E-Book, Englisch, Band 38, 484 Seiten
Reihe: REAL ? Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature
Dialogues with Winfried Fluck. Essays and Responses on American Studies
E-Book, Englisch, Band 38, 484 Seiten
Reihe: REAL ? Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature
ISBN: 978-3-381-10873-2
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Autoren/Hrsg.
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10.24053/REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies
Winfried Fluck To begin with, let me briefly define the sense in which I want to use the word “Americanization” in the following argument. Instead of the customary meaning of a covert or overt, clever or clumsy imperialist ploy, “Americanization” in this paper is meant to refer to developments that have either already taken place in the United States or are in a state of advanced development there, so that they can serve as models, or, where still contested, at least indicate some of the problems and consequences connected with them. Of these developments, widespread private enterprise and the all-?pervasive impact of market conditions upon the organization of almost all aspects of life are probably most striking and significant. In view of a fast-?growing global interdependence and especially in view of the breathtaking recent changes in Eastern Europe, it seems that this trend towards private enterprise will gain even more momentum so that the United States will continue to be of interest as a country in which certain tendencies of modern democracies have had an early start and therefore can be studied for some of their consequences. Instead of complaining about an alleged “Americanization of European Literary Studies,” I therefore prefer to deal with “The Americanization of Literary Studies,” which does not so much imply a cultural contrast and polemic but a discussion of a general line of development in the field and, indeed, in the humanities in general. This development is most advanced in the U.S. but is already taking shape in Europe as well – not because Americans have found a way to skillfully lure or pressure us into that direction but because the inner logic of a growing professionalization under market conditions leaves very little choice in the matter. In this somewhat reduced sense, then, the term “Americanization,” deprived of its customary melodramatic connotation, does not refer to scenarios of a takeover or seduction but to institutional changes in the profession that, due to the remarkable strength and vitality of American scholarship – which is, after all, one of the biggest success stories of the 20th century – begin to affect and shape scholarship outside the U.S. as well. Part of the complexity of the problem is that these changes have positive as well as negative consequences and that almost all of us in the profession, whether radical or conservative, apologist or critic, are participants in this development and are profiting from it. Thus, I intend to offer the following critique neither as a European who feels threatened by an American takeover, nor as an individual who has a reason for dissatisfaction and dissent and is looking for a meta-?perspective which would allow me to rise above recent developments. There is no such meta-?position outside the profession (and also no European high-?road), as the example of a well-?known (European) critic of modern science illustrates who, in an article which I read in preparation for this paper, lodges the by now familiar complaint about an ever growing tidal wave of publications that is caused, among other things, by a ready willingness to publish almost everything nowadays. The article points out that it seems to have become commonplace to publish papers read at conferences and then to recycle them in various versions and publications. I was duly impressed until I read at the end of the article that it, too, was the abbreviated version of a paper read at a conference whose proceedings would be published soon. The following discussion is thus intended as presentation of a number of observations whose tentative and preliminary nature is readily admitted. However, in a situation in which ambivalence, for reasons yet to be discussed, must prevail as an attitude, such a provisional mode of analyzing certain developments in the field may have the advantage of resisting easy, foregone conclusions. Some of these developments are quite obvious. Let me begin with the most obvious one affecting not only literary studies, but the humanities and the natural sciences as well: that of ever increasing specialization. This trend has often been pointed out and criticized, but usually from outside the profession and from the perspective of the amateur or the ‘public’ intellectual who feels lost (and perhaps also threatened) by the growing inaccessibility of arguments on culture and art. As a result, such criticism has usually focused on the emergence of a professional jargon which makes public discussion of cultural matters increasingly difficult. I think that this recurring complaint, although one may sympathize with its underlying democratic ethos, makes the professional weary because it does not get to the heart of the problem. For even if one were willing to “translate” difficult arguments for public consumption, this would not solve the more serious problem that, as a result of specialization, we are flooded by observations and interpretations that no longer can be meaningfully related to each other. In other words, the main problem caused by specialization consists not so much in obscurantism, but in an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. In principle, specialization, in the search for knowledge, is a useful and necessary procedure because it increases our knowledge of individual phenomena and thereby protects us from, or at least cautions us against, undue generalization. The question, therefore, cannot be whether we should have specialization, but how much of it we can absorb before reaching a point of diminishing returns where the sheer number of observations or interpretations can no longer be integrated so that quantity minimizes the meaningfulness of knowledge. This seems particularly pertinent in cultural and literary studies, for what we have here is not only a horizontal, but a vertical extension of knowledge. In the natural sciences, to take the other extreme, knowledge is gained, strictly speaking, when one conclusion replaces another. What causes problems is the horizontal extension of knowledge that has to be connected. However, cultural and literary studies, in fact all disciplines not dealing with systematic but historical knowledge, do not produce knowledge in the same sense as the natural sciences do, since they are interpretive sciences in which one interpretation does not necessarily replace another but merely adds another perspective which, in addition to horizontal extension, also creates a continuous vertical extension of the basic body of knowledge. In one sense, the fact that we cannot work under the assumption of gaining “definite” knowledge but can only add interpretations may appear to be liberating because it enables us to add freely to the existing body of knowledge in the field; on the other hand, one may still argue that a new perspective only becomes a truly new perspective as long as, and to the extent to which, it defines itself in relation to already existing views on the subject in question. A growing specialization and the ensuing fragmentation of knowledge, however, stand in the way of setting up such relations. What we may have to distinguish, then, is specialization as a temporary research strategy and specialization as an institutionalized mode of dealing with knowledge. Europeans may experience this problem more painfully than Americans, for whom the tendency toward specialization and fragmentation has its institutional equivalent in academic hiring practices. At American universities, literary scholars are often hired as specialists, for example, on American romanticism. In Europe, on the other hand, a professor is expected to represent his or her field more broadly, which, although it may seem to be a touching anachronism, really makes good sense. After all, the concepts that are used for delineating our areas of study, such as culture or history, are concepts designed to express the idea of a set of relations. A single event or text remains an anecdote as long as one is unable to relate it to a larger context; only then does it acquire meaning and significance. But clearly, the fact of an increasing specialization and the ensuing fragmentation of knowledge connected with it works against such linkage. Allow me to describe but one phenomenon which I have noticed time and again while dealing with the American novel of the nineteenth-?century for a book on the changing functions of fiction in American culture. Although American romanticism and realism stand in close temporal and cultural relation in the nineteenth-?century and interact in many complex and intricate ways, American realism specialists’ lack of knowledge about preceding literary traditions is, as a rule, rather striking and is usually limited to a vague concept of the “romance” derived from realistic polemics. On the other hand, specialists on American romanticism usually have equally reductive and polemical notions about concepts such as realism, mimesis, or representation. The consequences can be seen in the exaggerated claims about the importance of American romanticism for an understanding of America. That such claims were not merely the result of an ideological need for a unified national tradition is borne out by recent revisionist developments in the field in which the reality of disagreement and cultural conflict is readily acknowledged, but American romanticism continues to stand at the center of revision. How could it be otherwise, one may ask, for this is after all an important area of specialization for many of these scholars; to play it down would also hold the danger of...
