially, the study of the United States was introduced in the history departments. Generally, both research and teaching have been mainly concentrated in three areas: prior to World War Two it was primarily Norwegian emigration/immigration to the United States; then, after the war until the end of the Vietnam War, partly as a consequence of the Cold War, the main focus of interest in American history in Norwegian history departments was in foreign policy, the Atlantic community in
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particular. There was also quite a bit of work done on special domestic issues, such as the history of economics and labor, but mainly by academic journalists, politicians, and government administrators. In the field of teaching, American history, in the main, constituted parts of survey courses in world history. In the late 1960s, the teaching and research in American history was regrettably de-emphasized in most history departments at Norwegian universities, as the study of the USA became “politically incorrect” in these circles, mainly because of the Vietnam War. This in fact created a virtual hiatus in faculty recruitment in this field in history departments at Norwegian universities throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. 4 Because of the importance of mass emigration in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, emigration studies naturally dominated Norwegian studies and research regarding the United States in the early years. In the beginning, Norwegian- American history was written in the traditional contribution genre: it was important to document that the Norwegian immigrants to the United States had made substantial and positive contributions to American society and culture. It would be fair to say that it was professor Ingrid Semmingsen at the University of Oslo who—with her magisterial bi-volume study, The Way West (1941-1950)—lifted the history of Norwegian migration to America out of the filiopietistic rut and in fact put Norwegian-American emigration/ immigration studies at the forefront of international migration studies. 5 However, Ingrid Semmingsen did not teach and do research in the field of emigrant and immigrant studies only, but worked on a wide range of subjects; in fact her book The Creation of a World Power: A History of the United States (1946) was really the first high- quality general history of the American nation written by a Norwegian academic scholar. In 1963, Dr. Semmingsen was appointed to the first chair in American history in the country. Regrettably, when she retired in 1977, her chair in American history was split between Norwegian and American history, and it soon became evident that the new professor would mainly pursue his interest in the former branch of study. 6 Among the pioneers of general American history should be mentioned the seminal figure in Norwegian medieval history, Halvdan Koht (later to be foreign minister in the Norwegian exile government in London during World War Two) who also wrote several books on American history—political, social, economic, and constitutional—from ca. 1910 to the 1920s. His late book, The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (1949), was an early assessment of the Trans-Atlantic cross-currents.1 7 Norway’s vital role in the implementation of the Marshall Plan and later as home of the NATO North Command knit Norway closely to the Atlantic community. Several monographs and theses on Atlantic relations as well as emigration to America originated in the history department of the U. of Oslo in the post-war years down to the mid-1970s. Moreover, The American (later International) Summer School, which had been established at the U. of Oslo in 1947, offered a number of courses on American themes and other courses drawing heavily on American academic traditions in the early years. 8 However, because of the political importance of the United States, American foreign policy remained a subject of academic study at several universities and research institutions even in this nadir period of American history studies, among these the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and several military research institutions. A case in point is Olav Riste at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, who published widely on Norwegian military and political relations with the Atlantic
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community in the postwar years, in which Norway’s relationship with the United States constituted a very central portion. Another dominant scholar in the field of American- European relations has been Geir Lundestad (the current Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute for Peace and a professor of history at the U. of Oslo). His Cold-War studies include The American Non-Policy towards Eastern Europe (1975) and The United States and Western Europe since 1945: from "Empire" by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (2003). 9 It is symptomatic, however, that Lundestad, although a traditional historian by training, started his career as professor of American Civilization in the English Department at the University of Tromsø, in 1978. There he had succeeded Torbjørn Sirevåg, also a historian by training (doctoral dissertation on Henry Wallace). Sirevåg had moved into government, assuming the position as head of the Research Division in the Ministry of Education and Research. Later, he took up a position as professor of American Studies at the Norwegian School of Management while holding also an adjunct professorship at the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. In recent years he has written several textbooks in American Civilization for American Studies programs. American Studies Surfaces 10 Partly as a result of the political fall-out of the Vietnam War era, from the mid- or late 1960s to the end of the century, American history—political, social, and cultural—was primarily studied under the auspices of American Studies programs in English departments whose main responsibility was the teaching of English language and English-language literature. As leader of the American Institute (which, together with the British Institute made up the English department for teaching purposes, but remained separate research units), Sigmund Skard subscribed to a broad view of cultural studies, and he was also instrumental in the successful effort to establish the European Association for American Studies (1954). His book American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization (1958) was an early mapping of the American Studies movement in Europe. In 1949 he had published his book American Problems, which indicated a critical perspective on American culture. Among his several dozen books should be mentioned The USA in Norwegian History (1976).2 11 Gradually a third branch of study developed within English departments, first known as “American background”—ancillary to the teaching of literature—but which by the mid-1970s had developed into a separate “discipline”—although highly interdisciplinary and diversified—and in 1974 was officially designated American Civilization. It evolved along an almost exponential curve in the 1970s and 1980s and, when the forerunner of the current American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR, 1993) was established in 1974, the initiative was taken by faculty members of several English departments with financial support from the American Embassy. The first American Studies Seminar, mainly under the auspices of the U.S. Information Service, was held in Trondheim in1977. Since then some thirty American Studies conferences have been held. 12 The U.S. Educational Foundation in Norway (later known as the Fulbright Foundation) has also been a vital force in establishing and maintaining an interest in American Studies in Norway, and in recent years, so-called Roving Scholars for junior and senior high schools—itinerant American scholars visiting schools in all parts of the country— have proven to be a quite successful venture, extending the reach of the exchange program to grade schools. The Norwegian government has demonstrated its support of
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the Fulbright program by carrying 70 percent of the cost of the exchange programs, which is quite unusual, common practice being for the USA and the individual bilateral partner to share the costs equally. 13 Dorothy Burton Skårdal’s contribution to the field of America Studies should be underlined in particular. She studied under Oscar Handlin at Harvard University, and her doctoral dissertation—which was later published as The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experiences through Literary Sources (1974)—came to serve as a model for a great number of master’s theses. She was also an active force in inspiring emigration studies in Denmark and Sweden as well as among local historical societies in Norway. Furthermore, she was instrumental in establishing studies of “return emigration”, especially to the southern part of Norway. In recognition of the great value of her work she was made a Knight of the Order of St. Olav by King Olav V. 14 In this context should also be mentioned a literary scholar and long-time member of the EAAS Board, Orm Øverland of the University of Bergen. Having written his doctoral dissertation, The Making and Meaning of an American Classic : James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1973), at Yale University, he taught American literature at the University of Bergen. In the later years of his career he developed a strong interest in immigrant literature and culture. His book The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America (1996) won him the American Studies Network Book Prize for the Best Book by a European Scholar in 1998. In 2000 he published Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930. Perhaps most important from a historical point of view is the four-volume collection of immigrant letters, 1836-1888, which he has co- edited, entitled From America to Norway: Norwegian Emigrant Letters (1992-2002). 15 Today courses in American Civilization are offered by most Norwegian colleges and universities. At colleges and teachers’ training colleges civilization is taught mainly as “background” to American literature in American Studies programs. In universities the situation is different. As part of the structural reorganization of the study programs at the University of Oslo and its adoption of the Bologna Plan and the ECTS grading system, a strong North-American Studies section has been established under the program in European and American Studies, which is now the stronghold of American Civilization teaching and research in Norway, having four full-time tenured faculty members in the field, one full professor and three associate professors. 16 The program is administered by the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS). The full-time associate professors are: Mark Luccarelli (Ph.D. in American Studies, U. of Iowa), specializing in urban and environmental studies and foreign policy studies; Deborah Kitchen Døderlein (Ph.D. in history, U. of Minnesota), women’s history, multiculturalism, and film studies; and David Mauk (Ph.D. in history, City University of New York, formerly at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim), whose main interest is in immigration history and political studies. The fourth full-time faculty member is professor Ole O. Moen (Ph.D. in American Studies, U. of Minnesota), whose fields of specialization are constitutional history, and political and social history. In addition, literary scholar associate professor Erik Kielland-Lund, who was instrumental in establishing the program, now teaches part-time in the program, since his main obligation is in literary studies. His areas of specialization are “literature and society” and popular culture. Courses offered by ILOS range from general survey courses (some of which are co- taught with literature) to specialized courses on the history of foreign relations in a
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global context, the history of women and minorities; environmental and urban studies; political geography, economics, and institutions; film studies; popular culture; literature and society; immigration studies; legal and constitutional history; and political, social, and cultural history. Also, a number of courses in Canadian Studies are offered as part of the North-American Studies program. The Field of American Studies Expands 17 In the new millennium, the history and political science departments at the University of Oslo have rediscovered America, in a manner of speaking. The Department of History has broadened its studies of American history—although still primarily seen in a Norwegian perspective—having launched an ambitious research program, “America in Our Hearts, ” which studies perceptions of the USA by Norwegians in a broad historical perspective. The Department of Political Science, many of whose faculty members have done graduate studies at American Univesities, has also strengthened its studies of American society and institutions. In so doing, it is collaborating with ILOS American Civilization faculty members. 18 At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, there has been one tenured associate professorship since the early 1990s, Tore Tingvold Petersen (Ph.D. in history, University of Minnesota) whose main fields of interest are diplomatic history, political history, and Native American history. In the English Department (now The Department of Modern Languages), there have been at least one tenured associate professor in American Civilization, for some years two, as well as at least one adjunct professor or instructor. The chief person has been David C. Mauk (now at the U. of Oslo), an immigration historian (Ph.D. thesis on Norwegians in New York, The Colony That Rose from the Sea: Norwegian Maritime Migration and Community in Brooklyn, 1850-1910), who delves in political history as well. 19 At the University of Tromsø, Professor Torbjørn Sirevåg, followed by Professor Geir Lundestad, taught American Civilization, mainly history, from the mid-1970s till the latter assumed his position at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. After Dr. Lundestad’s departure, the chair in American Civilization (which was originally created as a combined position in both British and American Civilization) was transferred to British Civilization and given to a scholar with strong literary interests who has dedicated himself exclusively to British Studies. On the other hand, a professor of American Literature, Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, a literary scholar with broad social and cultural interests, has since the 1970s also taught American Civilization and written an important book on the methodology of the field, Culture, Language, Text: Culture Studies within the Studies of English as a Foreign Language (1992). 20 At several regional university colleges there are faculty members specializing in American history and civilization. At Stavanger College, which has recently become Stavanger University, there is Associate Professor Arne Neset, specializing in the history of arts in a social-political context, at Østfold College there are Associate Professor Robert Mikkelsen, a labor and social historian, and Associate Professor Magne Dypedahl, a general Americanist, at Agder College Robert G. Baehr has just retired as a general American Studies scholar, and at Vestfold College, Associate Professor James Godbolt, an American, has written an excellent post-World War Two American history in New Norse (one of two official Norwegian languages, which is based on the Viking tongue), USA i vår tid: trekk frå nyare amerikansk historie (The USA in Our Time: Main Currents in Recent American History, 1994). Associate Professor Øyvind
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Gulliksen at Telemark College, a literary scholar, has done extensive work on Norwegian-American immigrant culture, especially in a local perspective. Associate Professor Rasmus Sunde at Sogndal College has made a thorough study of emigrantion to America from his region. In addition American Civilization is being taught at all teachers’ training colleges, primarily in conjunction with American literature. 21 In response to the restructuring of Norwegian higher education to conform to the Bologna Plan, more interdisciplinary projects and general cooperation among diverse departments are being developed also in the field of American Studies. This may seem a little ironic since at no time since the Vietnam War have Norwegians been so critical of the American government as they are today. On the other hand, hardly in any other European country has American popular culture had such a broad and profound impact, beginning in earnest after World War Two and increasing steadily to the present. Recent Development 22 International political developments since the end of the Cold War have had profound repercussions in the field of American Studies in Norway. In the Cold War years, Norway was of vital interest to the United States—mainly for national security reasons —and the U.S. Government was willing to spend considerable sums of money to maintain good relations with Norway. This included generous support of American Studies at all levels. As already mentioned, it was to a great extent thanks to initiatives by the American Embassy that the organization of a Norwegian American Studies movement materialized. With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War things changed dramatically. Funds that had hitherto been spent in Norway were diverted to areas where they were more needed and where more was to be gained by such investment. It was quite symptomatic that the position of Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy in Oslo was moved to Vilnius, Lithuania. Likewise funds in support of national American Studies conferences all but dried up. 23 The Nordic Association for American Studies had been established in 1959, primarily as a sub-branch of the European Association for American Studies (1954). NAAS had national representatives in each of the five Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—and established a pattern of biennial conferences on rotation among the member countries. Its first conference was held in Sigtuna, Sweden, in 1961. These conferences received generous financial support from the American embassies in the respective countries as well as scholarly input from Americanists from the USA. In the early 1990s these financial contributions from the US Government to NAAS were being gradually reduced in the same way, if not quite so dramatically as American support of national activities in the field. 24 In response to the new circumstances after the fall of the Iron Curtain, American Studies scholars in Norway established their own national association, The American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR) at their annual national conference in Kristiansand, on May 8, 1993. A financial nest egg was created by voluntary contributions from core members, establishing an Endowment Fund, which was later renamed the Sigmund Skard Endowment Fund for ASANOR, which was set up to raise money for scholarships and travel grants, the latter mainly for high-school teachers who receive scant support from their schools to attend national conferences of this kind. Furthermore, a fund-raising drive was launched in order to raise money for the operation of the organization. Over the years several other funds have been
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established, named for other prominent American Studies scholars or donors, in order to attract money to the association. The following scholars have been presidents of ASANOR since its formal founding in 1993: Assoc. Prof. Robert G. Baehr, Agder University College (1992)1993-1996; Assoc. Prof. Arne Neset, Stavanger University College, 1996-1998; Assoc. Prof. Robert Mikkelsen, Østfold University College, 1998-2002 (acting also 2003); and Prof. Per Winther, University of Oslo, 2002- (2003-). 25 Nearly all of the ventures and initiatives taken by ASANOR were the brainchildren of a driving force in the American Studies movement in Norway, associate professor Robert G. Baehr at Agder University College in Kristiansand, now an emeritus scholar. He was also instrumental in establishing an ASANOR website in 2000, which was upgraded and provided with a new address in 2004, and has been its editor since its inception. His contributions to the success of ASANOR as a functional and vital association can hardly be overstated. As a result of the Norwegian initiative, similar national associations have now been established in the other Nordic countries, and in 2002 the NAAS Constitution was rewritten to square with the new realities. 26 NAAS is now a vital and functional federation, with a board made up of the presidents of the respective national associations for American Studies and the editor of the NAAS journal, American Studies in Scandinavia, since 2003 Professor Per Winther, chair of the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo and since 2004 also President of ASANOR. Professor Orm Øverland of the University of Bergen was editor of the ASIS journal from 1973 to 1985. He was subsequently president of NAAS, 1985-1992. Dr. Øverland has also been a dedicated servant to the EAAS, as a member of the EAAS board, 1976-1981 and Treasurer 1992-1996. Professor Ole O. Moen, the University of Oslo, was Vice-President of ASANOR 1998-2002, President of NAAS, 2001-2003, and the first Secretary General of EAAS, 2002-2006. Dr. Moen has served as Contributing Editor for Norway of the Journal of American History since 1994. In 2003 he was also appointed a member of the Board of International Advisers to the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and in 2004 he was invited to be the International Adviser to the Center for The Studies of the United States at the University of Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro. Since 2002 Associate ProfessorDavid C. Mauk, University of Oslo, has been Vice-President of ASANOR and editor of the NAAS Newsletter. 27 One important feature shared by ASANOR and the Danish Association for American Studies (DAAS) is their inclusion of high-school teachers as bona fide members, in contrast to the national associations of Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. Such a broad membership base enhances closer relations among teachers in secondary schools, colleges, and universities and facilitates coordination of programs and work towards common educational goals on all levels. Of special significance in this context is the pre-conference symposium for teachers, which has been arranged by ASANOR at its annual conferences since the early 1990s. 28 It should be explained that the reason I have not dealt with literary studies at any length in this survey, is simply that—like the situation in many Western European countries—American literature has been taught as part of English studies, mainly as literary studies rather than American Studies as such, although at the University of Oslo, for example, the teaching of American literature has been closely coordinated with the teaching of American Civilization, especially at the lower levels. Central figures
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here have been Professors Brita Lindberg Seyersted, Per Seyersted, and Per Winther and Associate Professor Erik Kielland-Lund. Per Seyersted also established Canadian Studies as part of the Department program—building impressive library holdings in the process, supported by generous grants from the Canadian Government—and Per Winther now teaches Canadian Literature as well as American literature. At the University of Trondheim (later at Agder College) we find Associate Professor Sigmund Roe, at the University of Bergen Professor Orm Øverland, Associate Professor Øyunn Hestetun, and Zeljka Svrljuga, and at the University of Tromsø. Fredrik Chr. Brøgger. Out of space considerations I have, however, limited my essay primarily to American history and civilization. 29 The field seems strong at present. Among the new aspects of American Studies is a stronger comparative dimension. This developing trend is strengthened by the new efforts of the universities and colleges to include at least one semester at a university abroad in every student’s Bachelor’s or Master’s program. A great number of exchange contracts have been established between Norwegian and universities and colleges in the United States and Canada in recent years. I an happy to report that students are attracted to North-American Area Studies courses in great numbers. In short, the future prospects of this field of study look bright.
NOTES
1. (Philadelphia, 1949); Pengemakt og arbeid I Amerika [Money and Labor in America] (1910); Genesis of American Independence (1910); Den amerikanske nasjon i opphav og reising [The Creation and Rise of the American Nation] (1920). 2. American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization (1958).
INDEX
Keywords: popular culture, multiculturalism, Film Studies, Bologna, American History, foreign policy, immigration, Vietnam War, women’s history, Native American history, American Civilization, old War
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American Studies in Poland
I. Institutions 1 At present, American Studies is not recognized by the state educational system as a field of study in its own right, but it belongs to Modern Languages (English) listed among academic disciplines taught at Polish universities. The Polish Association for American Studies has been getting ready to take steps towards establishing American Studies as a separate discipline through proper official channels. PAAS (www.paas.org.pl) was founded in 1990 in Warsaw and now has 150 members—faculty and Ph.D. students, mostly from the university Departments of English, since American literature and culture are obligatory components of three-year B.A. programs and optional components of two-year M.A. programs in English. Moreover, American Studies is taught at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw (chair: Dr. Tomasz Basiuk), the Department of American Studies and Mass Media of the University of Lodz (chair: Prof. Elzbieta H. Oleksy), and the Department of American Studies of Jagiellonian University in Cracow (chair: Prof. Andrzej Mania). The School of English of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin is the only Polish academic institution with a full program in American Studies as a major (program director: Prof. Jerzy Durczak).
2 Two American Studies journals are now published in Poland: the Polish Journal of American Studies (PAAS) and American Studies (American Studies Center, Warsaw). Both are peer-reviewed and open to submissions from all over the world. Every year the Polish Association for American Studies organizes a thematically focused international conference, usually held in the last week of October. II. Specific fields of research 3 As most Polish scholars and students of American Studies are affiliated to the Departments of American Literature in university Schools (Institutes) of English, and there either hold or aim at earning degrees in American literature, the discipline still has a predominantly literary character determined by the European tradition of modern philology. Thus far, a Department of American Studies (part of the School of English) has been established only at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin (chair: Prof. Jerzy Kutnik). Cultural Studies, including American Studies as well), have been also conducted and taught at the University of Silesia in Sosnowiec.
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4 The most popular field of research in Polish American Studies definitely has been twentieth-century American literature and culture. Among established, tenured scholars, most have been specializing in twentieth-century literature: Prof. Krzysztof Andrzejczak (Univ. of Lodz) in African-American literature, Prof. Andrzej Ceynowa (Univ. of Gdansk) in contemporary African-American drama, Prof. Jerzy Durczak (Maria Curie-Sklodowska Univ. of Lublin) in contemporary ethnic fiction and autobiography, Prof. Joanna Durczak (Maria Curie-Sklodowska Univ. of Lublin) in contemporary poetry and nature writing, Prof. Piotr Dziedzic (Univ.of Silesia) in contemporary fiction), Prof. Jadwiga Maszewska (Univ. of Lodz) in Native American fiction and literature of the American South, Prof. Agata Preis-Smith (University of Warsaw) in contemporary American poetry, and Prof. Zygmunt Mazur (Jagiellonian University, Cracow) in contemporary American fiction. A few scholars, such as Prof. Andrzej Kopcewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, emeritus), Prof. Zbigniew Maszewski (Univ. of Lodz), Prof. Agnieszka Salska (Univ. of Lodz) and Prof. Marek Wilczynski (Adam Mickiewicz Univ. of Poznan) have published both on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Recently, the most noteworthy joint effort of Polish Americanists has been a two-volume, comprehensive History of Twentieth-Century American Literature in Polish (ed. Agnieszka Salska, Cracow: Universitas, 2003). 5 Among the junior faculty and graduate students popular fields of interest include Chicano literature (Dr. Grazyna Zygadlo, Lodz), Afro-American literature (Dr. Ewa Luczak, Warsaw), Native American literature (Dr. Piotr Zazula, Wroclaw), gay fiction and autobiography (Dr. Tomasz Basiuk, Warsaw; Dr. Marta Mazurek, Poznan; Dr. Tomasz Sikora, Sosnowiec), women's literature and gender studies (Dr. Agnieszka Graff, Warsaw; Dr. Dominika Ferens, Wroclaw; Dr. Krystyna Mazur, Warsaw; Dr. Beata Williamson, Gdansk), science-fiction and cyberpunk (Dr. Pawel Frelik, Lublin) and contemporary poetry and fiction (Dr. Paulina Ambrozy, Poznan; Dr. Andrzej Antoszek, Lublin; Dr. Kacper Bartczak, Lodz; Dr. Jacek Gutorow, Opole; Dr. Zofia Kolbuszewska, Lublin; Dr. Grzegorz Kosc, Lodz). 6 Nineteenth-century American literature is now less often chosen as the main field of research, and only several scholars have been publishing extensively on this topic (Dr. Marek Paryz, Warsaw; Prof. Agnieszka Salska, Lodz; Prof. Marek Wilczynski, Poznan; Dr. Anna Wawrzyniak, Poznan; Dr. Magdalena Zapedowska, Poznan). Prof. Tadeusz Slawek (Univ. of Silesia, Sosnowiec) has been the most outstanding Polish scholar as regards comparative literature bordering on American Studies. 7 Non-literary American Studies in Poland range from American history (Dr. Zbigniew Mazur, Maria Curie-Sklodowska Univ. of Lublin; Prof. Krzysztof Michalek, Univ. of Warsaw; Prof. Irmina Wawrzyczek, Maria Curie-Sklodowska Univ. of Lublin) to political science (Prof. Stanislaw Filipowcz, Univ. of Warsaw; Dr. Bohdan Szklarski, Univ. of Warsaw), popular culture studies (Dr. Ewa Grzeszczyk, Univ. of Warsaw), ethnic studies, film studies, art history (Prof. Jerzy Kutnik, Maria Curie-Sklodowska Univ. of Lublin)… 8 Survey courses in the history of American literature and culture, as well as U.S. history, are offered to students from all countries of the European Union in all three- year university B.A. programs, while the offer of graduate courses and seminars varies from university to university, depending on the interests of faculty. 9 Polish Americanists have been taking advantage of the benefits of the Fulbright Program which also serves as a channel for recruiting visiting professors of American Studies from the United States.
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INDEX
Keywords : Fulbright, American literature, History of Twentieth-Century American Literature
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Overview of American Studies in Portugal
1 The practice of American Studies in Portugal evolved out of a philological tradition that might be seen in all of the courses taught at the five public Universities (Lisbon – Classic and New, Oporto, Coimbra, and Aveiro) and at the semi-private Catholic University until the Revolution of 1974. The following decade opened up new opportunities for the expansion of the field with the establishment of a few other public universities around the country (Évora, Minho, Algarve, Beira Interior, Trás-os- Montes e Alto Douro, Open University, Madeira and Azores) as well as several private institutions.
2 In undergraduate teaching, language and literature have been traditionally privileged areas, but linguistics and culture have gained ground within the curricula in the classic universities since the late 1970s. As a response to the present crisis in the Humanities, an effort is being made to appeal to a wider range of candidates. Changes are being implemented in the curricula and new courses are being offered. As the following data will show, the newer universities seem to be more open to interdisciplinary studies, although many creative practices of interdisciplinarity can be detected in the traditional curricula of older universities. However, it is noticeable that there is a general tendency to respond to developments in the field of American Studies in the US, with a growing exploration of social science, history, women and gender studies, comparative cultural studies, studies of identity, minority and ethnic studies, cinema and other arts. 3 For years, American Literature was the only discipline that was taught in Portuguese universities, and only at Coimbra, Lisbon and Oporto. The first Doctorate in American Studies to be held by a Portuguese academic dates from 1973, and was earned by Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos at the University of Yale. The wide range of activity Professor Santos subsequently developed at the University of Coimbra, including the intensive supervision of numerous MA theses and PhD dissertations around the country, the longstanding collaboration with the Fulbright Program, and her many efforts toward internationalization greatly contributed to the growing visibility of American Studies in Portugal.
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4 It was only in the 1980s that the first Master of Arts programs were created. Since then, over 100 MA theses have been produced all over the country (50% in the field of cultural studies, 50% in literary studies). MA programs - An overview of the main universities 5 Current American Studies MA programs include the following seminars: Cinema and Literature, Studies of Identity, American Modernism (U Lisbon); History – Immigration, Historical Overview of American Studies, Theories of American Studies, History and Literature, Utopia in America, Science Fiction, Poetry and American Studies, African- American Literature and Culture (U Coimbra); Spaces and Memory: Representations of Place, Representations of America and of the South, (U Oporto); American History, American Culture, American Literature (Poetry and the Arts), Literature and Cinema, Educational Theories (Open U); Modernity in American Literature, Images of the West in 20th-century Literature and Art; Literature and Gender (Catholic U) 6 There are also other MA programs—in Anglo-American or Anglo-Portuguese Studies— that include seminars in American Studies: Cinema (U Coimbra); Spaces and Memories in Anglo-American Poetry by Women, Representations of the Non-Place: Spaces of Dystopia in the 20th Century (U Oporto); American Culture (New University of Lisbon); American Literature (U Minho); 20th-century American Literature, 20th-century American Culture, Cinema, Theatre, Post-Colonial Studies (U Aveiro). Doctoral Programs 7 Although Doctoral seminars are still rare in Portuguese Faculties of Letters, a significant number of PhD dissertations in American Studies, predominantly focusing on literature, have been produced all over the country especially since the late 1980s. A transdisciplinary doctoral course created at Coimbra in 2004, "Languages, Identities and Globalization," includes two seminars in Anglo-American Studies. 8 The community of Americanists in Portugal is still very small, perhaps as few as 40 people affiliated with joint departments (Anglo-American, Anglo-German) or with larger groups (Social Sciences and Humanities, Languages and Literatures, Languages and Cultures). If in the past we would complain about large numbers of students and a heavy class load, the current crisis in the Humanities has completely changed the situation. 9 Although academic employment has been suffering many restrictions since the late 1980s, the present situation has put a stop to any increases of faculty in the foreseeable future. Besides an absurd amount of administrative work (characteristic of our traditionally bureaucratic society), democratic organization in small departments demands a lot from every individual. In addition to these factors, there is now a great pressure to revise curricula and invent new courses in a desperate attempt to survive the current crisis. Present economic strains in Portugal do not encourage research in the Humanities, and fewer and fewer institutions offer academic grants. All in all, we live in an environment that does not favor consistent and intensive scholarly production. 10 A cursory reading of the following list of selected publications by Portuguese Americanists in recent years gives us an immediate sense that the dominant interest is still literary analysis—comprising almost 75% of the listed items, notwithstanding the emphasis on cultural studies, visual arts, cyberculture, etcetera, in graduate teaching.
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ResearchOngoing Collective Research Projects:University of Lisbon – Center for English Studies 11 "Blurring of Boundaries/Intercultural Dialogues" (Teresa F. A. Alves, Teresa Cid). University of Oporto – Institute of North American Studies 12 “The City in American Literature” (Carlos Azevedo [coordinator], Maria João Pires, Maria Teresa Castilho, Ana Cristina Carneiro, Arminda João Seabra do Amaral, Clara Sarmento, Susana Cruz, Susana Magalhães). University of Coimbra – Center for Social Studies (http://www.ces.uc.pt/) 13 “Memory, Violence and Identity – New Comparative Perspectives on Modernism” (Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, co-coordinator), collective research project, with a strong comparative design and multidisciplinarity. It includes the following individual projects: "Sex and Sexuality in Modernist Poetics" (Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos), “The Race of the Nation: From Modernism to Post-Modernism in the African- American Text” (Isabel Caldeira), "Memory and Forgetting in the Modernist Transnation: Carey McWilliams and Social Modernism” (Maria José Canelo), “Modernity in Cather and Faulkner” (Paula Mesquita); “Windows of Modernism: Pessoa, Joyce and Fitzgerald (Inês Lage Pinto-Basto), “Inverting the Middle Passage: Return and Modernity in African-American Narrative” (Ana Luísa Saraiva). Open University – Center for Anglo-American Studies (http://www.univ-ab.pt/ investigacao/ceaa/index.html) 14 “The City in American Culture” (Maria Laura Pires); “Minorities in the US: History, Education and Culture” (António Simões), “Literature and the Arts” (Mário Avelar), “Feminist Movements in America” (Anne Cova), “Theory of Literature and Cultural Studies” (António Feijó). Recently Finished ProjectsUniversity of Lisbon –– Center for English Studies 15 “Literary Theory, Literature and Culture” (Maria Helena Paiva Correia, Coordinator) – translation of theoretical and critical texts in English; American literatures and cultures – studies of identity. University of Coimbra – Center for Social Studies 16 “Deterritorialization of Words in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and in the Poetry by Portuguese Immigrants in the US” (Graça Capinha); “Nationalism and Literary Magazines in Early 20th Century” (Maria José Canelo), part of a collective project on “Globalization”, 2001;
17 Translation into Portuguese of I’m Not Rappaport, by Herb Gardner (João Paulo Moreira). Open University – Center for American Studies 18 “Portugal and the Discovery of America” (Maria Laura Pires, Coordinator), René Garay, New York University (CUNY), Mário Avelar, University of Lisbon; 19 “Literature of Exile” (Maria Laura Pires, Coordinator)
20 “Two International Associations of Women of American Initiative: International Council of Women and International Women’s Suffrage Alliance” (Anne Cova, Coordinator); 21 “Multicultural Education and the History of Linguistic Minorities in the United States” (António Simões, Coordinator). Ongoing Individual Projects * 22 Teresa Botelho, New University of Lisbon: book on the history of the American press and an article on Asian-American crime fiction.
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23 University of Oporto: Carlos Azevedo on urban space and representation in the Harlem Renaissance and on modernism in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and the South in Yoknapatawpha County”; Teresa Castilho on Delta Wedding, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and utopianism in The Scarlet Letter. 24 University of Coimbra: Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos, organization (with António Sousa Ribeiro and Isabel Caldeira) of a book on Modernisms (including essays by several other Americanists); "Tradition and Violence: A Comparative Study of Lyric Poetry in Modernity” (focusing mainly on American and Portuguese poets) and Maria José Canelo, “Violence and Language in Common Ground”—both part of a collective research project, coordinated by a Germanist—“The Representation of Violence and the Violence of Representation”; 25 Graça Capinha, “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School: Poetics and Citizenship”; Translation into Portuguese of the Selected Poems of Robert Duncan and revision of the translation into Portuguese of the Collected Poems of Robert Creeley (Graça Capinha); Female Voices in the Poetry of Portuguese Immigrants; Poetry between Portuguese Discoveries and Portuguese Immigration; 26 Teresa Tavares: comparative American studies - immigration.
27 Isabel Caldeira: comparative work between Lusophone African writers and African- American writers; translation of African-American texts. 28 University of Aveiro: David Callahan: publications on James Fenimore Cooper and James Welch, Diane Glancy, Susanna Moore, Janett Turner Hospital; Anthony Barker on American Cinema; Reinaldo Silva on Lusophone American Literature and Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature. Publications (selection, 1995- )*Alves, Teresa F. A. 29 “Fashioning One’s Life After a Land of Lost Borders: Mary Austin’s Earth Horizon.” Novas Histórias Literárias/New Literary Histories, Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004; 30 "Cânone e Diversidade", Cadernos de Anglística 9, Lisboa: Colibri e CEAUL, 2003;
31 "Autobiographies of Women in the 'Promised Land'". Feminine Identities. Cadernos de Anglística 5 (Lisboa 2003), 133-160; 32 "Imprisonment and Madness: The Patterns of the Entrapped Self". Identity Matters. Anglo-Saxónica, Série II 16/17 (Lisboa 2002), 183-195; 33 "'Some Enchanted Evening'—Tuning In the Amazing Fifties, Switching Off the Elusive Decade", American Studies International, XXXIX/3 (October 2001), 25-40; 34 "Gazing at the River, Throwing the Line, Daring the Waters". Rivers and the American Experience. Lublin, 2000, 13-33; 35 "O conto como oficina da arte de narrar". A palavra e o canto: miscelânea de homenagem a Rita Iriarte. Lisboa, 2000, 301-8; 36 "In Praise of Saul's Soul". American Studies International XXXV/1 (February 1997), 32-43;
37 "Women's Narratives and the Shifts from the Canon". Dedalus: Revista Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada (Fevereiro 1997), 15-27. 38 ----- with Teresa Cid and Heinz Ickstadt, eds. Ceremonies and Spectacles: Performing American Culture. Amsterdam, VU University Press, 2000;
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39 ----- with Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos (coord.), Teresa Cid and Isabel Caldeira. Literatura americana. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998. Amaral, João Seabra do. 40 “(Re)naissance americana: demanda de uma identidade cultural”. Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. Avelar, Mário, 41 ------ed. Viagens pela palavra: miscelânea de homenagem a Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Lisboa, Universidade Aberta, 2005; 42 “Os Fundadores e os clássicos”. Viagens pela palavra: miscelânea de homenagem a Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 2005; 43 A poesia e as artes visuais. Cosmos, 2005;
44 Histórias(s) da literatura americana, preface by George Monteiro. Universidade Aberta, 2004. 45 “Bildungsroman, Rebuilding American Literary History – Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife”. Landscapes of Memory – Paisagens da memória. Lisboa: Universidade Católica Editora, 2004; 46 “Voices of Absorption – reading Karl Kirchwey’s A Wandering Island”. Miscelânea de homenagem a Margarida Losa. Universidade do Porto, 2004; 47 “Jack Kerouac - uma viagem no espaço, no tempo, na linguagem”. Op. cit. 6 (2003);
48 “Confessionalismo autobiográfico em Heaven’s Coast, de Mark Doty”. Do esplendor na relva – elites e cultura comum de expressão inglesa. Álvaro Pina et al. eds. Lisboa: Cosmos, 2000; 49 “The ancient earthworks and temples of the American Indians, de Lindesey Brine”, Anglo- Saxónica, 2000; 50 “What Happened to the American Dream?” Sociedade e Cultura Norte-Americanas. Ed. Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1997; 51 “Realização ou distorção do sonho americano?” Sociedade e cultura norte-americanas. Ed. Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1997; 52 Sylvia Plath - O rosto oculto do poeta. Lisboa: Cosmos, 1996;
53 “Operation Memory, de David Lehman: a superação de estereotipos românticos na poesia americana contemporânea”. Anglo-Saxónica, Lisboa, Colibri, 1996. Azevedo, Carlos. 54 “Entre o centro e a margem: excurso sobre histórias e antologias da literatura americana”. Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004, 245-57; 55 "A Portrait of the Indian Woman as Ghost Dancer: Mother Sioux in Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo”. Estudos/Studien/Studies 1 (2001), 117-26; 56 “Funeral Excursions, Posthumous Discourses: Twain, Faulkner, and Postmodernist Writing”. Op. Cit. 2 (1999), 115-126; 57 “A educação segundo John Locke: contributos para a identidade cultural americana”. Anglo-Saxónica: Revista do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa. Série II, 8/9 (1998), 121-29;
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58 “As elites do quotidiano: Don DeLillo e a política da escrita em Mao II”. Do esplendor na relva: elites e cultura comum de expressão inglesa. Álvaro Pina, João Ferreira Duarte e Maria Helena Serôdio (org.). Lisboa: Edições Cosmos, 2000, 549-63; 59 "James e Hemingway: as artes da ficção”. Anglo-Saxónica: Revista do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa. Série II, 2/3 (1996), 215-23; 60 "Oak Park as the Thing Left Out: Surface and Depth in 'Soldier's Home'", Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy. Ed. James Nagel. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1996, 96-107. Botelho, Teresa. 61 “Women Warriors in the Golden Mountain: Chinese-American Feminine Voices and the Experience of Becoming”. Novas histórias literárias/ New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004, 189-200; 62 “American Chinatowns: Ethnic Urban Enclaves, Rituals of Representation and the Recreation of Memories”. Landscapes of Memory/Paisagens da memória. Lisboa: Universidade Católica Editora, 2004, 269-277; 63 “Randolph Bourne and the Paradoxes of the Cultural Self” Estudos anglo-portugueses: Livro de homenagem a Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2003, 367-384; 64 “To Withdraw like a Monk and to Live Like a Prince: The American Pursuit of the Idea of Home”. Op. Cit. 5 (2002), 159- 178; 65 “Coming of Age: American Jews Under the Union Flag”. Op.Cit. 1 (1998), 91-105; Caldeira, Isabel 66 ------et al, eds. Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. 67 “The New Black Consciousness: Writing and the Construction of a Black Aesthetic; or, Looking Back at the Handwriting on the Wall”. Anarchy and Dissent: American Literature in the Sixties. Ed. Díaz Sánchez, María Eugenia and Viorica Patea. Salamanca, Spain: Plaza Universitaria, 1999. 68 ----- with Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos (coord.), Teresa F. A. Alves, and Teresa Cid. Literatura americana. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998. Callahan, David. 69 "Containing Manhood in James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer". Viagens pela palavra: miscelânea de homenagem a Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Ed. Mário Avelar. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 2005, 75-90; 70 "Narrative and Moral Intelligence in Gordon Henry Jr's The Light People." Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World. Ed. Geoffrey Davis, Peter Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent and Marc Delrez. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2005, 187-199; 71 "Who Hides in the Work of James Fenimore Cooper?" In James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art. Ed Hugh C.MacDougall. Oneonta: State University of New York, 2002: 21-25; also at 72 http://www.oneonta.edu/external/cooper/articles/suny/2001suny-callahan.html
73 "Sexuality and the Feminine Space in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room." Op Cit 5 (2002), 9-21;
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74 "Whiteness Studies: 'Nothing but oppressive and false'?" In Europe: Fact and Fiction. Ed. Anthony David Barker. Aveiro: Centro de Línguas e Culturas, 2001, 117-125. Canelo, Maria José. 75 "Common Ground and Immigrant Literatures in the 1940s". Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004, 295-306. 76 "Carey McWilliams and the question of cultural citizenship in the 1940s". PhD Diss. New York University, 2003. Capinha, Graça. 77 “The Three Marxes and the Four Williamses: A Poetics of Immigration”. Isabel Caldeira et al. eds. Novas Histórias Literárias/New Literary Histories. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. 78 “A magia da tribo. Para uma concepção agonista e poética dos discursos e das identidades: a desterritorialização das palavras na poesia L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E e na poesia dos emigrantes portugueses”. Maria Irene Ramalho e António Sousa Ribeiro (orgs.). Entre ser e estar. Raízes, percursos e identidades. Porto: Afrontamento, 2002; 79 "Before the Death of Our Fury: Female Voices in the Poetry of Portuguese Immigrants" in Ferreira, Virgínia, et al. (orgs). Shifting Bonds, Shifting Bounds: Women, Mobility and Citizenship in Europe. Oeiras: Celta, 1998; 80 "Tecendo e distorcendo o colonialismo da linguagem: um pequeno e quotidiano exercício de poética". Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 47 (Fevereiro 1997); 81 "Re-criando a inocência: Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field". Biblos LXXI, 1995;
82 ----- Co-editor (with Bela Feldman-Bianco) and co-author of Identidades. Estudos de Cultura e Poder. São Paulo: HUCITEC, 2000 (comparative study between Portuguese immigrant poets in the USA and in Brasil); 83 ----- Identidades, special issue of the journal Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 48 (Junho 1997), (comparative study between Portuguese immigrant poets in the USA and in Brasil) 84 ----- Co-editor (with Maria Irene Ramalho) and co-author of Os poetas e o social, special issue of the journal Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais. 47 (Fevereiro 1997); 85 ----- ed. Oficina de poesia. Revista da palavra e da imagem (a publication of the University of Coimbra), 2n series. Coimbra: Oficina de Poesia & Palimage Press. Cid, Teresa. 86 "'Krazy Katting' the Modern American Literary Landscape: from high to low and back again". Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004, 533-541. 87 “Rising Tides: The Power of Floods in American Life and Literature". "Nature's Nation" Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Ed. Hans Bak and Walter Hölbling. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2003. 198-217. 88 "Reading Katherine Vaz, Re-thinking the Portuguese Diaspora". Identities. Cadernos de Anglística 5, Lisboa, CEAUL e Edições Colibri, 2002. 249-269. 89 "Antigas raízes e novos rumos: o fado/blues de Katherine Vaz e a diáspora portuguesa nos Estados Unidos da América". Raizes e Rumos. Perspectivas Interdisciplinares em Estudos Americanos. Ed. Sonia Torres. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7 Letras, 2001. 212-219.
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90 "Wanting America Back: The Crown of Columbus as a Tentative Epic in an Age of Multiculturalism". The Insular Dream. Obsession and Resistance. Ed. Kristian Versluys. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995. 342-349. 91 ----- et al eds. "Feminine Identities". Cadernos de Anglística, 5, Lisboa, Colibri e Ceaul, 2002. 92 ----- with Teresa Alves and Heinz Ickstadt, eds. Ceremonies and Spectacles: Performing American Culture. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000. 93 ----- with Teresa Alves, eds. Walt Whitman. Colecção Actas e Colóquios. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 1999. 94 ----- with Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos (coord.), Teresa F. A. Alves and Isabel Caldeira. Literatura americana. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998. Gonçalves, Fernando. 95 “’I, Harlem, Speak to You’: A Poesia de Langston Hughes nos Anos 30 ou De Harlem Para o Mundo em Onda Curta”. Novas histórias literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. Mancelos, João de. 96 "Tão velhas quanto a lua: Baby Suggs, Thérèse e Consolata nos romances de Toni Morrison". A luz de Saturno: figurações da velhice. Ed. António Manuel Ferreira. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2005. 193-199. 97 "A Língua do Invasor e a Língua da Poesia: Joy Harjo e o Desconforto da Linguagem". Hélio Osvaldo Alves: o guardador de rios. Ed. Joanne Paisana. Col. Poliedro, 16. Braga: Centro de Estudos Humanísticos, Universidade do Minho, 2005. 183-189. 98 "Witchcraft, Initiation and Cultural Identity in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima". Revista de Letras , série II, 3, 2004. 129-134. 99 "The Eco-Poetics of Magic: Joy Harjo's Universal and Dreamy Places". Nordic Association for English Studies: Homepage www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/naes2004 100 "Como Roubar Cavalos aos Caras Pálidas: Poesia e Contra-cultura em Joy Harjo".
101 O lago de todos os recursos: homenagem a Hélio Osvaldo Alves. Ed. Luísa Leal de Faria e Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa, 2004. 119-126. 102 "Aztlán: O Barrío que Molda o Mito na Obra de Rudolfo Anaya". Landscapes of Memory / Paisagens da memória. Ed. Isabel Capeloa Gil, Richard Trewinnard, Maria Laura Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2004. 279-286; 103 "Dar novos mundos ao mundo: a retórica dos descobrimentos portugueses e do programa espacial norte-americano". Os descobrimentos portugueses nas rotas da memória. CD-Rom. Viseu: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2002. 229-244. 104 "Cultos e culturas: inquérito à nacionalidade de Deus". Do esplendor na relva: elites e cultura comum de expressão inglesa . Ed. Álvaro Pina, José Duarte e Maria Helena Serôdio. Lisboa: Edições Cosmos, 2000. 273-279. Marques, Maria do Céu Monteiro. 105 “John Dos Passos' USA and the American Dream”. PhD Diss. Universidad de Salamanca. Martins, Adriana Alves.
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106 “Between the Power of the Word and the Word of Power: The Importance of the Press in Postmodern Historical Fiction” Novas Histórias Literárias/New Literary Histories. Ed. Isabel Caldeira et al. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. Mesquita, Paula. 107 “Espectros e fragmentos: tensões psicossexuais em The Sound and the Fury e Absalom, Absalom de William Faulkner”, Diss. Doutoramento, Universidade de Coimbra, 2005; 108 " Daughters of Necessity, Mothers of Resource: White Women and the War in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!". Donald Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (eds.) Faulkner and War. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004; 109 "Law(s) and Disorder(s): Men Trouble in Faulkner's Sanctuary ". Op. Cit. and in Atenea – A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Universidad de Puerto Rico. XXIII 2 (Dezembro 2003); 110 "The Persistence of Memory: Reading Faulkner in a Post-Colonial Portuguese Context". Faulkner Journal of Japan 4.Tóquio: Faulkner Society of Japan, 2002. Pires, Maria Laura Bettencourt 111 ------ed. Europa e América: mitos e confrontos. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998.
112 Sociedade e Cultura Norte-Americanas. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1997. Prata, Ricardo Luís Tavares da Costa. 113 “Narrativas de Ursula Le Guin”. Diss. Doutoramento, Universidade Aberta. Raamsdonk, Alice Van. 114 Hillary Rodham Clinton: de activista liberal a arquétipo do poder feminino. Lisboa: Universitária Editora, 2000. 115 "A 'Separação de Esferas' e a instituição das Primeiras Damas dos E.U.A". Faces de Eva. Estudos sobre a mulher 7, Lisboa: Edições Colibri/Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2002. 19-44. Reis, Maria Filipa Palma dos. 116 "De nós ao Outro, nas narrativas universitárias do contexto anglo-americano". Viseu, 1999; 117 "O romance académico: dois mitos em confronto" Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires, ed. Europa e América: mitos e confrontos. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998. Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho S. 118 “Modernist Muses that Matter: Inspiration Revisited in Pessoa and Stevens.” Wallace Stevens Journal 29.1 (Spring 2005). “The Accidental Bridge: Hart Crane’s Theory of Poetry”. The American Poetry Book. Ed. Stephen Matterson and Michael Hinds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004; “Misremembering. H. D. and Inspiration”. Landscapes of Memory/Paisagens da Memória. Ed. Isabel Capeloa Gil, Richard Trewinnard, Maria Laura Pires. Lisboa: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2004; 119 Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa's Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2003; 120 "Poetry in the Machine Age [Stein, Williams, H.D., Moore, Crane, Hughes]" Cambridge History of American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Vol V. (2003). 121 ----- (coord.) with Teresa F. A. Alves, Teresa Cid and Isabel Caldeira. Literatura americana. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1998.
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122 ----- ed.. Poesia do Mundo1. Coimbra: Palimage, 1995-98-2001-04. Sarmento, Clara. 123 As palavras, a página e o livro: a construção literária na obra de Paul Auster. Lisboa: Ulmeiro, 2001, . Tavares, Teresa. 124 “New Women, New Men, or What You Will in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree." Edith Wharton Review 21.1 (Spring 2005): 1-15. 125 “De-Americanizing American Studies and Feminist Studies: Notes of A Portuguese Feminist Americanist.” American Studies International XXXVIII. 3 (Oct 2000): 100-6. 126 “European Immigrants and the Whitening of America, 1890-1924.” Oficina do CES 200 (Dec 2003). 127 ----- Isabel Caldeira et al, eds. Novas Histórias Literárias/New Literary Histories. Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra, 2004. Wilson, Stephen. 128 “Reading and Writing History: A Study of Ezra Pound’s American History Cantos”. PhD Diss. University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2003. Forthcoming * 129 Avelar, Mário. “’Shall I compare thee to ... Sylvia Plath?’ Reading Kate Moses’ Wintering”. Anglo-Saxónica CTVII. 130 Botelho, Teresa. “The Neo-American Education of Henry Park in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker” Op Cit; “Staging the Binary: Philip Kan Gotanda and the Status of American Ethnic Theatre” Livro de Homenagem à Professora Julia Dias Ferreira. 131 Callahan, David. "Cooper's Androgynous Heroes." In Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper. Ed. Jeffrey Walker. New York: AMS Press, 2005; "DNA, Bodily Realities and Surveillance in CSI." Television, Aesthetics and Reality. Ed. Anthony Barker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 132 Capinha, Graça. “Robert Duncan and the Question of Law: Ernst Kantorowicz and the Poet’s Two Bodies”, in A. Gelpi & R. Bertholf eds. Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics the Politics of Poetry. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 133 Mesquita, Paula. "Vestida para matar: The Unvanquished", in Volume de Homenagem a Margarida Losa. 134 * Besides being selected, these are partial lists due to my difficulty in collecting more comprehensive ones. Academic exchange. InternationalizationUniversity of Lisbon 135 Faculty Exchange Program with Georgetown University in Washington; Collaboration with Brown University in a project concerning Portuguese American Literature and Culture; 136 Participation and chairing of sessions in EAAS, ASA, Society for the Study of the Short Story (SSSS), and Modernist Studies Association (MSA). University of Minho 137 SOCRATES Programme – Erasmus – Thematic Networks (TN), Rosi Braidotti, Universiteit Utrecht (Coordinator); Ana Gabriela Macedo, Department of English and North American Studies, University of Minho 138 http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/international/athena.php).
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University of Coimbra 139 Exchange program with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with mobility of students, faculty and researchers (João Paulo Moreira: Director of UW Undergraduate Students at Coimbra; 140 M. Irene Ramalho S. Santos: International Affiliate, Department of Comparative Literature, UW-Madison (2004- ); 141 M. Irene Ramalho S. Santos – First International Representative on the Women's Committee 2003-05, Chair 2004-05 and Program Committee 1999); 142 Participation in ASA (M. Irene Ramalho S. Santos, Isabel Caldeira, Graça Capinha; Participation in EAAS (Graça Capinha, João Paulo Moreira, Isabel Caldeira, Maria Irene Ramalho S. Santos, Stephen Wilson); 143 The International Meetings of Poets, organized by the Department of Anglo-American Studies at the University of Coimbra, since 1993 (Irene Ramalho S. Santos, President of the Organizing Committee); 144 Graça Capinha: collaboration and interchange with the Poetics Program at the University of New York at Buffalo (Directed by Charles Bernstein, Robert Creely, and Robert Bertholf); 145 Teresa Tavares: participation in Conferences of the Edith Wharton Society; and in the 27th Conference of the Argentinian Association for American Studies, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe; 4th Conference on Languages of Mercosul, Resistencia, Chaco; and lecture at the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, Buenos Aires, 2005; Fulbright Summer Seminar, Multinational Institute of American Studies, New York University, 2003; 146 Isabel Caldeira: co-organization of a workshop in the EAAS, 1998 (with Kathleen Ashley, U. of Maine); regular participation in Conferences of the Toni Morrison Society (TMS); participation in Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), MELUS and Modernist Studies Association (MSA). Activities – EventsRecent: 147 5th International Meeting of Poets, 2004 – University of Coimbra
148 Coloquium on “Literatura e Qualidade de Vida” – Open University Forthcoming: 149 9th International Conference on "The Short Story in English" (21-29 June, 2006) – University of Lisbon; 150 Lecture Series on Dialogues between Literature and Art - Open University;
151 27th Conference of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American, “Crossroads of History and Culture”, April 2006 – New University of Lisbon (org.); 152 6th International Meeting of Poets, 2007 – University of Coimbra.
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INDEX
Keywords: Literature, history, Poetry, minorities, women studies, gender studies, comparative cultural studies, identity, ethnic studies, cinema, arts
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American Studies in Romania
American Studies at the University of Bucharest 1 The idea of teaching American Studies and founding a program in American Studies was first voiced in the long meetings of faculty and students held at the University of Bucharest soon after the collapse of the communist regime. The proposal was one of many that reflected the spirit of reform and hope for radical changes at the outset of Romania’s transition to democracy. The absence of institutional structures other than English departments and the lack of resources, tradition and experience conspired against the complete and immediate feasibility of the project at that moment. However in the early 1990s, within the English department at the University of Bucharest, a new emphasis was laid on American studies and an exciting course was introduced to students, majoring in English, i.e. American Civilization. Before 1989, only American literature was taught in the curricula, a one semester course, or an elective for senior students.
2 The introduction of American Civilization courses for English students (major or minor) was a groundbreaking success, and it set in motion the numerous achievements in the field of American studies which were to come in the following years. First a more extensive study of American Literature and Civilization (four semesters) became the predominant component for those who took English as a minor and chose the American module. For me, an undergraduate student at that moment, and for all my generation, it all started with Professor Rodica Mihaila’s course in American Civilization and her book The American Challenge : An Introduction to the Study of American Civilization (1994), the “blue bible” as we used to call it. Her innovative, interdisciplinary and up-to date approach fascinated us and also enticed us to specialize in this field ; moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it successfully challenged the old rigid institutional structures. As a result of Prof. Mihaila’s relentless efforts, in 1996 the first graduate program in American Studies opened its doors at the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures. I was among the fortunate fifteen pioneers to embark, from the very beginning, upon this new field in the Romanian academia. The graduate program offered us a module-based curriculum, which could accommodate a large variety of topics, such as Reconfiguration of American Studies, Film Studies, Sociology, Mass Media and Popular Culture, Gender and Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism and Visual Arts or U.S. Political Traditions ; these were just some of the courses offered by
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faculty coming from different departments of our university and from other academic institutions in Bucharest or by Fulbright Visiting Scholars. The program was intended to analyze American civilization in its origins, ideals, and historical development. Its inter- and trans-disciplinary approach, utilizing, besides history, the resources of literature, political science, economics, sociology, philosophy, and the fine arts, offered us the flexibility to work across discipline and address American culture through a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Coming with a rigid background (most of us were graduates of philology, while only a few were graduates of economics, medical school, or history), the program broadened our horizons and triggered in all of us an awareness of contemporary issues, be they political, economic, or related to human rights. The goal of the program was to integrate knowledge in a way meant to enable the students to grasp past and present cultural patterns of American society while pursuing their own special interests concerning that culture. The structure of the program accordingly provided ample opportunity for creative diversity. 3 Three of the MA graduates joined Prof. Mihaila in what was to become the American studies team, and later the American studies Center at the University of Bucharest. 4 The new step in catching up with the long tradition of American Studies departments elsewhere in Europe and in sharing our enthusiasm and fervor for this field, was founding an undergraduate program in American Studies at the University of Bucharest. Institutionalizing American Studies at the undergraduate level was a challenge and, more often than not, a continuous struggle with the old rigid and ossified university system, lack of financial resources, and countless delays and administrative difficulties in including American Studies on the national list of specializations. 5 Founded in 1999, the B.A. in American Studies at the School of Foreign Languages in the University of Bucharest has served as a center for creative multi- and interdisciplinary study and teaching about the United States. It has attracted some of the most talented and intellectually adventurous students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, by offering them a prestigious minor (as of 2004, a major) at the undergraduate level ; the success of the program is best proven by this year’s admission competition, the highest competition at the School of Foreign Languages, with 11 candidates competing for one government subsidized seat. In 2003 the program awarded the first B.A. degrees to its first 11 students. At least three of them continued their studies in PhD programs in the U.S. Since 1999, the program has enrolled roughly 200 students for the B.A. in American Studies. However it was only last year that “American Studies” was finally included on the national list of specializations : this was the outcome of a long struggle which brought official recognition to an interdisciplinary field established long ago in the Western world. 6 Organized and coordinated by Professor Mihaila, the program director, the purpose of the American Studies program at the undergraduate level is to provide students with the opportunity to gain a broader understanding of the United States through the study of diverse aspects of American culture, the use of several disciplines and approaches, and the development of a comprehensive view of America's past experience and present situation. The three main modules in the program, i.e. Culture and Values, Society and Communication, and History and Politics, help students understand changes in American social and political institutions, forms of economic organization, competing myths and ideologies, and responses to world politics that have developed
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in the American experience. In order to meet the requirements of the Romanian educational system (and the EU/Bologna Reform) as well as the present job-market needs, the program also offers a philology component together with an elective teacher-training module, which enable students to become specialists in American studies but also translators or teachers of English1. 7 The program has sought to overcome some of the limitations of present day Romanian institutional politics and align itself with European and American universities, where such programs have a long tradition ; this has been attempted mostly by drawing on the human resources of various departments, creating alliances and pooling resources among teachers and scholars from various disciplines whose intellectual interests are focused on the U.S. 8 The American Studies Program has enjoyed the participation and support of American Fulbright scholars, whose innovative, inspiring and challenging courses on Film Studies, Mass Media and Advertising, Law, or Journalism have become cornerstones for both students and young scholars willing to gain valuable fresh insight into the various topics covered. 9 Colleagues from other departments and institutions (History, Political Science, The Academy of Economics, The Center of Contemporary Art) have always participated enthusiastically in the program and have offered, in spite of the difficulties that a new program unfortunately entails, core courses in American Law, American History, The American Constitution from a Historical Perspective, Contemporary Visual Arts, Business Trends. Well-established researchers, as well as promising young scholars from the English department, have embarked on this new challenge and elaborated new and highly stimulating courses and workshops. One may mention here such courses as Anthropology and American Cultures, Political Doctrines, Native American Culture, African- American Culture, Language and Society, Popular Culture, American Utopias, American Philosophy, U.S. Cultures in the Era of Globalization or American Ethnic Literature. 10 Moreover, lectures and film series have been constantly organized, with a view to giving students and faculty the opportunity to meet and explore together major questions about American culture and society in a more informal context. The flexible module-based program has accommodated a number of Fulbright Scholars in various fields of study, so that not only the program is highly interdisciplinary, but also there is a wealth of direct experience for students. A rich (and growing) library, constantly supported by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, a multimedia system and a web page (www.american-studies.ro) with an active forum and permanently updated information also add to the attractiveness of American Studies in Bucharest. 11 If the graduate programs in Bucharest, Iasi (1996) or Cluj (1997) started almost simultaneously and independently one from the other, the burgeoning interest in founding undergraduate programs in many university centers was also galvanized by the active role the Romanian Association for American Studies (founded in 1999) has played in promoting and developing American Studies in Romania. The Association has brought together scholars and specialists in the field from all over the country, creating a strong community and has thus provided a much needed forum for discussion and clearing house for information about American Studies and related activities in Romanian cultural/educational institutions and research centers throughout the country. Through the e-list, the biannual RAAS-Fulbright Conferences and workshops, the Association has succeeded in being both an initiator and a driving
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force for the proliferation of American Studies programs throughout the country. It has been active in providing a site for an exchange of ideas and experiences between various universities about the EU/Bologna reform and the teaching of American Studies at the undergraduate and graduate level. American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj (Marius Jucan) 12 The inauguration of the B.A program in American Studies at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj reveals itself as a fortunate opportunity to realize the unprecedented growth of academic specializations in our University within the time span of the last decade, along with the intellectual commitment of researchers and professors determined to carry out the demanding scientific and cultural tasks of academic modernization. 13 The emergence of American Studies should be regarded as natural in the framework of an already established and accredited specialization—international relations and European Studies. The foundation for the emergence of this B.A. specialization at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, was laid in 1997, when an interdisciplinary master degree in American Studies was established, this being subsequently included among the master programs of the Faculty of European Studies (in 1999). The master degree enjoyed the support of many prominent personalities within the faculty, the university, and from outside the academic environment. The partnerships developed since the establishment of the master program will be continued and extended with the creation of this B.A. in American Studies (2004), international cooperation being one of the pillars upon which academic performance and competitiveness is based. The most enduring and fruitful relationships have been those with the Fulbright Commission and the Romanian and American Studies Association, with Michigan State University, Plymouth State University, as well as with the American Studies Seminar in Salzburg. These partnerships, following in the footsteps of those established by European studies —which resulted in joint and double degree programs for the B.A. and M.A. level—will yield similar results leading to a better understanding of the complex realities of contemporary American society. These studies, beyond their mediatic appearance, actually refer to more than just history, literature, politics or economics—they deal with the intertwining of the American and European realities pertaining to the two most significant actors on the contemporary world stage. 14 The interdisciplinary character, the teamwork, the constant updating of the scientific discourse mean not only the acknowledgement of a new specialization, but also the leading principles upon which this has been built. American-European modernity should be setting the pragmatic basis of the contemporary world ; thus, this specialization addresses not only high school graduates, but also different categories of specialists interested in acquiring knowledge from a different and innovative field, motivated by a necessity imposed by the pragmatic world we live in. The idea of political, military, economic and, why not, cultural hegemony may also have been one of the sparks which ignited the interest for American Studies. All these elements cannot be simply tackled at a journalistic level ; they need a foundation of academic institutionalization. American Studies at Al. Ioan Cuza University, Iasi (Iulia Blanutà) 15 Traditionally, there has always been a one-year course in American Literature for senior students, acquainting them not only with the literature but also with other aspects of the culture of the United States. Beside this course that functions as a
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compulsory topic of study, the department has offered students a number of optional courses dealing with specific aspects of American culture. 16 After 1995, the English department started a one-year (2 semesters) M.A. program, later to be developed in a two-year (4 semesters) M.A. program in American Cultural Studies, with 11 students accepted with governmental tuition and around 15 students paying their own tuition. Though organized under the umbrella of the Faculty of Letters in Iasi, this is more an interdisciplinary program since, beside the courses proposed by the professors from the English department, there is a constant co-operation with other departments in the University (History, Political Science, Philosophy and Journalism), the students enjoying a variety of perspectives on American culture. Thus, the courses offered by the department cover areas like American Poetics, Historicity and the Canon, Feminism, American History, American Art, Postmodernism, American English, Multiculturalism, and Film Studies , while students can also attend courses such as American Philosophy, Journalism, The American Political System, and Pragmatism. 17 Starting in 2004, the Department of English also organized a B.A. in American Studies as an option for students who chose English. In the first year 25 students chose this new specialization. 18 The BA was first structured on four years (eight semesters) and now it is restructured on three years (six semesters), because of the Bologna educational reform. Each year the students are offered a package of compulsory courses organized in Cultural Studies (Introduction to American Studies, Ethnicity, American Art, Gender Studies, Critical Approaches and American Modern and Postmodern Theory), Literary History, Language, American History, Political Institutions, Society and Communication (American Economic System, American Political System, Mass-Media, American Constructivism) and a Practical Course, completed by a package of optional courses that cover more specific aspects of American culture (The American South, The American Modern and Postmodern Short Story, Pop Culture, Science Fiction, the Language of Advertising, American Regionalism). 19 In order to complete their formation and offer them more opportunities on the job market after they graduate, the B.A. curriculum also includes the Methodology package, which is a set of courses and practical activities that are compulsory for all those who want to become teachers of English. American Studies at Ovidius University, Constanta (Ludmila Martanovschi) 20 Starting with the 2005-2006 academic year, students who opt for undergraduate studies at Ovidius University, Constanta have the chance to select the major in American Studies at the Faculty of Letters. This is a three-year undergraduate program followed by a three-semester graduate program in Anglo-American Studies focused on both British and American culture. 21 High school graduates interested in studying in English found the interdisciplinary agenda of American Studies not only challenging, but also capable of ensuring a pragmatic education for their prospective careers. After a most serious exam, fifty-four students became students in American Studies. The English Department is fully prepared for the future students eager to discover the United States of America, as the American Studies BA program gives a comprehensive coverage of many aspects of American culture and civilization as well as of the American economic, political, and administrative system. Proficiency in English remains a pre-requisite since all courses make use of English as the language of the bibliographical material and of the class
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activities. Besides, students learn a second foreign language of their choice (German, Spanish, or Portuguese). 22 For the past six years, some of the English Department faculty has already taught variants of the core courses of the American Studies undergraduate program as electives in the English Major BA program. Thus, the foundation for the upcoming American Studies BA program has already been laid. In the curriculum valid this fall, besides American Literature, the philological module includes Developing Skills in Speaking, Listening and Writing English and American Language for the three years of study along with other specialized courses such as Contemporary Critical Theory in the first year or Language and Society in the third. The socio-cultural module offers first-year students Introduction to American Studies and U.S. History, second-year students do U.S. Geography, American Philosophy, "Media Studies" and "Popular Culture," while third-year students do U.S. Religion and Contemporary Arts. The wide range of elective courses further consolidates the students’ knowledge of, and skills in, specific areas of interest. Going from courses such as American Political System and Institutions, US Constitution, Ethnic Studies in the first year, to Gender Studies, History of U.S. Press in the second year, and Film Studies, Contemporary American Theatre, US and Globalization in the third year, the students have the chance to get acquainted not only with most relevant topics in the field, but also with the expertise of the professors, associate-professors and assistant-professors at Ovidius University – Constanta as well as with visiting Fulbright lecturers. American Studies at University of West, Timisoara (Cristina Cheveresan) 23 The beginning of the academic year 2004-2005 witnessed the fulfillment of a dream : the English Department managed to devise a new and innovative MA program, meant to cover as many areas connected to American Studies as currently possible. Thus, benefiting from a close collaboration with the Political Science Department, this initiative is aimed at offering a panoramic view of the American socio-political and cultural space, as well as detailed outlooks on its specific issues. Graduates in letters, philosophy, journalism, political science etc. who are proficient in English are invited to enlarge their knowledge of the ‘American Dream’ by means of attending series of lectures and seminars focusing on a large variety of study-topics. 24 The American Studies postgraduate specialization functions according to an interdisciplinary model of presentation and analysis : American culture, civilization and literature come to meet history, geography, religion, as well as gender and media studies or human rights in what is intended as an original and highly interactive program regarding the United States of America. This generous plan sets itself to open pathways to a better understanding of Transatlantic stereotypes and controversy, as well as to an accurate evaluation of the existing similarities and differences between American and European cultural patterns. 25 The objectives of this ambitious project are utterly diverse : offering the MA students solid knowledge of the above-mentioned fields of American Studies, it envisages their ulterior involvement in research, as well as the development of their analytical skills by means of comparative approaches. The students will be able to apply the acquired theoretical knowledge in practical situations typical of the American way of thinking and acting, in the context of their frequent meetings with foreign lecturers. 26 ***
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27 Even if not all universities around the country have American Studies graduate or undergraduate programs, American Studies has become an important component of their curricula (in the Universities of Craiova, Galati, Oradea). In Baia Mare, for instance, despite the massive cuts in teaching time that the new EU-compliant 3-year formula has engendered (shrinking study time from 4 to 3 years), the faculty have managed to preserve a significant American component offered to students enrolled in the Romanian and English Language and Literature and, to a lesser extent, to those in Applied Modern Languages undergraduate programs. American Culture and Civilization, History and Geography of the U.S., American Literature are some of the core courses taught at the University of Baia Mare ; also, many American writers are present in such courses as narratology or drama. A less fortunate example is the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, where departmental limitations and restrictions have prevented the institutionalization of a graduate or undergraduate level program. 28 Hoping that our brief presentations illustrate the growth and diversification of American Studies in Romania in a relatively short period of time, I would like to express my strong belief that this process of institutionalizing American Studies will continue.
NOTES
1. Under the Bologna educational reform, the American Studies undergraduate program in Bucharest will be three-year long, with a two-year MA program.
INDEX
Keywords: philosophy, popular culture, history, sociology, law, pragmatism, politics, canon, Film Studies, Mass Media, Gender, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, Visual Arts, Communication, Bologna, Advertising, Journalism, Business, Native American, Poetics, Feminism, American Art, South, Regionalism, African-American literature and culture, Science Fiction
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American Studies in Russia
1 Interest in the USA, both general and specifically academic, has always existed in Russia, with its own ups and downs. But American studies as an academic discipline started gaining its popularity probably after WWII when there sporadically started to emerge the ever-increasing number of academic books, articles and dissertations in literary and historical research on the USA, the main centers of which were founded at the Academic Research Institute of the USA and Canada, headed by academician G. Arbatov, at the Academic Institute of General History (with academician Bolkhovitinov at the head), at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). American studies have always been taught in the framework of university English Language Departments Syllabi, interest in this discipline gaining fresh impetus during the last decade. Nowadays American Studies go hand in hand or even successfully competes with British studies in all major Russian universities.
2 The year 1974 should be mentioned as a special landmark in Russian American Studies history. That year the first conference of Soviet literary scholars was held at Moscow State University, organized by the Dean of the School of Journalism, Professor Yassen Zasursky. Since then and up to now, on a permanent basis, these annual conferences have been gathering numerous scholars in American Literature from the Soviet and post-Soviet space, putting them in contact with their colleagues from American universities. These annual events give ample opportunity for both leading scholars and newcomers to exchange their views on American literature and culture. The proceedings of these academic events, published annually from 1974 to 2003, give a fairly accurate and complete picture of what is going on in Russian studies of American literature and culture. The ever-changing themes of the Moscow conferences have varied in the wide range determined by the sociopolitical situation in the country: from “October and the Literature of the USA. The Impact of the Great October Socialist Revolution on American Literature and Journalism” (1987) to “Mass Culture: an American Experience” (2002) and “Freedom of Choice in the American Civilization” (2004). After the breakdown of the USSR, the annual conference of the Russian Society of American Culture Studies remains the central and the most regular event of American Studies activities in Russia. It also continues to attract scholars from ex- Soviet republics and gains manifest interdisciplinary character. The Russian Society for
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American Culture studies remains one of the most influential branches of the Russian Association for American Studies. 3 The Association for the study of the United States was founded in February 1996 at a conference held at Moscow State University. The initiative group of the Moscow University Americanists had been joined by scholars from other universities and research centers of the Russian Federation. Membership of the association soon reached a number of 120 scholars specializing in the fields of history, international relations, literature, social and political sciences, economics and law. Members of the new association represented not only a wide number of regions of Russia, from Saint Petersburg in the West to Khabarovsk in the Far East, but also scholars from Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. 4 Regular conferences became a main form of activity of the Association. Eight major conferences have been held since 1995 : “American society on the eve of the XXIst century” (1995), “The New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and its meaning for the USA and Russia” (1995), “The United States and the outer World” (1996), “American studies in Russia: in search of new approaches” (1997), “The USA: origin and development of the national tradition and national character” (1999), “ The Problem of “We- the Others” in the context of the historical and cultural experience of the USA”(2001), “Conflict and consensus in American society : theory and practice” (2003), “The conservative tradition in American society : its origin, evolution and contemporary role” (2005). 5 All sessions were followed by publications of the materials of the conferences which consisted of full text articles based on major papers by the participants. 6 The group of scholars studying American literature at the Department of Contemporary Literatures of Europe and America at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) consists of three senior research fellows, among them doctors of philology Maya M. Koreneva and Ekaterina A. Stetsenko. All of them work on the fundamental joint project —the History of US Literature in six volumes. Volumes I, II, III and IV have already been published and volumes V and VI are in the process of being edited. The scholars also work on they own projects in the fields of the American contemporary novel, mass literature, romanticism, drama… 7 Another major center of American Studies is St. Petersburg. American Studies have been developing there since the middle of the last century. At first it was mainly in literary studies: Yury Kovalev and Alexandra Savurienok, two professors in the Literary History Department of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) State University, not only belonged to those Soviet scholars who made the literature of the USA the subject of their special interest, but also created the whole school of “americanists” in the local literary scholarship. Nowadays this Department (Chair — Professor Elena Apenko) remains one of the pivotal academic institutions for American Studies in Russia. 8 Deep changes in our inner and international situations at the turn of the century gave new life and diversity to American studies in the city. Centers for American Studies operate now in the largest two universities of the city, at St. Petersburg State University and at Hertzen Pedagogical State University. Summer Schools, seminars with visiting professors, student exchange programs help to involve many people in American Studies.
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9 Many projects have Russian-American relations as their specific scope. For example, the annual Russian-American Seminar under the constant supervision of the head of the Department of North American Studies, Professor A.Shirjaev, was launched in 1992 at the Faculty of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University. Scholars in all spheres of the humanities from Russia and the USA meet to discuss both “burning” questions of Russian-American relations and fundamental matters of American Studies in Russia. Due to the constant efforts of professor Y.Tretjakov, the St. Petersburg Branch of the Academy of Sciences hosts the biannual conference “Russian-American Links”, where a diversity of mutual influences and controversies in different spheres is discussed. It is very important that gradually American Studies in St. Petersburg become an interdisciplinary project. 10 One of the signs of the deeply changed situation in Russian-American sociocultural and academic relations, with its increased freedom and flexibility, is what became the Fulbright Summer Schools in the Humanities. They have been held annually since 1997 —the joint initiative of Moscow University and the American Studies Association of Russia, supported and co-organized by the Fulbright Program in Russia. They were founded by Professor MGU Tatiana Venediktova who is not only the Director of the Summer school, but the real heart and soul of the project. 11 Each June the Summer School brings together a group of 25-30 graduate students and university teachers (age varying between 25 and 35) from all over Russia for a session of intense learning and discussion devoted to a subject of common scholarly interest in the humanities. Geographical coverage has been widening over the years, including most regions of Russia1, occasionally also Ukraine and Belarus. 12 The themes of the Summer Schools vary from year to year but continuous emphasis is maintained on American Cultural Studies as a comparative discipline, open dialogically onto the global multicultural space and engaged in active dialogue with Russian academic culture. 13 The themes of the past schools were: “Text as Culture, Culture as Text” (1997), "America as Vision and Spectacle" (1998), "The Imagined Past of America: History as a Cultural Construct" (1999), "Nation as Narration: American and Russian Experience" (2001), "Popular Literature: Cultural Mythmaking and Intercultural Communication”, “Everyday Life as Text in American and in Russian”, “Values, Canons, Prices: Text as Intercultural Currency”. Among teachers in the former Summer schools there were distinguished scholars—American (Sacvan Bercovitch, Paul Lauter, Stephen Mailloux, James Chandler, Marc Seltzer, Karal Ann Marling, John Raeburn, N. Katherine Hayes…) and European (Winfried Fluck, Frederick Brogge, Marc Chénetier…). 14 One of the most essential tendencies in the development of American Studies in the vast Russian space is the decentering of American Studies activities geographically across Russia which has become an important symptom of the new academic situation after the “perestroika”. Several influential Centers of American Studies appeared in Russian cities, more or less remote from a cultural metropolis. Among them Tomsk, Volgograd, Izhevsk can be mentioned. 15 Teaching and researching the history and foreign policy of the United States began at Tomsk State University at the beginning of the 1950s. In spite of the fact that Tomsk was a “closed” city up to 1990, more than fifty dissertations on American Studies were defended by Siberian scholars. Problems of American foreign policy after W.W. II were
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and are in the focus of interest of professors and postgraduate students of TSU. Between 1995 and 2005, eight issues of the non-periodical American Studies in Siberia were published in Tomsk. In 2003, Prof. Mikhail Pelipas published the book Forged by one chain: The US and Great Britain in the Middle East in 1945–1956. Up to now Tomsk State University is the only center of American Studies in the vast region of Russia that stretches beween Niznii Novgorod and Irkutsk. In 1996, Tomsk State University Professor Mikhail Pelipas—an alumnus of the John F. Kennedy Institute for American Studies Grant Program (1992, 1996), founded the Siberian Association for American Studies. For the period of its existence (1996–2003) the Association held several conferences on the problems of comparative studies of American and Siberian histories and gave some help in teaching American history in Universities of West Siberia. 16 The center for American Studies “Americana” was created in 1995 within Volgograd State University, in Volgograd. The goal of the center is complex, mixing the study of diplomatic, economic, political and cultural connections between Russia and the countries of the American Continent in modern history. The director of the Center is Alexander I. Kubyshkin, Professor of History, Head of Department of Area Studies and International Relations at Volgograd State University. The Center publishes an annual bilingual (Russian and English) series of collections of papers : Americana. (7 vols. between 1997 and 2005). Re-presentation of Canada: Cross-Cultural Reflections on the Canadian Society is an annually published bilingual (Russian and English) series of collections of papers on Canadian Studies by Russian and American scholars. There were also numerous conferences and seminars on American Studies held by the Center between 1998 and 2005, among them “Russia and the Countries of the American Continent: The Experience of Historical Relationship” (September 1997); “University and Civil Society : the practice of Russian-American Cooperation (September 2001); “American Studies” in Russian Scientific, Educational and Cultural Area (October 2003); “The « Old » and the « New » Borders of Eurasia and Northern America: Security and Cooperation Issues (April 2004). 17 The center for American Studies (CAS) at Udmurt State University (Izhevsk, the Udmurt Republic, Russia) was officially established on April 28, 1998. The Center was the result of intensive and hard work by the University staff that is aimed at developing and strengthening mutually beneficial Russian-American relations. Professor Irina Morozova, the principal initiator, and her colleagues at the Chair for Foreign Literature have been the core ideologists of the Center for many years. 18 The CAS maintains research, follows educational trends and is actively involved in the creation of the informational database on American Studies. The Center represents a valuable resource as the advising office for a number of international educational programs such as IREX, Fulbright, etc. The Center’s library, a donation from the US official agencies and partner organizations, is a nice collection of volumes that include masterpieces of American literature, works on political science, economics, etc. along with reference books on educational opportunities in the USA and periodic editions covering American Studies issues. 19 The CAS staff exercises the local community-oriented approach to developing Russian- American projects and very often acts as the principal organizer and coordinator for the professional and student exchanges between the USA and Russia to benefit the communities.
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20 Still another republican center in the Russian Federation— Kazan (Tatarstan)—is also famous for its achievements in American studies. The Department of World Literature at Kazan State University has become the center of American studies ; among its most important publications should be mentioned Professor Olga Nesmelova’s book “Russian reception of American Literature in the XX century” (Kazan 1998) and that by Associate Prof. Vera Shamina “Two centuries of American drama” (Kazan 2000). 21 Krasnodar State University (Kuban) is another famous center for American studies in Russia known for its publications in Poe studies (the series “Edgar Allan Poe. Essays. Papers. Research”) and translations of classical American literary scholars papers. 22 It should be also added that American Studies in Russia are not necessarily connected with the activities of the institutionalized Centers. A lot of highly topical projects are launched at “provincial” universities due to the initiative of individual American Studies scholars. Ivanovo State University can be considered as an example of this. At Ivanovo State, American Studies traditionally have had a literary and cultural bias, their main locus being the Department of World Literature. Founded in 1974 by Professor V. N. Sheinker, the distinguished Soviet scholar of American literary Romanticism, the Department also hosted research in the literature of the American South. 23 Nowadays, the literary and cultural emphasis has been retained (one of the latest Ivanovo UP publications is Olga Antsyferova’s book The Literary Dimensions of Henry James), but the focus of American studies in Ivanovo has shifted to implementing new long-distance teaching technologies, namely, joint Internet projects coordinated from the Russian side by Professor Olga Antsyferova, Chair of the Comparative Literature Department, and alumna of the John F. Kennedy Institute Grant Program (1999), of the Fulbright Program (2000) and the Salzburg Seminar (2003). The Internet project “The Eurasian Cyberparallel: American Culture via Internet” (http://www.ivanovo.ac.ru/ cyberpar) united the creative efforts of professors and students at eight universities all over Russia and Ukraine. Now large-scale, the “Ivanovo-Wisconsin Exchange Project” (http://wwwivanovo.ac.ru/iv-wis) consists in putting students in the Modern World History course at the University of Wisconsin (Stout) in direct virtual contact with a peer group at Ivanovo State. American and Russian films have been chosen as a common focal point for discussion. 24 Obviously lacking comprehensiveness, this survey gives several representative examples of various forms of American studies activities in the Russian Federation. 25 Summing it up, the scene of American studies in Russia is in a state of flux, seeking for reasonable balance between traditional academic borderlines of research and fresh interdisciplinary approaches. It might be termed an inter-paradigmatic period. But it is also a time of great intellectual excitement—of experimentation, exploration, critical ferment, and lively debate.
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NOTES
1. Universities in cities such as Barnaul, Chelyabinsk, Chita, Ekaterinburg, Ivanovo, Irkutsk, Izhevsk, Kaliningrad, Kazan,Krasnoyarsk, Krasnodar, Kursk, Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Rostov-on-Don, St. Petersburg, , Syktivkar, Tver, Tomsk, Tyumen, Ufa, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Vyatka, Yaroslavl.
INDEX
Keywords : Fulbright, canon, Russian Federation, Annual Conference of Soviet Literary Scholars, Moscow University, Spectacle, Nation, Popular Literature, Mythmaking, Intercultural Communication, Values
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(North) American Studies in Spain: between eclecticism and politics
1 At present, the Spanish university system does not offer any specific place for American Studies. In practical terms, this means that there is not such a thing as a degree in (North) American Studies for undergraduate students. The study of the history and culture of the United States of America is mostly disseminated all over the country in a number of departments of English, English—and English literature—still being the main subject of study in the only BA degree somehow related to our field of knowledge. Obviously, each English department is also free to allot the number of credits corresponding to the different disciplines to be covered in any English degree in Spain. This means that frequently the teaching of the English language is per se the centralized subject in our credit schedule. Occasionally, there are some departments of History where a few professors are devoted to the study of the Americas but links between History and English faculties are, unfortunately, not very common yet, even if some efforts are already being made to link us in some common research activities.
2 Furthermore, in Spain, English departments are often divided in two different sections; language and linguistics on the one hand, and literature and cultural studies on the other. Even when such division means an equalitarian correspondence in the number of credits, tradition usually prevails over the present socio-political situation and still the teaching of “English” (British and Irish) literature predominates over the teaching of North American matters. What it means, in practical terms, is that an average Spanish department of English may have in its syllabus for the undergraduate degree between 32 to 60 credits mostly dedicated to the teaching of American (United States) literature because, once again, there is a subsequent centralization of literature over other cultural matters. In sum, old academic privileges still reign in the Spanish University system while the more effective blurring of discipline boundaries existing in the US and in some European countries is only now starting to be felt here, academic research being probably the best indication that things are changing in our context. 3 The entrance of Spain, more than twenty years ago, in what is now the European Union meant, among many other things, a faster economic development of the country and the consolidation of academic links with many European and American universities. The Fulbright Commission, USIA, and the American Embassy in Madrid certainly
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provided Spanish scholars with favorable conditions to go to the US to further studies in an ample variety of fields. Such fields, of course, included literary and cultural studies, the result being that many of the faculty members teaching American literature and history in the Spanish University benefited from one international program or another. 4 From a purely administrative viewpoint, we can certainly conclude to the practical nonexistence of “American Studies” on an undergraduate level—but, perhaps, for a few credits in subjects usually named “Cultura e instituciones” or the like. Furthermore, there are not sufficient conditions yet to allow for a fruitful interchange between English and History departments. However, as happened in the USA some decades ago, the situation is gradually changing, mostly due to a fruitful research activity that is opening holes in the rigid administrative structures of the Spanish University. 5 If the postmodern condition brought about, among many other things, the questioning of the strict limits imposed by traditional thinking, and the subsequent recognition of the multifarious conditions of life, the Spanish Academe could not resist such ideological attacks for long. This meant, in practical terms, that in post-Franco Spain, by the beginning of the 1980s we had almost abandoned the exclusive close-reading or biographical approaches to the study of literary matters. Feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and cultural studies gradually took over, soon to be followed by the new perspectives on life provided by chaos theorists, the recognition of other minorities, and topics referred to the conditions of the self, hybridism, or the never- ending critical dispute between nature and nurture. Amidst such cultural mixture, our critical methods, frequently eclectic, were also on the move and with it our very object of analysis: literature, as an aim in itself was gradually—and smoothly—displaced by the notion that literary matter is also a cultural symptom and therefore a means to investigate the conditions of society at any given time. In other words, we followed the critical path opened in the USA a few years earlier even if we did not have the administrative capacity to implement American Studies as a regular degree. 6 As an aftermath of the (failed?) « postmodern » revolution, scholars have provisionally concluded that humans are eminently discursive animals and values are never natural or universal; therefore, we should not try to impose our own values—or lack of them— on other people by force. However, it is by now also a well-known and extended fact that most politicians—at least in the Western part of the planet—have not read Foucault, Derrida or Levinas, not to mention Lacan, Kristeva or Butler, and simply try to ignore the fact that other people may think different and be, at least in part, right in their perspective. Spanish politicians, unfortunately, are not exceptional in this sense and are now involved in the task of, once again, making university life a bit harder for students and faculty alike. For some years now, the Spanish Government seems to have declared war against University departments by insisting on their belief that the Spanish University should be much more competitive, by this meaning, of course, immediate economic profitability. This implies, on the one hand, that universities cannot raise matriculation fees to bear the real costs generated by students—all of them, rich or poor, intelligent or blockhead, have to be subsidized by university budgets—while the flow of public income is being systematically reduced so that universities need to raise money elsewhere. However, on the other hand, the Government does not apply any favorable fiscal policy that could lure private money into funding university programs.
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7 Spanish politicians—historically well known for their smart understanding of the living conditions of the people—now try to complete their job by forcing the Spanish University system to reduce dramatically the number of degrees. Once again, demands are made especially to the Humanities, the intention being to replace old traditional degrees by new ones more responsive to the present socio-economic conditions of the country—that is to say, to the impulse of liberal anti-ecological globalization. The main excuse that the Government of Spain has given to force us into this dramatic reduction is an apparent necessity to unify the number and nature of our academic degrees with the rest of the European Union, an imperative necessity whose origin, though, cannot be traced anywhere in European legislation. 8 What all this political interference means in practical terms is that, at present, even the current BA degree in English provided by Spanish universities is at peril. If we cannot maintain the degree, the prospects for American Studies in Spain at the undergraduate level are not very optimistic; we will be lucky if we are allotted a few credits in a new general degree in Modern Languages, where perhaps the totality of English Studies will soon be allocated. 9 A certain hope remains, however, at the level of postgraduate studies. Some universities may eventually start new MA degrees or maintain doctoral programs where English and American Studies may coexist even with the added help of some specialized courses in linguistics, but the present situation is still rather obscure. 10 An exception to the existing panorama is the Research Institute for North American Studies, originally founded in 1986 within the University of Alcalá, in Madrid (http:// www.iuien-uah.net/). The Institute develops teaching and research programs in American Studies that try to match North American excellence but they also offer a degree in Spanish Studies aimed at North American students. Still a very young institution, the Institute is, at present, organizing a new MA degree in American Studies, the only one in the country, which benefits from the technical possibilities developed with Internet. This institution at the University of Alcalá is also in charge of a doctoral program in American Studies that has been running for two years now, being one among very few academic places where members of different English and History departments meet to carry out a unified curriculum. The Research Institute for North American Studies also sponsors Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos (REN), a biannual publication founded in 1989 (http://www2.uah.es/iuen/reden/contents.htm). 11 American Studies in Spain has traditionally benefited from a national forum in AEDEAN, the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies—also the Spanish associate member of EAAS. The institution was founded in Seville in the year 1976 by a small number of university professors who mostly belonged to the few English departments existing in Spain at the time. Now it has a membership of about 1,300 professors, lecturers, and graduate students from Spanish universities and abroad. AEDEAN has been holding an annual conference since 1977, always in the month of December, which, on average, brings together three to five hundred of its members. The Association also sponsors one of the oldest critical reviews of English Studies in Europe, Atlantis, now online at http://www.atlantisjournal.org/, which also features a number of articles on North American culture—mostly on its literature. Both the annual conference and the biannual review are dedicated to the study of the different branches of language, linguistics, and cultural studies in English. Within the latter field, literature studies still rule even if their research aims have become rather
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encompassing. One of the officers of AEDEAN’s Executive Board has to be a specialist in American Studies and is in charge of all matters related to our field of study. The AEDEAN annual conference traditionally includes one panel dedicated to American Studies. The panel for our 2005 Conference is divided in five sessions where seven individual papers and three round tables are to be presented. Topics vary from the study of specific aspects in the writing of Flannery O’Connor, Ana Mendieta and Migdalia Cruz, Gordon Henry Jr., Elizabeth Bishop, or Chuck Palahniuk to extended discussions about masculinities and femininities, immigrant women writers, or hybrid literatures in North America. In general, we can affirm that literary studies still predominate over other matters, but the increasing hybrid nature of our studies and their diverse approaches are aspects quite noticeable in the program. 12 The fact that AEDEAN is dedicated to the study of all branches of English language and culture, together with the progressive specialization of faculty members, eventually brought ab out the birth of different smaller national forums dedicated to more specific fields of study. Among other academic groups, Spanish researchers in the culture of the United States decided to create their own specific association. As described in their web page (http://www.saasweb.org), the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) was founded in Madrid in 1993, and was formally registered as ‘Sociedad española para el estudio de los Estados Unidos de América.’ Its aim is to promote and encourage the study of all areas of American Studies, assisting individuals and groups in developing their work and sharing their cultural and scientific interests.” SAAS has a current membership of over one hundred and thirty professors and lecturers of American literature and History who mostly work in Spanish universities. This association collaborates in the publication of an annual critical review, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (REN), also sponsored by the University of Seville, a journal that, since its foundation in 1993, has published peer-reviewed papers strictly dedicated to the study of North American literature and culture. 13 The topics selected for the biennial conferences that SAAS has celebrated so far may give European readers a certain indication of the type of research that Spanish scholars have been developing in later years. The first conference was held in Madrid, its chosen topic being “History and Fiction: Fictions of History” (l994). Subsequent meetings, held in different Spanish cities, featured the following themes and topics: “Urban U.S.A.: Real and Imaginary Cities” (l995), “Century Ends, Crises and New Beginnings” (l997), “Travelling Across Cultures: The Twentieth-Century American Experience” (l999), “Power and Culture: Forms of Interaction and Renewal” (2001), “American Mirrors: Sef-Reflections and Self-Distortions” (2003), and “Masculinities, Femininities and Hybridities in U.S. Culture” (2005). These conferences have regularly attracted over one hundred participants from Spain and abroad. Their format includes plenary lectures (usually five), panel sessions (twelve to sixteen), dialogue sessions, roundtables, and workshops on specific issues or areas of study. 14 In March 2007, the Universidad de Coruña will host the 8th SAAS Conference, its tentative title being, “Secrets: The Politics, Poetics and Ethics of Secrecy in U.S. Culture.” 15 Within this complex academic panorama, there is no clear unified view of method, corpus or research aims that may sufficiently encompass what scholars in American Studies are now doing in Spain. Certainly, the imprints of the different poststructuralisms and feminisms are still traceable in the research of many colleagues.
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But so are film studies, problems of identity, queer studies, the impact of scientific theories on literature, eco-criticism, and the demands for ethics in contemporary culture, as well as the increasing importance of Chicano literature and the presence of the other Americas in the culture of the United States. Different research teams and individual scholars, amidst the chaotic administrative situation of the Spanish University, keep on going in the hope that the future will soon bring us a little sunshine…
16
INDEX
Keywords: Literature, culture, hybridities, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, AEDEAN, SAAS, deconstruction, cultural studies, minorities
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American Studies in Switzerland : A Preliminary Overview
1 In contrast to many other Western European countries, there are no independent departments of American Studies at Swiss Universities. Many of the seminars and institutes are not large enough to allow narrow specialization. Chairholders are therefore often generalists in terms of teaching, although their research may be more focused. Some departments have professorships which are defined as chairs in “American Literature” (Basel, Geneva, Lausanne)—the majority, however, have chairs in “English and American Literature” (Bern, Basel, Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Zurich). It is therefore not possible to study “American Literature” or “American Studies” at one of the Swiss universities as a major, or, indeed, a first or second minor. Instead, American Literature / American Studies is integrated to a greater or lesser degree (depending on the students’ interests and the offerings of the departments) in “English”, “Anglistik”, “English Languages and Literatures”, etc. as the subjects are called in the various departments.
2 Historically, American Literature was offered for the first time in Switzerland at the universities of Basel and Zurich in the 1930s. In Basel, the first courses were taught by Prof. Henry Luedecke who later published a Geschichte der Amerikanischen Literatur (History of American Literature 1952, second edition 1963). In Zurich, American Literature was introduced to the department by Prof. Heinrich Straumann who also wrote a study of American Literature—American Literature in the Twentieth Century—an overview which was published in 1965 by Harper and Row. Both, Luedecke and Straumann basically taught English but offered courses in American Literature regularly. 3 In the course of the twentieth century, more and more universities filled at least one chair with a professor who would offer both, English and American Literature. The first (and up to now only) department to have a chair in American Studies was the University of Geneva where John G. Blair was Professor of American Literature and Civilization until recently. 4 At present, the situation of English and American Literature is the following (listed by university, in alphabetical order, and including also the chairs in linguistics which are part of many departments):
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5 Basel
6 Englisches Seminar
7 http://pages.unibas.ch/anglist/
8 - Prof. Dr. Balz Engler (English Literature)
9 - Prof. Dr. Hartwig Isernhagen (American Literature)
10 - Prof. Dr. Christoph Ribbat (Assistant Professor of North American Literatures and Cultures) 11 - Dr. Werner Brönnimann (Titularprofessor English and American Studies)
12 - Dr. Franziska Gygax (Titularprofessorin English and American Literature)
13 - Dr. Therese Steffen (Titularprofessorin Gender Studies in the Anglophone Context)
14 Bern
15 Institut für englische Sprachen und Literaturen
16 http://www.cx.unibe.ch/ens/
17 - Prof. Dr. Margaret Bridges (Medieval English Language and Literature)
18 - Prof. Dr. Werner Senn (English Literature)
19 - Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl (English and American Literature)
20 - Prof. Dr. Christiane Schlote (Assistant Professor in Post-Colonial Literature)
21 Fribourg
22 Department of English Studies
23 http://www.unifr.ch/das/
24 - Prof. Dr. Dimiter Daphinoff (English Literature)
25 - Prof. Dr. Anthony Mortimer (English Literature)
26 - Prof. Dr. Robert Rehder (English and American Literature)
27 Geneva
28 Département de langue et littérature anglaises
29 http://www.unige.ch/lettres/angle/
30 - Prof. Dr. David Spurr (Modern English Literature)
31 - Prof. Dr. Guillemette Bolens (Medieval English Literature)
32 - Prof. Dr. Deborah Madsen (American Literature)
33 - Prof. Dr. Lukas Erne (Modern English Literature)
34 Lausanne
35 English Department
36 http://www2.unil.ch/angl/
37 - Prof. Dr. Neil Forsythe (English Literature)
38 - Prof. Dr. Peter Halter (American Literature)
39 - Prof. Dr. Denis Renevey (Old and Middle English)
40 Neuchâtel
41 Institute of English Studies
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42 http://www2.unine.ch/anglais
43 - Prof. Dr. Patrick Vincent (English and American Literature)
44 - Prof. Dr. Lukas Erne (Visiting Professor in English Literature)
45 St. Gallen
46 Fachbereich Englische Sprache und Literatur
47 http://www.kwa.unisg.ch/org/kwa/web.nsf/wwwPubInhalteGer/ Englische+Sprache+und+Literatur?opendocument 48 - Prof. Dr. Alan Robinson (English)
49 - Dr. Werner Brönnimann (Titularprofessor English and American Studies)
50 Zürich
51 Englisches Seminar
52 http://www.es.unizh.ch/
53 - Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Bronfen (English and American Literature)
54 - Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer (English Philology)
55 - Prof. Dr. Udo Fries (English Linguistics)
56 - Prof. Dr. Martin Heusser (19th- and 20th-Century Literatures in English)
57 - Prof. Dr. Peter Hughes (English and American Literature)
58 - Prof. Dr. Allen Reddick (English Literature)
59 - Dr. Fritz Gutbrodt (Titularprofessor Modern Literatures in English and Comparative Literature) 60 - Dr. Hans Osterwalder (Titularprofessor English Literature)
61 - Dr. Therese Steffen (Titularprofessorin Gender Studies in the Anglophone
INDEX
Keywords: American literature
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American Studies in Turkey
Gülriz Buken
1 In the discipline of American Studies in Turkey, the major contribution emanates, on the one hand, from the American Culture and Literature Departments instituted in various Universities in Turkey and, on the other, from the American Studies Association of Turkey. Up till now, unfortunately, no Research and Performance Institute or Center for the Study of America has yet been established to secure the necessary contacts with other similar institutions in Europe and in the United States, to facilitate research and international collaboration for academic activities and publications. Nevertheless the attempts to establish such a Center in Istanbul have been initiated and it is hoped they will bear fruit within a year.
2 Initially the English Language and Literature Departments, where most of the current faculty in American Culture and Literature Departments have been educated, trained and taught the courses related to American culture and literature, constituted an insignificant fraction of the total courses in the various curricula. When the latter were founded by permission of the Council of Higher education for the first time in 1982 at Hacettepe University, inevitably, given the lack of faculty trained in the field with degrees from US Universities with American Studies Programs and/or Departments, the courses related to American Studies in the curricula of the originally founded American Culture and Literature Departments did not exceed more than half of the total courses offered. Only when these Departments started to offer MA and PhD programs and, in due time, granted degrees, did the number of trained faculty exceed the original five American Literature specialists. Those who could get the few Fulbright scholarships were exposed to American culture and the American education system and were able to earn their PhD degrees at American Universities; the rest had to train themselves with short visits, often privately funded, during which they could do research for their dissertation. The faculty then was and nowadays is enhanced by Fulbright visiting Professors. 3 Attending Conferences and giving papers in Europe or in the United States always remained a dream as there existed no funds for that purpose available in State Universities for Teaching and Research assistants, let alone graduate students. Those who could attend the Salzburg Seminars or few other conferences were financially
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supported by their families. Fortunately, in recent years, the younger academics-to-be in state Universities are luckier in this respect and various other funds are available for them, such as the Erasmus Program and an increased number of Fulbright degree scholarships. When the private Universities came on the scene, the latest being Halic University in 1998, those enrolled in the graduate programs of American Culture and Literature or the History Department—Bilkent University is unique in this regard as it grants MA and PhD degrees in American History— were and are subsidized if they participate and give papers at Conferences taking place in Turkey or abroad. Only recently the American Studies Association of Turkey has also been awarding travel grants for graduate students who have papers accepted for Conferences held in the United States and both graduate and undergraduate students who attend the annual American Studies Conference in Turkey. At Baskent University, the Department organizes the International Students’ Seminar which is a unique venue where the students have an opportunity to touch base and exchange ideas with graduate students from other countries in Europe. 4 As can be deduced, both receiving the required training in the discipline and trying to publish in citation indexed journals in the US—now a requirement for the PhD Degree— is an extremely demanding and highly competitive mission to be accomplished with limited means. 5 However, the American Culture and Literature Departments aim at addressing a broad spectrum of American Studies at large—American literature, history, philosophy, religion, arts, politics and social life, how American literary and cultural traditions have developed and were subject to transformations in the course of history; their curriculum is based on courses dealing with the survey of different genres and/or different centuries in American Literature. Moreover, they are geared for training the students for comparative analysis as expressed openly by the mission statement of a department: “The department offers a course selection that examines the United States in all its complexity, integrating literature, culture, and history. This interdisciplinary program will not only introduce students to the study of the United States, but will also develop critical and creative thinking skills that will enable students to reflect upon their own culture and its history and literature.” Likewise, the mission of the Department at Ege University is “In an age of globalization,[…] to offer a wide choice of courses providing insight into both the American and the international agenda. The result of this curriculum is to encourage a comparative perspective on the world.” None of the mission statements of other Departments deal specifically with American Studies either. Accordingly, a majority of courses, in their curriculum, are not related to different fields within American Studies (besides literature) except for the Introduction to American Studies I and II & American Studies in a Global Context and other restricted electives directly related to American Studies offered at Bilkent University, and American Studies specific courses offered at Ege University (for example American History I & II, History of Turkish-American Relations, US Government And Politics, American Popular Culture, American Intellectual History & Criticism, American Themes And Issues, History of American Economy, Aspects of American Culture, Cultural Regions of the US.) 6 Naturally enough, the dissertations prepared for degrees granted by the Departments in Universities other than Ege and Dokuz Eylul, both in Izmir, without exception focus on the analysis of literary works. The latter specific cases are also reflected by the focal points of MA and PhD. dissertations, bearing such titles as The Influence of the Roosevelt
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New Deals upon Contemporary US Culture (2001); A Comparative Approach to American and Balkan Political Cultures from a Romanian perspective (2003); The Example of US Influence upon the Central Asian States after the Soviet Disintegration(2002); Efforts of the United States to become a World Power During the Interwar Period and the Effects of its Near-Eastern Policy Upon Turkey (1997); Turkish-American Relations Concerning the Cyprus Question (1996); Realpolitik or Idealism? US Policy on the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline: A Case Study (2002); Power and Ideology in American Political Texts: A Critical Discourse Analysis (2001); Turkish-American Cultural Relations: The Reflections of America and Turkish-American Relations in Political Humor Magazines published in Turkey between 1945 and 1960 (1999); The Interaction of American Painting and Poetry through Urbanization between 1900 and 1940 (2001); Debates on Society, Individual and Death and their Reflections on American Popular Culture in the1990's (2003); Twentieth-Century American Foreign Policy and Turkish-American Relations after the Second World War (1998); Turkish-American Cultural Relations and its Reflection on Political Cartoons [1960-1980] (2005). 7 The American Studies Association of Turkey, on the other hand, contributes to the development of American Studies in Turkey by organizing monthly lectures, panels and the annual conferences which, in recent years, have become international. In these conferences, initiated in 1977, a broad spectrum of themes have been covered ranging from “The American South,” “The American West”, “The Worlds Women Make,” “Media, Culture and Nation in the Age of Information” “Postmodernism,” “Multiculturalism in America,” and “Challenging America: Similitude and Difference” to “Theory, Themes and Practice in American Studies in Turkey. ” 8 At the 30th Annual Conference on “American Studies: Past, Present and Future”, as Prof. Clifford Endres pointed out in his Opening Remarks “[i]t was felt that, after 30 years, the time had arrived to take a fresh look at the position of American studies in the Turkish academic establishment; to examine what’s gone right over the last three decades and to see what could do with a bit of tweaking. In short, if we can see where we’ve come from, we may be able better to see where we’re going. This will entail looking at the state of American studies in Turkey—its pedagogy, its curricula, its research and publication possibilities, and, perhaps most importantly, its usefulness to students—and seeing where they might be improved”. The roundtables on “Curriculum and Research Issues in Turkey,” and “American Studies from the European Point of View” and the panels on “Definitions and Re-definitions,” “Historical Reflections,” “Methodological Challenges,” “Pedagogical Perspectives,” and “Chicana and Chicano Studies,” all provided different perspectives on American Studies in terms of teaching, researching and publishing in the discipline in domestic and international spheres. Moreover, it was a unique training process for the student participants and collaborators. 9 Obviously, realities cannot be surmounted in a short time but since the potential for the flourishing of the discipline of American Studies in Turkey rests in the young generation of Americanists, in due time, Turkish scholars will also make effective contributions in the international arena, “mediating between transnational and nationalist perspectives.”
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AUTHOR
GÜLRIZ BUKEN Bilkent University, Ankara
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USAmerican Studies in the United Kingdom
1 It is first necessary to lay down some framing parameters to the study of the USA in the UK’s Higher Education (HE) institutions—its Universities and Colleges:
2 -A 2004 article in The Guardian by Polly Toynbee, widely read around the world
3 -the introduction of “top-up” fees which UK and EU citizens wishing to enter UK HE
4 -USAmerican Studies’ “critical mass” in any one institution;
5 -the quinquennial government-imposed “Research Assessment” Exercise—aka the RAE
6 -the British Association of American Studies (BAAS)
7 -issues of gender and socio-economic class
8 -the barrier of the common language
9 -the Atlantic Ocean, aka “the pond” by many Anglo-Americans.
10 It is disappointing to have to begin with Polly Toynbee’s Guardian article, “A degree in bullying and self-interest? No thanks,”1 which was both superficially researched and highly misleading, but there is little choice in this matter. I have lost count of the number of times that European-based USAmericanists and—even—US-based USAmericanists have raised the issue of Toynbee’s Guardian article. 2 Toynbee argued that UK late-adolescents were turning away from USAmerican Studies, put off by the Bush government’s global policies. Though rebuttals of Toynbee’s argument did appear, in letters to the editor of the Guardian, these generally went unremarked outside of the UK. What was repeatedly picked up on was how Toynbee, in her article, noted that the gross number of applications to UK universities by students wishing to study ‘American Studies’ had fallen, according to the (reliable) UK’s University Central Admissions System. Toynbee then went on to speculate as to why this reduction might have occurred, and jumped to the convenient and not implausible conclusion that the decline was the consequence of an anti-American backlash of a kind. In particular Toynbee took the reduction in applications to be the consequence of the US invasion of Iraq as part of its war on terror. Were this to be simply the case, then such a decline would need to frame my argument, as it would imply a re-orientation in the interests and engagement of young adult aspirants to higher education in the UK—a turning
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away from American Studies as a subject of study which would have considerable implications for the subject. 11 Conventionally, young adults have been the main source from which USAmerican Studies draws its recruits (the UK’s HE intake is now nearing 50% of eighteen- to twenty-year olds). Indeed, the UK’s young adults have consistently taken an interest in the products and productions of US individuals, groups, companies and multinationals since 1945. In this post-war period these interests have ranged eclectically, taking in: refreshments, from Hershey bars through Coke and Big Macs to Starbucks and M&Ms (formerly, in the UK, Smarties); popular music, from Glen Miller and bebop through Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison to Madonna, rap and the Strokes; films and TV, from “I Love Lucy”, “The Lone Ranger”, “Rebel without a Cause” and “The Wild Ones” through “Easy Rider”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Star Trek” and “MASH” to “Friends”, “Kill Bill” and “Violence in America”—many of these glitzed up by Hollywood’s commercial rituals (like the Oscars, Disneyland and their attendant processes of celebrification); its love of addictive drugs (from Tennessee whiskey and Camel to Budweiser and Marlboro Lights via many other recreational and more or less severely demonized drugs); its writing and visual arts, from Catcher in the Rye through the Beats and The Bell Jar to Bret Easton Ellis and Toni Morrison and from abstract expressionism through Andy Warhol and photo-realism to graffiti art; its often ideologically-loaded material cultural innovations, from Levi jeans, ever-higher skyscrapers and ever-larger hypermarkets to defense architecture, gated communities and ghettoes; its environmental excess, from Silent Spring and Cadillacs through Earth House Hold, air-conditioned shopping malls, ever-wider freeways and hogged Harley Davidsons to eco-fascism, the murder of the Kyoto agreement and Hummers; its inability to contain its endless diversity by any ideological device, be that melting pots, salad bowls or multiculturalism’s warm but problematic embrace; its (often related) display of and (often but not always) celebration of rebellion and free speech on the one hand and guns, capital punishment and censorship (that of the moral majority or that of the “politically correct”) on the other; its deep love of anarchy (no government at all) and of ideological institutions (family, religion, high school, the stars and stripes, States Rights and apple pie). Do I contradict myself? “Very well then I contradict myself”, for America is “large”, it does contain “multitudes”.3 12 This catalog, a heady admixture of glamour and dissent, youthfulness and exploitation, could be extended for pages. Somewhere in this catalog, the vast majority of UK citizens will encounter something that hooked them or alienated them (or both) in their late teens. Never knowing what to make of USAmerica, Amerika or Amerikkka, often fearing it, sometimes loving it, wanting to visit it and love/hating it when there. Immediately, it becomes clear that an event like Iraq and a President like George W. Bush are not going to effect a cultural sea-change of the kind Toynbee proposes. Indeed, she conceded in her article that “opinion polls make it clear that people are well able to separate their feelings about Americans from the politicians and policies now occupying the White House.”4 America’s allures and alarms continue to attract interest—if often in an increasingly wary way. UK late-adolescents still want to try to get to grips with its multiplicity, and any burgeoning anti-USAmericanism is countered, more or less, by such a response. Yet it is not that Toynbee was wholly wrong in proposing that the Iraq intervention was a turn-off. The Iraq intervention was and is unpopular in the UK, and Tony Blair suffered from this in the UK’s 2005 General Election because of his administration’s support for the policy. Would-be USAmerican
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Studies students probably did decline in number as a result. But only slightly; anti- USAmericanism is not new, but nor is it monolithic and in the UK, as in most of Europe, contradictory feelings and responses to USAmerica are entertained simultaneously by subjects only partly or poorly interpellated into the USAmerican dream’s increasingly residual and diluted discourses. 13 Consequently, though most USAmerican Studies courses in the UK still fill up each year, they fill up slightly less readily, as USAmerica’s exceptionalist myth looses its grip on the popular imagination. There have been some American Studies program closures, but these mostly predated Iraq and were the consequence of other factors, such as the ending of free higher education and the introduction of student “top-up” fee—fees that grow ever-larger and come to seem more prohibitive to almost all students, except for those from the most affluent backgrounds. Such top-up fees hit USAmerican Studies hard because students majoring in the subject are almost always required to undertake a fourth year of study in the United States. Their debts, consequently, become roughly 25% higher.5 This leads on to issues of class, which I will turn to later in my article. Already, I think, by raising the issue of affordability, I have drawn much closer to defining the core cause of the decline in numbers of applications for American Studies degree courses. 14 This decline in demand for places on USAmerican Studies courses in the UK, driven mostly by the introduction of top-up fees, relatively small though it is, matters very much, because it has weakened the position of the groups of staff teaching USAmerican Studies in the UK. I will return to this theme, but it is worth noting at this point that the position of American studies teachers is often always already weakened by the fact that they are not located in a single administrative unit—usually in UK HE such units are called “Departments”—but instead constitute a loose coalition of staff with a common interest in USAmerica drawn from several different departments. As such these USAmerican Studies staff are not in control of, nor have much influence over, decisions about how to allocate resources. For example, if the loose coalition of USAmericanists in an institution draws on staff from the Departments of History, English, Politics, Geography and Cultural Studies in a University—a not untypical coalition—and one of these staff, say the only Americanist in the Geography department, retires, then it is difficult to ensure that the interests of American Studies are effectively represented in that Department. The Geography department may feel that the higher number of students applying to do Development Studies justifies an appointment in this area of expertise, rather than American Studies, without fully appreciating the knock-on consequences—the negative impact on American Studies. 15 The issue here is one of critical mass. Often, in the UK, a program in USAmerican Studies is not quite large enough to warrant the establishment of a new Department, and then the determination of the economic in the last instance becomes an important consideration (if you will excuse this Althusserian outburst). Though, for convenience, the rest of this article will speak of American Studies “Departments”, instead of resorting to any more awkward formulation, such as “American Studies Departments or ‘subject groups’ of staff,” it is important to bear in mind that very often—indeed, usually—USAmericanists in the UK do not enjoy the protection of being located inn a single Department—that is to say, a discrete, (semi-)autonomous unit (a problem held in common with most UK Area Studies “subject groups of staff”). Such infra-structural fragility makes American Studies vulnerable to course closure, not least because, if the
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subject is shut-down, redundancies can be minimalized, as the group of staff return to teaching “special options” in their “home” departments. 16 The ever-present risk in all this is that, overall, USAmerican Studies’ community of scholars in the UK becomes too small and dispersed to sustain American Studies, with the attendant risk that USAmerican Studies might cease to be fully self-sustaining at the national level. This in itself does not have to be a bad thing : perhaps American Studies generally should seek to be more international, and in seeking to be more international, resist any process by which the ASA might consciously or unconsciously set the agenda along US-centric lines as it internationalizes itself with growing determination and stamina. One thing I do have in mind here is the idea that the European Association of American Studies needs more frequently to consider how it might function internationally, beyond its biennial conferences and the establishment of the European Journal of American Studies. Perhaps EAAS needs to operate in a more concertedly international way—for example, by brokering international collaborations: research and staff and student exchanges, for example, that are not myopically dependent on regarding the US as the inexorable hub of all such exchanges. Just as, in David Crystal’s argument, “English is now so widely established” around the globe “that it can no longer be thought of as ‘owned’,” 6 so, it might be argued, “America” is not just American and “the American” is not just America’s (not least because USAmerica is not all of America). Perhaps a more global understanding of what is America and what is American would prove more attractive to students and help prevent course closures at a time when Development Studies, Migration Studies, Diaspora Studies and Globalization Studies are generally growing in popularity. This drift away from Area Studies to other kinds of transnational study has been emerging in the UK for some time, reducing the viability of USAmerican degree programs. 17 One possible other factor contributing to American Studies program closures in the UK, however, has been the government-imposed research assessment exercise—the RAE— and this brings me to my next framing parameter. The UK’s RAE has proved to be highly controversial and it is a strange and difficult activity to describe briefly. Its objective is clear, however: it seeks to ensure that UK government research funding is directed towards those higher education institutions that will most benefit from and make the best use of such financial support, in order to sustain and develop academic research. The RAE seeks to achieve this by assessing research quality, institution by institution, discipline by discipline, subject by subject. What has proved contentious in all this is whether the RAE has succeeded in doing what it seeks to do. A widespread feeling in the UK is that instead, by erecting sets of criteria by which it measures “quality”, “benefit” and “best use”, the RAE has somehow distorted or diluted the research being undertaken in UK higher education. 18 The RAE has certainly resulted in an extension of funding. Institutions previously excluded from receiving any direct (as imposed to competition-driven) government funding now receive at least some block grant funding, if they cross over the RAE’s quality threshold, when before 1991 they did not. Be it noted I am talking of dozens and dozens of such institutions. Increasingly, as well, “peers” have, during the RAE, examined UK academic research and judged it to be improving in quality, while, at the same time, the quantity of research being carried out has also risen. These “peers” are large in number—a typical RAE panel drawn up to judge any particular subject consists of over a dozen senior academics—and these panelists have almost never reported any
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concerns about the RAE process (or if they do have concerns, they have concealed them). All this could be taken as a measure of the RAE’s success (though since the numbers of academics undertaking research has risen sharply to cater for increased student intakes in the UK, such an extrapolation may not be as valid as first appears). 19 On the other hand, academics frequently contend that certain types of research have suffered a decline. Since the RAE is a quinquennial exercise, this decline is alleged to have occurred in relation to “large” projects, which take more than five years to reach fruition and which take up all the research energies of the researcher(s). Such “large project” researchers would have difficulty in meeting the RAE’s quinquennial timetable, which in turn inevitably shapes its criteria to some extent. Thus, it is argued, such researchers become handicaps during the assessment exercise. The argument therefore runs that such researchers may therefore, by choice, or by diktat, choose not to undertake such time-consuming research (despite the RAE administrators’ repeated explicit statements that it is not the intention of the RAE to discourage such research). On the other hand, at the other extreme, the RAE’s criteria do direct its assessors to view “survey” type publications (such as this one!), with little or no academic “research” contained within them, as not warranting a high rating (so making such “outcomes” a handicap in an unambiguous way). If my Department knew I was spending my time writing this essay, the argument runs, they would be discouraging me from doing so! 20 Yet these fears do not seem to be borne out. I do not detect any important re- orientation or diminution of any “large project” or “survey” types of research and/or publication being undertaken by UK-based researchers. Nor do I sense that academics are churning out research of a sub-standard variety to meet RAE-imposed targets (another common accusation). The RAE, however, does seem to have impacted upon American Studies in quite another, more unanticipated way, and this is above all else why it deserves to be set up as a framing parameter when considering the situation of USAmerican Studies in the UK. The RAE has always sought to ensure that different subject areas (English, History, Geography, French, American Studies) are treated comparably when assessing research quality and the research environments (“research culture”) in which such research is pursued. In the RAE quinquennial exercise for 2001, for example, the RAE managers went so far as to establish a checking procedure to ensure comparability between different subject areas—known as Units of Assessment or UoAs. The aim was to ensure that each UoA’s assessment was equally rigorous—no more and no more less. This was easy to do when, nationally, the ‘UoA’ was large (History, say, or Sociology). “Smoothing”, as it might be labeled, was relatively easy to do. But UoAs like American Studies were not large. Only thirteen “departments” entered the 2001 RAE in American Studies, and comparability with a much larger UoA, like English, became difficult. The sample size in USAmerican Studies is too small for anyone to mount any sort of effective challenge to the overall verdict, as statistical significance could not be demonstrated with any confidence. A clear consequence was that American Studies, on average, was arriving on average at low ratings—suggesting less high quality research was emerging from USAmerican Studies than was the case in many other UoAs, and this was especially true when it was compared with other Area Studies. This is starkly demonstrated in the following table. This compares, in four closely-related UoAs, the percentage of researchers located in “departments” in the UK
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scoring a high RAE Grade (Grade 5 or better) with the percentage scoring a lower RAE Grade (Grade 4 or less than Grade 4): 21 UoA Grade 5 or better Grade 4 or less Total researchers entered
22 American Studies 50.04% 49.06% 113.5 researchers
23 Middle East/African Studies 80.44% 19.66% 128.8 researchers
24 Asian Studies 77.38% 22.62% 129.5 researchers
25 European Studies 61.20% 38.80% 558.7 researchers
26 The lower overall rating for Americanists is clear.7 It needs to be said that the national average for all UK researchers in all UoAs scoring a Grade 5 or better was 55%,8 not that much more than—though, nevertheless, significantly more than—the average for American Studies (50%). But when American Studies is compared with other Area Studies who entered about the same number of researchers (Middle East/African; Asian) the difference is huge (50% compared to 75% plus). Even a very much larger UoA, European Studies—a UoA sufficiently large to be subject to “smoothing”—still had a much higher average—over 10% more. 27 What this meant in practice is that overall, nationally, American Studies received less government money in block grant form, and this is still the case year upon year. Indeed it will continue to be the case until 2009. It also meant that within each institution, American Studies was often rated lower than other “departments” and therefore it was less likely to be rated so highly by that institution’s managers. On the face of it the RAE’s verdict in 2001 was that much poorer research was being done in American Studies than was the case in, say, Chinese Studies or Russian Studies. I must just add that American Studies scholars in the UK contest this verdict bitterly. 28 But the knock-on consequences have been grim. As a consequence of RAE 2001’s American Studies panel’s relative conservatism in arriving at its gradings, and the resulting lack or reduction of research funding, one University’s American Studies research team was disbanded (and its teaching team subsequently reduced to a rump by staff losses). Another only survived by implementing a drastic series of economy measures and increasing its teaching commitments substantially (and, again, some staff leakage resulted). 29 This impact of the RAE on American Studies also indicates how any overview (such as this one) of a subject’s “national provision” needs to be alert to the institutional state apparatuses that frame the provision. Another such apparatus (though less of a state apparatus, perhaps), the British Association of American Studies (BAAS), has, in this respect, also been of decisive importance. Taking as its objective “to promote, support and encourage the study of the United States in the Universities, Colleges and Schools of the United Kingdom,”9 BAAS was founded in 1955 by an “intimate” and “joll[y] … band” of scholars,10 who believed, in the aftermath of World War Two, that the need to study the United States was inescapable—as unavoidable as the USA’s final, overt acceptance of its World “super-power” role. BAAS was founded at an international conference on American Studies, the fourth such in the UK. Like the previous three, this conference was sponsored by the United States Education Commission (USEC). But US government involvement did not stop at sponsorship. Rather, a vision of American Studies in the UK was brought to this 1954 conference via the offices of the Cultural Attaché to the US Embassy in London, Dick Taylor and his participation on a UK ‘ad hoc committee on American Studies’ formed by USEC at that time. That USEC had been
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founded on the back of the Fulbright Act of 1946 is one sign of how the US saw its newly-warm embrace of its world role as incorporating a need to better educate the world about America. That USEC, via Taylor, now laid down some alluring financial come-ons to this ad hoc committee in the UK is another. Yet, as Scott Lucas and Ali Fisher have pointed out, what resulted is not any take-over or puppet-mastering by USEC or any other US institution.11 Rather, the UK members of the ad hoc committee resisted core elements of USEC’s propositioning. They were, it is true, somewhat seduced by the promise of funding, and hurried into action by intimations that this offer of funding has a limited shelf-life. Yet they also shied away from the suggestion that BAAS should take on certain functions that would require it to assume a material as well as virtual existence—that is to say, to build up archives, study facilities and the like, that would necessitate the establishment of an institute—or, at least, an institute in all but name. What USEC was proposing would need housing; at one point a property called Ditchley Park was mentioned.12 30 This decision not to seek to establish an institute was a shrewd call. In India, for example, at about this time, a Fulbright agreement in 1950 established an exchange program of academics, and the USA helped ensure American Studies flourished via USEFI (the United States Educational Foundation in India). In 1964 this culminated in the establishment of the American Studies Research Center (ASRC) in Hyderabad, supported by the USA’s State Department. In particular, the ASRC built up an impressive library. In 1996, however, the money ran out. The Center had been funded by a reversion (the money paid by India in the past for wheat it had received from the USA was now channeled by the USA’s State Department into the ASRC). The decision to discontinue funding after this money ran out was devastating for the Indian ASRC.13 It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that such intellects as those of Dennis Welland, Malcolm Bradbury and H. C. Allen were alert to the risk that what they were being offered was ‘front-end loading’ of this kind (though in 1955 it would not have been called that): financial support that would cease to continue when BAAS was securely up and running. Instead, the nascent BAAS, cash-strapped and cautious, protractedly negotiated its way to a compromise. These negotiations were not directly with a US government agency, but with the Rockefeller Foundation. A lot of money was obtained, but no commitment to establish any kind of ‘institute’ was made. Instead the $150000 over five years that the Rockefeller Foundation granted was to be spent on annual academic conferences, research fellowships, conferences for schoolteachers and the acquisition of research resources—but now resources to be dispersed across different UK universities and not concentrated in one central location.14 These negotiations were accompanied by some anxiety. Frank Thistlethwaite, founding chair of BAAS, at one time even contemplated looking this gift horse in the mouth, but in the end observed to Marcus Cunliffe, “I suspect that the reputation of the association might suffer … from turning down such an offer.” Thistlewaite feared that turning down the money would reduce the nascent organization to little more than “a talking shop.”15 So it is fair to say that there is no “smoking gun” to be found. BAAS was not founded as a stool-pigeon of the US government’s post-war ambitions to spread USAmerican Studies across the globe, whether its motives were quasi cultural imperialist or not. Yet BAAS was founded to counter the “condescension”, “ignorance” and “prejudice” that dominated the British hegemonic establishment16. To this extent at least there was a congruence between what BAAS’s founding members felt it should be about and what the US Government wanted it to achieve that was very productive for the latter.
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31 It must also be said that the residues of this anxiety-ridden foundation of BAAS remain visible. BAAS’s infrastructure broadly echoes the objectives that the US government had in mind for it. BAAS still maintains a commitment to promoting the teaching of American Studies in schools and this is formally represented in the make-up of its Development Subcommittee and in how it deliberately reaches out to teachers in most of its activities (such as its conferences). Similarly, it continues to seek to develop resources, though now mostly by striking or seeking to strike deals with various kinds of publishers—microform publishers, internet publishers, academic publishers, textbook publishers—that often have at their heart archival developments, drawing on US-related archives in the UK. None of these activities are in the least bit objectionable or exceptional. Quite the reverse. The BAAS-backed BRRAM (British Records Relating to America on Microfilm), for example, has done sterling work for decades. Yet overall it does mean that BAAS’s terms of reference extends well beyond the sort of remit that some professional academic associations possess (at least in the UK), which tends to foreground more exclusively academic research and its delivery. It is possible that, consequently, the sort of committee structure that BAAS possesses, with a conference committee, a development committee and a publications committee, means that it is set up to respond to government appeals for involvement in the various kinds of audit and quality-assurance activities that have come to the fore in UK HE in the 1980s and 1990s almost as well as it is set up to secure the development of a thriving American Studies research culture. BAAS’s interests are more harlequin than they might have been had the US government’s agenda not been vigorously represented at BAAS’s birth. Almost, but not quite: I want to return to the BAAS and its research agenda in due course. 32 I think it is worth dwelling also on the trace of rebelliousness that not only caused BAAS to shy away from any subsumption within the US government’s proselytizing agenda, but also from the condescension that the hegemonic establishment trained on their ex-colonists. This can be related to a widespread sense amongst young males in particular in the postwar period that the democratic, egalitarian, unceremonious, informal and above all friendly approach ostensibly espoused by the American servicemen they encountered during and after World War Two offered an antidote to the stuffiness, formality and hierarchicalism that these young British adults detected in the structures of post-war Britain. This sort of point is of course, perilously difficult to support, and pointing to Jimmy Porter’s love of jazz in Look Back in Anger is not in itself sufficient to prove the point. Yet the election of a Labour government and the rejection of Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in 1945, despite the (often over-estimated but still important) role that Churchill played in sustaining the morale of the British people during the War, does provide some sort of indication that impatience with the British establishment was quite widespread. 33 I do want to suggest, then, however tentatively, that British “class” distinctions played a part in the rise of American Studies. This is not a simple case of thinking in terms of Marxist class divisions. Marxist analyses are enabled by dividing up society into the bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the lumpen proletariat (perhaps laced with an appeal to Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals). British “class” distinctions, by contrast, involve much more fussy and fuzzy differentiations, chiefly revolving around the invention of a middle class, itself subdivided. Turning to America enabled a freer intercourse between, across and
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through these fussily and fuzzily defined “class” gradations, that was refreshing to those who fwelt stifled by Britain’s class-consciousness—even if this involved more than a few dollars worth of buying into the USAmerican exceptionalist dream. It all seemed more democratic “over there”, and, residually, it perhaps still does. However, perhaps this residual sense of radical egalitarianism is no more than vestigial now, as the intake of American Studies students becomes increasingly middle class, as those from less socially-advantaged socio-economic groups shy away from acquiring four years of loans and debts rather than (merely!) three. Indeed one senior USAmericanists was recently (October 2005) heard to propose that what USAmerican Studies now provided was a species of “finishing school” for females from well-heeled families. This sexist observation was not without a thick residue of merit. It is largely the case that USAmerican Studies is dominated by the late-adolescent children of the middle class, and it is true that in many USAmerican Studies “Departments”, those centered more on History/Literature/ Culture/Media Studies than on History/Politics/ International Relations/Geography, the intake is predominantly female. More than incidentally, this also means the intake is predominantly “white”—despite the strength of ethnic studies of various kinds in UK USAmerican Studies provisions. 34 This gender and class bias does have consequences. At undergraduate level the courses that recruit most heavily are those that feature literary, cultural and media studies. This in turn influences hiring policies, and a kind of self-perpetuating shift in the overall emphasis of USAmerican Studies results. The annual BAAS conference, for example, is now dominated by sessions on topics related to literary, cultural and media studies. A more-or-less conscious effort is being made by the USAmerican Studies community in the UK to address this drift. In this respect it is possible to argue that the Bush Presidency, far from having a negative impact on USAmerican Studies in the UK, is having a positive effect, by bringing political, diplomatic and international considerations to the forefront of students’ minds—re-radicalizing them, if you like. 35 I do sense that there is currently a growing discussion about how USAmerican Studies needs to be proactive in sustaining a balance in its curricula between a vital engagement with issues of gender, ethnicity and race and their discursive and performative representations in USAmerica’s cultural apparatuses on the one hand and the need to sustain an engagement with other (inter-)disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches on the other. However I also sense that this debate is not new, nor as complete as it might be. Religion and law feature too infrequently, perhaps, but the clearest omission is an engagement with the issue of language competency. There are of course, systemic reasons for this, not least to do with the necessary concession that English is sited at the forefront of the list of global languages. The nearest other contenders are Spanish and Chinese (the British Empire and its legacies have a lot to do with this, needless to say). Yet Chinese is perhaps falling away, as more and more commonly Chinese industries insist upon English being spoken throughout their operations—even in China itself.17 Spanish is perhaps the most plausible exception to simply (if reductively) passing the verdict that English’s global dominance is unassailable, and it is important to notice that the use of Spanish in the USA figures prominently in arriving at this verdict. Yet USAmerican Studies in the UK has hardly responded at all to the increase in the use of Spanish within the USA’s borders. Generally these is no requirement, or only a minimal requirement, for USAmerican
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students at whatever level to engage in second language study. This must be a bad thing. 36 The only glimmer of hope I can offer at this point is to observe that students do come to question the “naturalness” of language and to recognize both its arbitrariness and its conventionality by encountering what Lawrence Ferlinghetti once described as the “barrier of the common language.”18 This is of course not just a matter or sorting out sidewalks from pavements, cookies from biscuits nor trunks from boots (nor, even, M & Ms from Smarties). It is of course to do with more complex and nuanced shadings, which persistently drive home to USAmericanist students in the UK the cultural differences between US English speakers and UK English speakers. Often, UK whites’ reliance on irony and self-deprecation in their humor, and USAmerica’s frequent failure to crack even a responsive smile in return has something to do with this break- through. I wish I could claim that, newly alerted to these complexities of language, the UK’s USAmerican students rushed off to the language laboratory. They don’t; but they have learned something about inter-cultural competence. 37 Yet if encountering cultural difference doesn’t quite set UK students of USAmerica off down the road towards second language acquisition it does at least make them realize how wide the Atlantic pond is. Perhaps it also establishes a comparative reflex within them. For, besides studies revolving around ethnicity, race, gender and their articulations in the cultures of the USA, an arena which continues to attract students, perhaps now more than ever, is Atlanticism—study of the various Atlantics, their exchanges, crossings, currents and flows. In this arena, the list of approaches is long and growing. This involves not just the transatlantic but also the circumatlantic and the cis-atlantic; and not just the New England and/orWASP Atlantic so long a center of attention, but also the Black Atlantic, the Red Atlantic, the Green Atlantic, the Jewish Atlantic, et cetera. There has been a big upsurge in attention, marked by a long series of initiatives. Though it is a little invidious to pick out a few, it is best I do so: the Scottish Trans-Atlantic Relations Project (STAR); UK involvement in the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies; the recent founding of the Transatlantic Studies Association (TSA); the recent founding of both Atlantic Studies: Literary Cultural and Historical Perspectives and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, the organ of the TSA—two new journals now arranging themselves alongside Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations,19 et cetera. I think it is plain that there is more than a little overkill in all this. The attendant risk in all this attention poured upon the Atlantic is that other crucial developments will get somewhat passed by: for example, scant attention is being paid overall to the emerging importance of the Pacific Rim and the attendant—let us coin the phrase—Pacificisms that are beginning to emerge, with, for example, Hawai’i as one fulcrum of this re-orientation. 38 One can see just why the Atlantic is so dominant. The UK’s colonial links to the USA and its continued retention of Canada and the West Indies long after the end of the USAmerican War of Independence deeply implicates the UK in Atlantic trades, profits, losses, exploitations and commodifications—especially slavery. The Atlantic trade was central to the UK’s assumption of modernity, and remains central to its transnational engagements. But such a concentration has generally ensured relatively little non- USAmerican Studies occurs. Simply put, other American Studies are thin on the ground; what Canadian Studies there is (and it is relatively strong when set alongside the provision for Central and South American Studies) depends substantially on an
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enlightened Canadian government policy of supporting Canadian Studies in the UK over the long term, on a continuing basis. There is some teaching of the Americas, as witnessed by the existence in London of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, which incorporates the Institute of Latin American Studies, and in the provision in Latin American Studies offered by the University of Liverpool in particular. But otherwise, when gauging the kinds of interests in the Americas that are active in terms of the UK research centers that exist, things are pretty resolutely defined by Anglophone American Studies’ predomination. Thus we have the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at the University of Keele, the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at the University of Glasgow and (in a more limited way, as its name suggests) the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia. Symptomatically, even the Institute for the Study of the Americas incorporates alongside the Institute for the Study of the Americas the Institute for United States Studies. Each of these is to a greater or lesser extent cash strapped, though to say this is not to denigrate the important work they do. The only two centers that have any sort of budget are the Eccles Centre for American Research and the Rothermere American Institute.20 Both these have substantial bequests providing them with an income providing some stability—the Eccles Centre from Lord and Lady Eccles, the Rothermere from Lord Rothermere. There is some irony in this, for these titled benefactors chose locations for their bequests that are not entirely appropriate. The Eccles Centre is based at the British Library, which has, conspicuously, recently decided to rein back on its expenditure on USAmerican publications (though its library does possess some significant American archives—particularly early maps of the Americas). Even more disconcertingly, the very much more wealthy Rothermere American Institute is based in Oxford University, an institution which has no real tradition of study of USAmerica, relatively few researchers working concertedly in this area and no American Studies provision (though some postgraduate provision is now being developed; the institute has only recently been established, it must be added). It is difficult not to conclude that the class-ridden contours of English society influenced the decision about where these well-endowed research centers should be located. The provinces—outside the so-called “golden triangle” of London Cambridge and Oxford could hardly be considered, even though the commitment of Liverpool, Birmingham and Nottingham were more longstanding and thoroughgoing. These centers stand alongside the Scottish Transatlantic Research project, the Dundee Transatlantic Association and the (very recently founded) Centre for Foreign Policy, Media and Culture at Birmingham to define American Studies in the UK, once all these centers are set alongside the American Studies programs (for American Studies, almost always read USAmerican Studies, as ever) that exist in many of the Universities in the UK.21 39 Yet it is in fact difficult to measure the size of the USAmerican Studies community with any accuracy, since so many of the USAmerican Studies programs in the UK are delivered not in distinct “Departments” but by ad hoc groups of staff arranged in loose coalitions (as previously mentioned). Accordingly any survey of the resulting patchwork undergraduate provision becomes difficult. 40 A few generalizations can be attempted, based on how this provision is “sold” to prospective students: the transatlantic is (unsurprisingly) often flagged as a feature; film studies and ethnic studies, especially African American and Native American studies are frequently vaunted; single honours degrees usually involve four years of study with a year (the third) spent in USAmerica—usually in University exchanges, with
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California most frequently specified; and much mention is made of adopting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The contours of this engagement are usually not clearly laid out, but rather baldly claimed. It is perhaps true to say that often the under-specified interdisciplinary approach that is deployed is informed by UK humanities’ widespread embrace of three main strands of theory. One derives from European Marxist and post-structural theorists (Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Kristeva, et cetera). The second stems from what might be described as British Cultural Studies (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy) and the last from postcolonial theorists (Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Robert Young). US theorists, like Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja, Mary Louise Pratt, are most commonly taken up insofar as they engage with one or more of these theoretical strands. 41 Such rapid summarizing runs the risk of sounding dismissive. I must therefore take pause to stress the variety of research that occurs in the UK. It is a varied and dynamic research scene, and this is reflected in a rich provision, despite the recent emphasis upon the Atlantic (and even if the Atlantic comes to dominate even more when graduate provisions are added in to the survey). British USAmerican Studies is, thank goodness, far from drawn up along comparitivist lines. The siren voices that often unthinkingly emerge from the USAmerican academy—urging that, say, a non-US student of USAmerican Studies working in the UK and interested in William Burroughs, should focus upon him and his work comparatively, drawing upon and researching Burroughs’ long engagement with the UK literary, cultural, social (and medical) scene and excavating relevant UK archives—are very far from always heeded. Heeding these voices would certainly produce some sort of comparativist ghetto, into which non-US scholars could be (safely) lump[en]ed, leaving the “real” research to be done by USAmericans, in the US. Consequently, and rightly, much emphasis in the UK is placed upon finding ways of sending UK academics across the Atlantic pond to carry out primary research. 42 However, I would want to urge again that in Europe—and beyond Europe—there is much room for further properly international collaboration and co-operation. The aim of this should not be just to take account of the new interest in the transnational in USAmerican Studies or the importance of globalization, though both these should certainly constitute a main element of such developments. Rather, World American Studies should also aim to come together to help define what perspectives result from studying USAmerica from the outside, untrammeled by an increasingly confident, interventionist and censorious neo-conservative and “moral majority” USAmerican minority that perhaps does somewhat rein in USAmericanists in the USA. 43 For this reason I am bound to end this article by suggesting that the European Journal of American Studies country-by-country survey of USAmerican Studies in Europe is fundamentally misconceived—even retrograde. Rather this brand new journal of American Studies in Europe, in which this essay appears, should be considering larger questions, to do with the transnational, the global, and how American Studies scholars outside of the States may be particularly fortunately positioned to take on USAmerican Studies at this point in this field’s development.
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NOTES
1. Polly Toynbee, ‘A degree in bullying and self-interest? No thanks’, The Guardian Wednesday 25 August 2004, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/ 0,1290138,00.html [accessed 01/11/2005]. 2. The conflation USAmerica[n] is taken from Malim Johar Schueller. I agree with him that ‘American’ as an adjective and ‘America’ as a noun should only be deployed in hemispheric usages. See Malim Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalism: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press), 1998. In this article, also, I will view American Studies as a subject, an Area Study, rather than as a discipline. I regard American Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor, though one always embracing at times, strategically, disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives as well. I return to this issue near the end of my article. 3. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass 1855, rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, 123. 4. Toynbee, op. cit. 5. Rebecca Smithers, “80% against student top-up fees,” The Guardian 9 September 2003. http://educationguardian.co.uk/students/tuitionfees/story/0,12757,1038519,00html [accessed 30/9/2005]. 6. David Crystal, English as Global Language, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 11-26. 7. See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/assessment/ [accessed 30/9/2005] 8. The scores were actually amalgamated to become “departmental” scores, and these departments’ ratings were then calculated overall as a composite of the research submitted, the research environment and esteem indicators. Consequently the phrase “percentage of researchers located in ‘departments’ in the UK” is an important qualification. 9. http://www.baas.ac.uk/administrastion/admin.asp [accessed 5 November 2005] 10. Herbert Nicholas, “The Education of an Americanist,” Journal of American Studies 14 (April 1980): 24. 11. Scott Lucas and Ali Fisher, “Master and Servant? The US Government and the Founding of The British Association of American Studies,” European Journal of American Culture, 21.1 (2002): 16-25. 12. Lucas and Fisher, 18. 13. See Manju Jaidka, “American Studies in India: a retrospect,” Comparative American Studies 2.4 (December 2004): 461-469. 14. Lucas and Fisher, 22-23. 15. Frank Thistlethwaite to Marcus Cunliffe, 9 February 1957, BAAS archive, University of Birmingham Library Special Collections, Box 1 B1. 16. See Richard King, “Present at the Creation: Marcus Cunliffe and American Studies,” Journal of American Studies 26 (1992): 265; David Reynolds, “Whitehall, Washington and the Promotion of American Studies in Britain during World War Two,” Journal of American Studies 16 (August 1982): 166. 17. This assertion is based upon my own observations when in China in 2002 and 2003. 18. Personal communication to R. J. Ellis, 2 September 1997.
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19. See http://www.star.ac.uk; http://www.cmsu.edu/mcts/index.cfm; http:// www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~awparker/transatlantic.html; http://www.tandf.co.uk/ journals/titles/14788810.asp; http://www.dundee.ac.uk/iteas/journal.htm; http:// www.symbiosisonline.org.uk. All accessed 30/9/2005. 20. http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/as/Dbruce/bruce.htm; http://www2arts.gla.ac.uk/ CAS/; http://www.uea.ac.uk/eas/centres/miller/miller.intro.shtml; http:// americas.sas.ac.uk; http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/; http://www.bl.uk/collections/americas/ american.html. All accessed 30/9/2005. 21. http://www.star.ac.uk; http://www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~awparker/tsa.htm; http://www.ifpmc.bham.ac.uk. All accessed 30/9/2005.
INDEX
Keywords : interdisciplinarity, Film Studies, Native American, African-American, ethnic studies, USAmerican Studies
European journal of American studies, 1-1 | 2006