An Introduction to Intercultural
Negotiations in the Americas and Beyond
By Barbara Buchenau
and Marietta Messmer
Armin Paul
FRANK
On the Comparison of Interliterary
Configurations
Abstract: In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations,"
Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions
from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison
is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary
literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities
or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources.
This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but
effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting
in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From
a comprehensive perspective, this is how the history of literature -- which
differs from, but is not unrelated to, the history of literary life -- is being
made: Not intra-nationally nor in the context of an indiscriminate internationality
but within configured sets of more or less closely connected literatures that
change throughout time. In order to outline the internationalist making of American
literatures and to compare typically American configurations of interliterary
processes, Frank presents a number of such interliterary configurations.
Frank LAUTERBACH
British Travel Writing
about the United States and Spanish America, 1820-1840:
Different and Differentiating
Views
Abstract: In his article, "British Travel Writing about the Americas,
1820-1840: Different and Diffentiating Views," Frank Lauterbach analyzes representations
of the United States and South America in British travel writing of the post-Monroe
years. His analysis rests on examples from two travelogues by Basil Hall, written
in 1824 and 1829, respectively. Lauterbach discusses three related points: 1)
Intent on overcoming the colonial affiliation with Anglo-American culture, British
travelers try to establish a clear (romance of) difference between themselves
and the United States, they employ a post-colonial rhetoric that stresses the
strangeness rather than likeness of America; 2) Ironically, US-American responses
to Basil Hall's work refute such claims of difference and, in turn, re-assert
British hegemony through a colonial rhetoric designed to leave sameness between
both countries virtually transparent; and 3) In contrast to their differentiating
view of the United States, British writers approach South America with a different
objective: Here a colonial rhetoric both enhances their self-identification
and parallels neo-colonial interests by making the Other recognizable and easily
penetrable despite its (thus neglected) differences. Lauterbach proposes to
view colonial and post-colonial representations or narrations of alterity as
a potentially neutral duality in discourse since both rhetorics can equally
well emerge in writings from the (former) imperial metropolis and ex-colonial
periphery.
Annette PAATZ
The Socio-Cultural Function
of Media in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Abstract: In her article, "The Socio-Cultural Function of Media in Nineteenth-Century
Latin America," Annette Paatz explores the function of the review genre in the
context of Latin American nation building. Paatz focuses, on the one hand, on
the genre's nationalist purposes and, on the other, on the appropriateness for
intercultural communication. Drawing on the concept of mediated communication
as social practice in the context of media cultural studies, Paatz analyses
the reviews as representations of nineteenth-century Latin America's negotiations
of transatlantic and thus intercultural relationships. She highlights the pragmatic
ways in which Latin America utilized European media products in order to increase
the flow of information and to sustain a Latin American pan-subcontinental communication.
This fact suggests that the often noted importance of Paris as the cultural
center of the Western world throughout the nineteenth century can be described
in terms of the medial support it offered to Latin American nations in their
claim for and building of cultural identity. By considering the conditions of
production as well as reception, Paatz pays attention to cultural biases inherent
in media communication between Europe and Latin America.
Marga GRAF
Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural
Self in Présence Africaine
Abstract: In her article, "Roots of Identity: The National and
Cultural Self in Présence Africaine," Marga Graf investigates
some of the difficulties African, American, Brazilian, and Caribbean Blacks
of the mid-twentieth century encountered in their attempts to voice their cultural
and racial self-understanding, a self-understanding struggling to a large extent
to challenge the established dichotomy between black racial inferiority versus
white superiority. After the Second World War, black intellectuals meeting at
the Sorbonne in Paris founded the journal Présence Africaine,
a journal that became the voice of blacks investigating their history and culture
throughout the different regions of Africa as well as diasporas worldwide. In
Présence Africaine, well-known black writers, poets, and intellectuals
joined hands with white authors, most of them French writers and intellectuals,
in a common endeavor to support the formation of a new cultural, historical,
and political identity of and for blacks. Focusing on the decades of the 1950s
and the 1960s, a time of multiple struggles for political independence, Graf
explores the journal's material with regard to major regional differences in
the processes of black identity formation and in the interpretation of négritude
as a concept supporting blacks in their search for the roots of their identity.
Josef RAAB
El gran viejo: Walt Whitman
in Latin America
Abstract: In his article, "El gran viejo:
Walt Whitman in Latin America," Josef Raab examines the role and relevance
of Walt Whitman within Latin American poetry. It is observed that since the
publication of José Martí's essay of 1887, "El Poeta Walt Whitman,"
Whitman has been a prominent figure in the literary imagination of Latin America.
While Martí lauded Whitman as a prophet, his reception in the Americas
is far from homogeneous, however. Raab's study addresses ways in which some
of the more prominent Latin American poets -- José Martí, Rubén
Darío, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vinícius de Moraes, Jorge
Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz -- have re-fashioned Walt Whitman. Further, Raab
argues that the reception of and response to Whitman illustrate that we can
think of Whitman as a kind of Rorschach test: The ways in which he is being
read and employed by Latin American writers reveal more about his readers than
about him. Depending on their own poetic and political agendas, Latin American
poets pick up (approvingly or disapprovingly) divergent aspects of Whitman’s
sometimes contradictory positions, thus constructing their own versions of Whitman
and integrating them into their own poetic imagination and practice. The heterogeneous
appropriations of Whitman by Latin American poets underline the vitality and
polyvocal quality of Whitman's work and the continuing appeal of the man whom
Darío called el gran viejo.
Marietta
MESSMER
Twentieth-Century American
Literary Historiography
Abstract: In her article, "Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography,"
Marietta Messmer analyzes the ways in which contemporary histories of American
literature -- members of a discursive formation that has traditionally privileged
a nationalist paradigm -- position themselves in the context of current debates
on constructions of post-national cultural identity. Concentrating on the changing
conceptualizations of the term "American" employed in these literary histories,
Messmer traces briefly the major shifts in historiographical negotiations of
American interliterary and intercultural relations throughout the twentieth
century. Messmer discusses the ways in which American histories of literature
move from an earlier -- albeit reductionist -- interest in defining American
literary identity through difference (manifesting itself in attempts to disaffiliate
American literary texts from their transatlantic, and in particular their British,
contexts) toward a seemingly more inclusive focus on American literature's intracultural
diversity and polyvocality. Ultimately, however, Messmer argues that, to a large
degree, the current historiographical emphasis on intra-American pluralism is
all too frequently accompanied by new attempts at establishing (a revised version
of) historiographical nationalism. In this sense, transatlantic disaffiliative
and intra-American pluralist constructions of identity can be interpreted as
two versions of American cultural and literary nation building.
Barbara
BUCHENAU
Comparativist Interpretations
of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography
Abstract: In her article, "Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier
in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography," Barbara Buchenau points
towards problematic processes of selection and narrative positioning at work
in historiographical studies when analyzing and synthesizing early American
frontier fiction. Apart from selecting only a small number of literary texts
from the large pool of frontier fiction, these over-arching narratives tend
to reduce the meaning of the literary works selected to those characteristics
that are understood to be of importance for the emerging national literature.
Concentrating on two novels long excluded from the American canon, Catharine
Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The
Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), Buchenau argues that even literary histories
that aim at a depiction of the diversity characterizing the American literary
landscape find it difficult to incorporate novels that either, as in the case
of Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, find fault with certain established myths
(the American West as virgin land; unsubdued nature as pitiless danger zone),
or, as in the case of Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, deconstruct
both the heroic implications and the perceived optimistic consequences of a
mythic metaphor (the frontier’s privileging of the survival of the fittest,
its suggestion of a glorious national future).
John NEUBAUER
Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad
y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence
Abstract: In his paper, "Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros
and the European Novel of Adolescence," John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas
Llosa's 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of
Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is
described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauer's article looks at
Vargas Llosa's work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents
in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three
main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and urbanity
and on the problematics of the concept and workings of peer groups while stylistically
the texts show their authors' experimentation with new narrative forms.
Angela M.
SENST
Regional and National Identities
in Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's Criticism
Abstract: In her essay, "Regional and National Identities in Robert Frost's
and T.S. Eliot's Criticism," Angela M. Senst analyzes Robert Frost's and T.S.
Eliot's criticism in order to explore their different concepts of culture and
to determine their respective regional and national identities: While both poets
stress the necessity of unified cultural entities, Frost is deeply committed
to the American principle e pluribus unum, whereas Eliot disapproves
of internally heterogeneous societies that strive to level out differences which
he considers a prerequisite for the mutual revitalization of cultures. Instead,
Eliot promotes the idea of intercultural exchange, whereas Frost credits the
experience of immigration with producing and continuously revitalizing the American
culture. Considering New England the cradle of the cultural and political American
nation, Frost is convinced that his regional loyalty is the foundation for his
national loyalty. T.S. Eliot, however, considers a cultural nation to be an
organic, and not an artificial, structure. Consequently, he can become a naturalized
British citizen without giving up his cultural loyalties to the regions of his
childhood and youth, while denying America, as the product of colonization,
its claim to being not only a political, but also a cultural nation.
Krzysztof
KOWALCZYK-TWAROWSKI
Southern American
Regional Sensibility versus the North
Abstract: In his paper, "Southern American Regional
Sensibility versus the North," Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski investigates some
key myths underlying the culture of the American South. Kowalczyk-Twarowski
discusses the issue of national versus regional sensibility in early statesmen
and writers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Fitzhugh, and John C. Calhoun.
Starting with the mythology that evolved about North-South relations in the
wake of the Civil War, Kowalczyk-Twarowski delineates some steps in the construction
of regional feeling. In his analysis of the latter, Kowalczyk-Twarowski argues
that the romanticized image of the South is a product of Northern needs for
an antidote to the fast pace of change which swept America in the last decades
of the nineteenth century. Using the examples of the 1930 anthology I’ll
Take My Stand and The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy, Kowalczyk-Twarowski
shows how Southern mythology resists change and supports self-defensive passivity
instead.
Eugenia SOJKA
Canadian Feminist Writing and
American Poetry
Abstract: In her article, "Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry,"
Eugenia Sojka explores contemporary English-Canadian feminist avant-garde and
language-focused writing and its intertextual linkages with American Language
Poets. Texts of English-Canadian feminist writers such as Lola Lemire Tostevin,
Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, and Gail Scott are read with
reference to ideas and techniques inscribed in the writing of Ron Silliman,
Charles Berstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman. Sojka focuses
first on the socio-historical dimension of the writing and proceeds to the exploration
of several discourses inscribed in the texts of writers associated with both
groups. Their texts return to the politics and aesthetics of the historical
avant-garde and reincarnate the spirit of carnival. They re-read earlier female
avant-gardes, carnivalize monologic concepts of language and writing, experiment
with the "new sentence" and interartistic projects, and carnivalize the traditional
concept of the genre. While Canadian writers engage in the re-reading of American
feminist avant-garde, their focus is on the Canadian socio-historical and political
situation. What distinguishes Canadian language writing from other international
avant-gardes is their intertextual dialogue with Québécois-Canadian
feminist writers and the intense work on language closely linked with the complex
and problematic nature of Canadian identity in a post-national and globalized
world.
Terence MARTIN
From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity
and Revenge in American Writing
Abstract: In his article, "From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity and Revenge
in American Writing," Terence Martin argues that one of the basic narrative
patterns in American writing is that of revenge for the violation of innocence.
Martin explores in his study Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods,
Brian Garfield's Death Wish, and John Grisham's A Time to Kill,
texts in which ambiguities of the pattern are expressed in a dramatic and disquieting
fashion. After brutality to innocent victims precipitates the action, each of
these novels identifies predators and revenge figures and thus sets in motion
an escalating spectacle of retribution. Typically, predators are drawn from
groups society views with disdainful hostility -- Indians in the frontier setting
of Nick, nameless and vicious "bad guys" in the New York of Death Wish,
or rednecks in the Mississippi locale of A Time to Kill. Set against
such antagonists are the avengers, frequently fathers who become obsessed with
the need to destroy the destroyer. As the selection of predators reveals social
biases and frustrations, so the actions of the avenger manifest a need to get
even for something no longer possessed. Additionally, as part of a fascinating
sub-drama in these novels, the avenger tends to become the creature of his obsession;
he is thus prone to resemble the predator in unsettling ways.
Roland
HAGENBÜCHLE
Living Together as an
Intercultural Task
Abstract: In his article, "Living Together as an Intercultural Task,"
Roland Hagenbüchle explores the multi-faceted challenges we face in a multicultural
world. At the same time, he refers the reader to a survey of recent studies
indispensable to an informed investigation of this topic. After analyzing the
various options for coming to terms with life in multicultural societies and
paying special attention to John Rawls' global model of justice as fairness
and Martha C. Nussbaum's concept of a good life (based on the capability model),
Hagenbüchle advances the transcultural concept of personhood as a non-hegemonic
starting point for a dialogic intercultural exchange. Surprisingly enough, the
correspondences of values among otherwise widely differing cultures tend to
converge in the form of a common human ethos, thus strengthening our trust in
a peaceful coexistence of peoples and (hopefully) laying to rest the ghosts
of an inevitable and close-to-apocalyptic "clash of civilizations" (Huntington).
Bibliography
Barbara
BUCHENAU and Marietta MESSMER
Selected Bibliography for the Study of Interculturality
in the Americas: Theories and Practice