Major versus minor? Languages and literatures in a globalized world 9789027268549, 9027268541

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Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures issn 2213-428X

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/fillm

Series Editor: Roger D. Sell, Åbo Akademi University Editorial Board Meenakshi Bharat

Gu Yueguo

Tom Clark

John Noyes

Sonia Faessell

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Luisa Granato

Tatania Venediktova

University of Delhi

Victoria University Melbourne University of New Caledonia National University of La Plata

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences University of Toronto University of Cape Town Moscow University

Advisory Board Petra Broomans, University of Groningen Nominated by IASS – International Association for Scandinavian Studies

Philippa Kelly, California Shakespeare Theater Nominated by AULLA – Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association

Bianca Maria Da Rif, University of Padua Nominated by AISLLI – Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana

Bénédicte Ledent, University of Liège Nominated by ACLALS – Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies

Chen Rudong, Peking University Nominated by GRS – Global Rhetoric Society

Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, University of São Paulo Nominated by ALFAL – Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina

Erik Doxtader, University of South Carolina Nominated by ARCSA – Association for Rhetoric and Communication in Southern Africa

Daniela Merolla, Leiden University Nominated by ISOLA – International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa

Sebastian Feller, A*STAR - Institute of High Performance Computing Nominated by IADA – International Association for Dialogue Analysis

Jean-Marc Moura, Paris West University Nanterre La Défense Nominated by ICLA – International Comparative Literature Association

Elisabeth Jay, Oxford Brookes University Nominated by IAUPE – International Association of University Professors of English

S. Ade Ojo, Le Village Français du Nigeria Nominated by WAMLA – West African Modern Languages Association

Volume 1 Major versus Minor? – Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World Edited by Theo D’haen, Iannis Goerlandt and Roger D. Sell

Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World Edited by

Theo D’haen University of Leuven

Iannis Goerlandt University of Leuven

Roger D. Sell Åbo Akademi University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/fillm.1 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2015007160 (print) / 2015012091 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0128 7 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6854 9 (e-book)

© 2015 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Series editor’s preface

ix

Acknowledgement

xi

Contributors Introduction Theo D’haen, Iannis Goerlandt and Roger D. Sell

xiii 1

Part I.  Languages chapter 1 The “minor language” perspective Östen Dahl chapter 2 The language milieu of the Old Order Amish: Preserving Pennsylvania Deitsch Johanna Jansson chapter 3 English – The Last Lingua Franca? Nicholas Ostler chapter 4 National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia: Language conflicts, 1784–1848 Lav Subaric chapter 5 Error and innovation in postcolonial composition: The implications of World Englishes David Huddart chapter 6 Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills through selected literary works: A strategic approach to writing development in English Amporn Srisermbhok

15

25

43

53

67

81

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Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

Part II.  Theoretical considerations: Language, culture, literature chapter 7 Critical glissantism: Édouard Glissant’s views on language(s) Kathleen Gyssels

103

chapter 8 Decolonizing world literature Magdi Youssef

125

chapter 9 Minor and major readings across cultures Lotta Strandberg

141

chapter 10 From Black Athena to Black Dionysus and beyond? African adaptations of Greek tragedy Astrid Van Weyenberg

157

chapter 11 From minor genre towards major genre: Crime fiction and autofiction Karen Ferreira-Meyers

171

chapter 12 World literature / World culture? TV series and video games Sylvie André

187

Part III.  Literatures chapter 13 Small presses and the globalization of poetry Manuel Brito

207

chapter 14 Between “minor” and “major”: The case of Polish literature Marta A. Skwara

221

chapter 15 “The world at large … is only an expanded homeland”: From Goethe’s idea of world literature to contemporary migration literature Leena Eilittä

233



Table of contents vii

chapter 16 Who is the Other? Goethe’s encounter with “China” in his concept of Weltliteratur Yi Chen

241

chapter 17 “Major” and “minor” literatures: Indian cases Meenakshi Bharat

253

chapter 18 A “minor” language in a “major” literature: Contemporary Irish literature Micéala Symington

263

Index

273

Series editor’s preface

The Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (FILLM) is UNESCO’s ceiling organization for scholarship in the field of languages and literatures. The Federation’s main aim is to encourage linguists and literary scholars from all over the world to enter into dialogue with each other. During the twentieth century, linguistic and literary studies became steadily more professional and specialized, a development which significantly raised the overall standard of research, but which also tended to divide scholars into many separate and often smallish groupings between which communication could be rather sporadic. Over the years this became something of a handicap. New ideas and findings were often slow to cross-fertilize. Given the rapidly globalizing world of the early twenty-first century, the relative lack of contact between scholars in different subject-areas became a more glaring anomaly than ever. Against this background, FILLM decided to set up its own book series, in the hope of fostering a truly international community of scholars within which a rich diversity of interests would be upheld by a common sense of human relevance. Books appearing under the label of FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures deal with languages and literatures world-wide, and are written in a jargon-light English that will be immediately understandable and attractive to any likely reader. Every book presents original findings – including new theoretical, methodological and pedagogical developments – which will be of prime interest to those who are experts in its particular field of discussion, but also seeks to engage readers whose concerns have hitherto lain elsewhere. 

Roger D. Sell

Acknowledgement

For invaluable help in the production of this volume we should like to thank Professor Stein Haugom Olson, who as Dean of the Faculty of Business, Languages and Social Sciences at Østfold University  College Halden hosted the 26th International FILLM Congress in 2011.

Theo D’haen Iannis Goerlandt Roger D. Sell

Contributors

Sylvie André is Professor of French and Francophone Literatures at the University of French Polynesia. In Le Récit: Perspectives anthropologique et littéraire (2012) she examined the links between pre-modern traditions (oral and aesthetic), modern European culture, and cultural products available on the web. In doing so, she used interdisciplinary frameworks (anthropological and sociological) which can treat several different types of linguistic production as having an aesthetic or literary dimension. More recently, she has co-edited Littératures du Pacifique insulaire / Literatures of the Pacific Islands (2013). Meenakshi Bharat works at the University of Delhi and is a writer, translator, reviewer and critic. Her interests range from children’s literature, women’s fiction, film studies and postcolonialism to English and cultural studies. Her books include The Ultimate Colony: The Child in Postcolonial Fiction (2003), Desert in Bloom: Indian Women Writers of Fiction in English (2004) and Rushdie the Novelist (2009). She is currently serving as President of FILLM. Manuel Brito is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna. Recent publications include Means Matter: Market Fructification of American Innovative Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (2010) and Reshaping Publishing in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century (2014). Yi Chen has recently received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. In her dissertation she used a phenomenological approach to explore the nature of comparison and dialetheia (self-referential paradoxes). Her focus of research is on the Táng poet Wáng Wéi (王維, 701–761) and the German poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). Östen Dahl is Professor of General Linguistics at Stockholm University. In recent years, his research has mainly been typologically oriented, with a strong interest in diachronic approaches to grammar. His books include Tense and Aspect Systems (1985) and The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity (2004). Theo D’haen is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven. Recent publications include The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012, with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir), World Literature: A Reader (2012, with César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen), and American Literature: A History (2014, with Hans Bertens). From 2008 to 2011 he served as President of FILLM.

xiv Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

Leena Eilittä teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are in Kafka, Swiss migration literature, and European Romanticism. She belongs to the editorial board of Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms and is currently Treasurer of FILLM. Karen Ferreira-Meyers is Coordinator of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the Institute of Distance Education of the University of Swaziland. One of her most recent publications is L’autofiction d’Amélie Nothomb, Calixthe Beyala et Nina Bouraou (2012). Iannis Goerlandt is Assistant Professor at the University of Leuven, editor of the Flemish literary magazine nY and a prolific translator. His research focuses on imagology, intertexuality, Arno Schmidt, and David Foster Wallace. In 2008 he published Schulen zur Allegorie: Nationale Bilder in Arno Schmidts utopischer Prosa. He co-edits the series “Schrifturen” focused on contempary German literature, with published volumes on Thomas Meinecke and Marica Bodrožić. Kathleen Gyssels is Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Literatures at Antwerp University, where she teaches Black and Jewish Diaspora literatures within a comparative perspective. She publishes mainly on Caribbean writing: two of her recent books are Black-Label (Léon-Gontran Damas): Les déboires antillo-guyanais (2013) and Marrane and marronne: La coécriture réversible d’André et de Simone SchwarzBart (2015). David Huddart is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches postcolonial fiction, literary theory, and World Englishes. Author of Homi K. Bhabha (2006) and Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (2008), his most recent book is Involuntary Associations (2014). Johanna Jansson is a doctoral student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Academy University. Her research focuses on the Old Order Amish in North America, with special emphasis on the maintenance of their minority language, Pennsylvania Deitsch. Nicholas Ostler is Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and chairs the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a charity registered in England and Wales. His publications include Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (2005), Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (2007) and The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel (2010). Roger D. Sell is Emeritus H. W. Donner Research Professor of Literary Com­munication at Åbo Akademi University. His books include Literature as Com­munication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism (2000), Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized (2001) and Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue (2011). From 2011 to 2014 he served as President of FILLM.

Contributors xv

Marta Skwara is Professor of Polish and Comparative Literature at the University of Szczecin and editor-in-chief of Rocznik Komparatystyczny (Comparative Yearbook). She has written numerous books on Polish literature within world contexts, most recently on “the Polish Whitman” (2007). Her work in progress is on series of translations. Amporn Srisermbhok is Dean of Liberal Arts at Southeast Bangkok College. Her research interests cover major North American writers, issues of gender and equality, and English language education.  Lotta Strandberg is a Research Scholar at New York University and is working on South Asian fiction. One of her other interests is relationships between storytelling and gender. Lav Subaric is a Senior Scientist at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies and the University of Innsbruck. His scholarly interests include manuscript studies, mediaeval Latin and Neo-Latin Studies, especially regional Latin literature and the role of Latin in politics. Micéala Symington is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Univer­ sity of La Rochelle. Her research focuses on French, English and Irish literature (nineteenth to twenty-first centuries) from a comparative perspective, on the poetics of criticism, and on the relationship between literature, art and history. Her publications include Ecrire le tableau: L’approche poétique de la critique d’art à l’époque symboliste (2006) and Actualité et inactualité de la notion de postcolonial (co-edited, 2013). Astrid Van Weyenberg is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University and a researcher at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). In her book The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (2013) she argues that African adaptations of Greek tragedy should not be narrowly defined in terms of “writing back” to the Western canon, since the political roles they play are far more varied and complex. Magdi Youssef has taught Comparative Literature at German and Egyptian universities and is currently President of the International Association of Intercultural Studies (IAIS). His work, published in Arabic and six European languages, has influenced trends in several Western universities such as in the Decolonizzazione movement at Università La Sapienza in Rome.

Introduction Theo D’haen, Iannis Goerlandt and Roger D. Sell

Although the term “globalization” did not become a household word until the early 1990s, the phenomenon it describes goes back several centuries. It is at least as old as the European voyages of discovery and the subsequent emergence of what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989) has called “the modern world system,” which linked together all of the world’s major economies round about the beginning of the sixteenth century. More recent prefigurations of present-day globalization were to be seen in the period leading up to the First World War, when new free trade arrangements encouraged a steady growth of international economic relations, marked by the increasingly global reach of particular brands. Nor had globalizing trends escaped the notice of nineteeth-century intellectuals. Economic consequences were examined by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848, and two decades earlier Goethe, thinking more in terms of cultural manifestations, had already spoken of Weltliteratur. Yet during the past twenty or thirty years the pace of globalization has certainly become much more rapid. Now, then, is probably a good time to weigh up the benefits it may offer against the possible risks. In scholarly work on languages and literatures, this line of enquiry is likely to focus on certain particular issues: on language spread, language hegemony, and language conservation; on literary canons, literature and identity, and literary anthologies; and on the bearing of the new communication technologies on languages and literatures alike. And in any such explorations, the most frequently examined opposition is bound to be between languages and literatures perceived as “major” and others perceived as “minor”, two terms which are sometimes qualitative in connotation, sometimes quantitative, and sometimes both at once, depending on who is using them and with reference to what. These were the main themes discussed at the 26th International Congress of the UNESCO-affiliated Fédération Internationale des Languages et Littératures Modernes (FILLM), from which most of the chapters in the present volume originated. As its editors, we have selected contributions from scholars based many in different parts of the world – in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. doi 10.1075/fillm.1.003int © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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As a result, the book brings together a range of different viewpoints which not only reflects FILLM’s goals as a democratically international federation, but which also promises to cover the topic of globalization in due complexity and depth. ***** The book falls into three parts, the first of which is about the world’s languages, the relative positions of some languages vis à vis others, and especially the question of whether the status of English as lingua franca is detrimental to other languages – a worry expressed by the renowned German philologist Erich Auerbach as long ago as 1952 in his seminal article “Philology and Weltliteratur”. There are also chapters which discuss these issues specifically from the point of view of language teaching, while other chapters necessarily touch on the function of various languages as vehicles for literary activity. Östen Dahl’s opening chapter, for instance, notes that writers who use “minor” languages receive no recognition beyond their immediate linguistic environment. To the world at large, the literature they create remains more or less invisible. Nor do the complications stop there. Dahl also points out that some languages have no written form at all, or have a written form that has virtually no practical use. The culture associated with such languages may well include something we could call a literature, but in that case it will be an oral one – an orature – which is not produced by “writers”, and which is that much less likely to attract attention in the wider world. In an age of sometimes roughshod globalization, the fate of cultures associated with minor languages is becoming a focus of urgent scholarly, but also political and public concern. That is why Dahl examines the position of minor languages in considerable detail: their number, their geographical distribution, their specifics, and their ongoing disappearance. In the next chapter Johanna Jansson, too, partly dwells on the disappearance of languages. She notes that, unless something is done about it, by the end of the twenty-first century anywhere between 50% and 95% of the world’s present tally of 7,000 languages are likely to be extinct. The pressures on minority speakers to shift to a dominant language can be all too strong; intergenerational language transmission can easily falter; and attitudes towards a minority language can be very negative, not only among speakers of some more dominant language, but among speakers of the minority language itself. The main purpose of Jansson’s chapter, however, is to examine an example which bucks the general trend: the language of Old Order Amish communities, who even though they have lived in North America for almost three centuries still speak Pennsylvania Deitsch – a minority language – as their mother tongue. Today, Pennsylvania Deitsch is regularly spoken by some 280,000 people, and its use is actually spreading. At the present rate of growth, by the year 2100 its speakers could well number over a million. This is all

Introduction 3

the more surprising in that Pennsylvania Deitsch has no standardized written form or official status, is not the medium of instruction in Old Order Amish schools, and in its speakers’ daily life frequently alternates with English, which they use for most literate practices. Most remarkable of all, speakers of Pennsylvania Deitsch are not significantly concentrated in one specific area, but live in what amount to language islands dotted about on the majority’s Anglophone sea. What, then, is the explanation? Jansson’s answer draws attention to a combination of factors: home and family, community, traditions, beliefs and religion, domain allocation, and questions of attitude. With Nicholas Ostler’s chapter, the book moves from minor languages to English, the present time’s lingua franca. Ostler compares it with its predecessors in the lingua franca role, pointing out that a language can rise to this status for reasons of empire and politics, of commerce, or of religion. In general, however, a lingua franca lasts only as long as some such original raison d’être still applies. True, a lingua franca can also regenerate by being adopted for some new purpose, or by being taken up as a mother tongue. But otherwise it will inevitably decline through a process of either ruin, relegation, or resignation: it will either (1) die away in step with the activities and accumulated resources on which its use was based, or (2) be formally abolished, often in favour of some other official medium of communication, or (3) see its population of speakers lose prestige, so that it ceases to be widely used, quite regardless of whether or not some other language replaces it. All these paths to decline have been instantiated in the past, and it so happens that English, even if its global reach will hardly be matched by any other major language in the foreseeable future, has already ceased to be borne up by new reasons for growth. Yet instead of English being replaced by some other language, the very need for a lingua franca is in Ostler’s view now likely to diminish, not least because of the new language technologies, most notably machine translation based on quantitative analysis. Turning to an earlier lingua franca, Lav Subaric’s chapter looks at changing attitudes to Latin as an official language in the eastern half of the Habsburg empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The catalyst here was the new language-based national identities which were gradually replacing the older legal concept of nationhood. The net result was that Latin now came to hold different kinds of significance, and to involve different practices, for different ethnic, social and even generational groupings. For some people, it was an integral part of what they wanted to preserve as their identity. For others, it was an obstacle to the development of nationhood. The practical usefulness and political signifance of a lingua franca are again at issue in David Huddart’s chapter, which returns to English as the prime exhibit. More particularly, Huddart is concerned with the teaching of English as a lingua

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Theo D’haen, Iannis Goerlandt and Roger D. Sell

franca, and with the claim that there is actually more than one “World English”, in that English can be coloured by the environment within which it is being used – can undergo a process of “cultural translation”, to use the terminology of postcolonial theoreticians. When postcolonialism’s liberatory drive gains headway within the field of language pedagogy, it encourages what its champions refer to as “creativity”, as a way of resisting the alleged tendency of a lingua franca towards cultural imperialism. Having examined the implications of such postcolonialist thinking for composition studies in North America, Huddart then asks whether an analogous approach would be suitable in English courses offered by universities in Hong Kong, where he himself is based. One of his points here is that his students want to be taught, not Hong Kong English, but an English that is more widely viable. Among other things, therefore, they positively welcome the example set by an English native speaker. Huddart’s more general claim is that the fruitfulness of postcolonial teaching theory most probably varies from one postcolonial context to another. But at least on this showing, postcolonialism’s celebration of innovatory difference can sometimes collide head-on with practical demands for an intelligible sameness. Amporn Srisermbhok’s chapter is also about teaching lingua franca English in the Far East, more specifically in a university in Thailand. Drawing not only on her own personal resources as a teacher but on several task- and contentbased approaches to teaching, Srisermbhok wanted to find out whether, and if so how, reading activities could significantly help students improve their Englishlanguage writing skills. Her experiment involved a group of twenty participants in an intensive 30-hour workshop, and she collected data from participants’ writing assignments, from a questionnaire, and from open-ended questions intended to elicit suggestions and recommendations. Putting everything together, Srisembhok came to the conclusion that both intensive and extensive reading did help participants improve their writing skills, but also their listening and speaking skills as well, and that there were notable improvements in the areas of vocabulary and communicational flow – the use of discourse markers, for instance. Participants were pleased with the progress they had made, and felt encouraged to apply what they had learned to their own work as teachers, and to continue with their own private reading. ***** Part II of the book begins to engage in some detailed literary discussion, but in ways which particularly emphasize the controversial theoretical issues raised by globalization for the study of language, culture and literature more generally. The transition from Part I’s explorations of major and minor languages is achieved by Kathleen Gyssels’s chapter on the influential Martiniquan man of

Introduction 5

letters Édouard Glissant, whose view of language/s was, she argues, distinctively complicated and even self-contradictory. His response to the fragmentation of Caribbean literature, and indeed to what he described as the Balkanization of the entire African diaspora’s cultural production, actually varied from one phase of his intellectual development to another. Early on, he opposed the dominance of French as a lingua franca by championing creolization, apparently in the belief that communities expressing themselves in different languages, dialects and creoles would be able to enter into meaningful relationships with each other through a world literature that was not carried by some single shared linguistic medium. Later, he seemed to change his mind about this, and to seek recognition for Caribbean literatures by choosing a publisher at the very heart of the Parisian literary establishment. Nor was this the only paradox. From Gyssels’s critique, Glissant emerges as a thinker whose idiosyncatic blind spots were directly at odds with his professedly democratic goals. In compiling La Terre, le feu, l’air et le vent: Une Anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde (2010), for instance, he left out many representative poets merely because they did not appeal to his own long-established personal preferences, and he also completely ignored, as throughout his career, Caribbean writing in Dutch. All in all, his case offers the clearest possible illustration of just how necessary, but also just how difficult it is to balance between major and minor languages and literatures in what is now a globalized world. That globalized world is one in which literatures themselves sometimes seem to call for discussion not only as “literatures” (plural) but in terms of “World Literature” (singular). Any text nowadays, after all, can go viral overnight. Yet the concept of World Literature, linked as it is to Goethe’s discussion of Weltliteratur nearly two hundred years ago, is as much of a target for postcolonialist deconstruction as is the argument for a single English lingua franca discussed by David Huddart. And Magdi Youssef, in his chapter here, argues that as things stand at present World Literature is certainly fair game – that it needs to be “decolonized” and rendered far less Eurocentric in its ideological assumptions. One of his chief claims is that the Nobel Prize for Literature basically mystify literary phenomena, by still assigning them to a lofty Kantian perspective. Youssef himself embraces a more down-to-earth account, in which the politico-economic and socio-economic conditions under which literary processes take place are not seen as entirely exterior to literary phenomena, but as intrinsically affecting literary techniques, structures and preoccupations. As for a World Literature of the future, in Youssef ’s view this could involve an endless variety of literary and cultural inventions, all of them reflecting objective distinctions between different socio-cultures that would finally open themselves to each other. There would no longer be a drive towards either identifying with the Other or rejecting the Other. Instead, “[t]he sense of being different, if coupled with self-confident openness towards the Other, would make

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for a truly sound and rewarding cultural encounter worldwide, which would be greatly preferable to the present way of making literature internationally acceptable by dressing it up in a certain ideological uniform.” A similarly historicizing argument is offered by Lotta Strandberg in her chapter, which analyses the influence exerted on canon formation and literary interpretation by different reading positions. Strandberg raises the question of whether, just as there are definably major and minor languages and literatures, there are also definably major and minor reading positions. And if there are, on what criteria can the definitions be based? By way of answer, she explores some of the reading positions which have been adopted, or which could be adopted, in interpretations of South Asian women’s writing, and more particularly of Githa Hariharan’s novel The Thousand Faces of Night (1992). She comes to the conclusion that in the world of today some strongly dominant reading positions certainly are at work. Readings of the kind put forward by Fredric Jameson, for instance, are representative of Western Anglophone academia in general, and some typically Western feminist readings have also been extremely influential. Strandberg herself occupies what might seem to be a somewhat peripheral reading poition, in that she is a Finnish reader, who is most “naturally” conversant with Finnish, Finland-Swedish and Swedish literature. This not only makes her hesitant only to pass judgement on Hariharan, but prevents her from endorsing either Jamesonian or convenionally Western feminist readings. So placed, and by carefully and undogmatically trying to penetrate Hariharan’s own socio-cultural context, she finds herself empathizing with concerns to which the dominant readings have been totally oblivious. On the one hand, she rejects the Jamesonian compulsion to view all third-world texts as merely political allegories. On the other hand, she can see that Hariharan’s own feminism, far from being a critique of heterosexual marriage, highlights certain culturally specific tensions and sympathies between one Indian woman and another. Astrid Van Weyenberg’s chapter, too, is sharply focused on contexts and their theoretical implications. Her topic is African adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy which are set in contemporary African contexts, so serving much the the same function as did the Greek originals: they use materials from the distant past in order to comment on the present. Through their reworkings of the ancient plots and characters, Wole Soyinka, Fémi Òsófisan, Yael Farber and others redirect attention, not only to the texts and contexts of ancient Greece, but to cultural traditions of which Greek tragedy has come to form a canonical part, traditions not only European but African as well. Careful to distance herself from postcolonialist interpretations of the more reductive and doctrinaire varieties, Van Weyenberg emphasizes the sheer energy and originality of the plays she is discussing. The African adaptors, unruffled by the civilization which Goethe found the most aweinspiringly universal of all, raise perspectives in which that ancient Greek culture

Introduction 7

was secondary and African cultures were primary, and in which African cultures are now once again leading the way, this time in the form of hybridities which could well have global significance. As is clear from the demystifying historicism of the chapters by Youssef, Strandberg and Van Weyenburg, in a globalizing world literature can become a battle-ground for power politics, much of which has to do with contests of legitimation. Which individual, which grouping, which institution, has the right to say what texts deserve to be taken seriously, how they are to be interpreted, and what qualities are worthy of admiration? In Karen Ferreira-Meyers’s chapter, the question of legitimacy has to do with genres, at which point the terms “major” and “minor” have nothing at all to do with quantity or size but are entirely, and strongly, evaluative: some genres are slightingly referred to as minor, while others are valorized very positively as major. Ferreira-Meyers is particularly interested in the legitimation process by which, either within a single culture or more globally, a genre can actually graduate from minor to major. As her two case studies she takes Lusophone and Anglophone crime fiction in Africa, and African and Francophone European autofiction (a type of writing in which autobiographical fact is strongly interwoven with fiction). Her conclusion is that genre legitimation has five distinguishable stages: (1) authors writing in the new genre become more independent and less subject to popular commercial demand; (2) they begin to aspire to a higher aesthetic value; (3) their audience expands and diversitifes; (4) the range of authors using the new genre becomes correspondingly more varied; and (5) there are specific instances of the genre’s recognition – as when journals, awards and conferences are devoted to it – along with critical approaches which explicitly take it into account and theorize it. The possibility that popular forms of entertainment may graduate to a high cultural status is also the theme of Sylvie André’s chapter. High literature, as she points out, was a notion or phenomenon linked with the development of the Western middle class during the nineteenth century. In the globalized world of the future, literature will in André’s view either vanish or fundamentally change. Present-day communication technology already provides forms of culture which are in effect world-wide: in particular, television series and video games, whose huge popular success may at first seem to be determined solely by the law of the marketplace. But this is where André raises some searching questions. Could it not be that these new forms of narrative have some specific features of their own? And in cases where the creation of new narratives is collaborative or even collective, might we not learn something from earlier scholars’ discussions of oral traditions? Might not digital culture even be able to produce works that are major, not only in terms of global spread, but in terms of quality as well? – a new World Literature, as it were.

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***** Part III of the book continues the literary discussions of Part II, taking up the same theoretical considerations, but with a more pronounced emphasis on their relevance to particular practices, traditions and writers. As a necessary focus of attention here, some chapters return to differences between major and minor languages. Manuel Brito’s chapter is a natural bridge from the one by Sylvie André in that he, too, is concerned with technologies and markets for the dissemination of cultural products. He offers a salutary reminder that, when a writer or a literary fashion achieves a global popularity, this is not just a matter of the quality of writing. Much really does depend on the available means of distribution and promotion. Brito is particularly interested in the role of small presses specializing in innovative poetry, previously considered as the most elitist kind of writing of all, but now in increasingly wide international circulation. Brito shows, in fact, that the small poetry presses have completely revolutionized both the university system and the market for books, reaching ever larger communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia (including New Zealand). And “communities”, he emphasizes, is exactly the right word here. Innovative poetry is no longer the preserve of particular “nations”. Its linguistic flexibility and formal experimentalism have deterritorialized national pride within an all-embracing cultural pluralism. Marta A. Skwara’s chapter, by contrast, is about a literature which has perhaps been unduly held back: Polish literature, which is so often regarded as a minor literature belonging to a larger literary region. More specifically, Skwara takes up cases in which Polish literature has been considered as one of the “Slavic Literatures” or one of the “East-Central European Literatures.” As she sees these groupings, they lack real substance, and are ideologically charged, viewing the literatures so grouped together as exponents of some “common mechanism” which is actually far less “common” than claimed. In Skwara’s view, the most fruitful approach is not to present particular European literatures from particular vantage points, but to study European literature as a whole, to which all European literatures can be said to contribute. One way for a literature to extend its reach is for its writers themselves to cross geographical boundaries. This is the topic of Leena Eilittä’s chapter. She begins, though, by going back to Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur as expressed in his journals, letters and essays. What emerges very clearly is Goethe’s hope that literary works would become less rooted in some single place, more cosmopolitan, more intercultural. Eilittä’s main suggestion is that this aspect of Goethe’s dream is now coming true in intercultural developments within the field of migrant literature. Writers such as Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin, Catalin Dorian Florescu and Radka

Introduction 9

Donnell, all of whom have moved from elsewhere to Switzerland, have brought with them unfamiliar social, psychological and literary perspectives in very much the way Goethe had desiderated. On the other hand, Eilittä also points out that the deracination which can make migrant writers so fascinating in their new homelands can be very painful and problematic. For the individual writer, globalization sometimes comes with a high personal price tag. If Goethe, longing for order and peace after all the violent chaos of the Napoleonic wars, failed to predict all the complexities and possible downsides of a global future, was he any more accurate in his view of the past, and in particular of the ancient civilization of China? According to Edward Said (1978), the answer must be negative here. Said portrayed Goethe as a prime example of a European “orientalism” which viewed the east through its own ideological spectacles. And although some scholars have found Said’s accusation less than fair, Yi Chen’s chapter here argues that Goethe, despite some good intentions, was guilty as charged. Through a detailed comparison of Goethe’s Chinesisches (his translations-cumcompositions of Chinese poems) with both the Chinese originals and the English translations that were his immediate source, Chen shows that his interest in “the East” and “the other” did not prevent him from writing a poetry firmly based on his own Enlightenment ideals and on classical Western models. Published in 1827, at the time when he was just beginning to formulate his concept of Weltliteratur, the Chinesiches suggest how hard it was often going to be for European champions of World Literature to neutralize their own authoritarianism. The penultimate chapter takes up many languages and literatures in a way that is representative of this volume as a whole. Without offering any premature answers, it also begins to redefine the question of major-ness and minor-ness in a rapidly globalizing world. Here Meenakshi Bharat is discussing some of the many languages and literatures of India. Her suggestion is that the terms “minor” and “major” can scarcely do justice to the Indian situation, unless they are allowed to carry several different senses. Echoing the point made by Magdi Youssef, she shows that, in addition to the difference between quantitative and qualitative considerations, a crucial role can also be played by factors which at first seem extraliterary. A literature may be major or minor partly because of geography, history, politics or economics, and a literature which in one location or scenario is major or minor may, in some other location or scenario, be the reverse. Multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic India is a veritable confluence of literatures, and in ways, we might add, which can attune us to complexities in the present-day world as a whole. So having placed Bharat’s account in relation to earlier chapters in this book, we may find ourselves wondering – like Glissant in his later years – whether a single but multilingual World Literature will ever be really possible. And

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if not, will there ever be a World Literature that is not the result of some kind of violent and/or ideological imposition? Not to mince words here, do the notions of “World Literature” and “World Lingua Franca” now need to be firmly relegated to an imperialist-cum-colonialist past? Or can they be rehabilitated in a practical and equitable way that fully endorses a politics of recognition? Read in this perspective, Bharat is especially suggestive in her comments on India’s multi-lingual Dalit literature, a literature of the underpriveleged and marginalized which nevertheless inserts its own minor-ness within the field of major-nesses, very much in the manner theorized by Guattari and Deleuze (1986). In effect, Dalit literature engages dominant major literature in a dialogue that is critical but also creative, so lending further support to Youssef ’s vision of a World Literature arising from numerous historically different Others. A somewhat similar way forward is hinted by the poetry of Seamus Heaney, as analysed in the book’s final chapter by Micéala Symington. Symington pinpoints cases where a dominant language and its culture and a minor language and its culture do indeed enter into rewarding synergies. She is interested in what happens when words and phrases in a minor language such as the Irish language are used in the middle of literary texts written in the lingua franca English. Discussing her examples from Heaney, she argues that, partly by cueing in a colonial-postcolonial dialectic, his bilingual practice redefines the context of writing, staking out an identity which, within the broad field of literature in English, has its own separateness, and which refuses more monolithic, homogenous identities by opening up a plurality of histories, not least the historical experience of being a “minority”. In Symington’s view, this vertical descent of Heaney’s poetry into the pre-history of Ireland actually frees it from the horizontal limitations of place. As a result, an Irish literary work predominantly written in English can be perceived, not only in terms of, or in relation to, English or British literature, or indeed in relation to European literature, but as part of a wider endeavour to be understood in a more fully human context. The references to “minorness”, by converting a monolithic vision into a plurality of divergent, sensuously relished pasts and presents, expand the literary paradigm. Here, then, as in some of this volume’s earlier chapters, minor can be seen as transmogrifying into major.

Introduction 11

References Auerbach, Edward. [1952] 1969. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Edward and Marie Said (trans.). The Centennial Review 13: 1–17. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The Modern World-System, vol. II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840’s. San Diego: Academic Press.

part i

Languages

chapter 1

The “minor language” perspective Östen Dahl

The Call for Papers for the FILLM Congress in Halden spoke of writers who use “‘minor’ languages” and “never receive any recognition beyond their immediate linguistic environment,” their literatures remaining invisible to the world. No doubt this statement holds for many languages, but what struck me was that it left out the large proportion of the world’s languages that either lack a written form altogether or have one that has virtually no practical use. Such languages do not necessarily lack a literature, however, but the literature they have is an oral one, and thus there are no “writers”. This is what has led me to offer an orientation on “minor languages” and their situation. My own perspective is that of someone who has done research mainly on language typology, defined as the systematic study of similarities and differences between languages, but also to some extent on descriptive linguistics, defined as the documentation of the structure of individual languages. In both these intimately connected research areas, the minor languages of the world play an important role, and for more than one reason. The first question to be asked about minor languages is what we mean when calling a language “minor”, since the criteria are not very clear. The notion of a “minor language” is essentially a negative one – it is a language which lacks the features qualifying a language as “major”. We should thus look at some ways of delimiting the class of major languages. The easiest criterion is probably the number of speakers, although one should keep in mind that the available statistics are often incomplete or unreliable. The Ethnologue database (Lewis 2013), whose ambition it is to catalogue all the world’s languages, currently lists 7,105 living languages. According to the statistical tables on the Ethnologue website, 393 of these have more than a million speakers. As noted on the website, these languages, which make up about 5.5% of the total number of languages in the world, account for approximately 94% of the world’s population. The remaining 94.5% of the languages are spoken by 6% of the world’s population. The average number of speakers among the world’s languages is about a million, but the median is much smaller  – somewhere around 10,000. This means that there are as many languages below as above that size. The figures in doi 10.1075/fillm.1.01dah © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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the Ethnologue are often only rough estimates and in some cases quite old, but the general picture is most certainly correct: a few languages are spoken by most people in the world, and most languages are spoken by a few people only. However, a language may have relatively many speakers and still be quite obscure. In fact, some of the languages identified in some sources as being in the very top group with respect to speaker numbers are not even officially recognized as languages. Thus, Ethnologue lists a language called “Wu” with 77 million speakers, but officially it is considered a cluster of Chinese dialects. (Wu varieties are spoken in and around Shanghai; the name “Shanghainese” is probably better known outside of China.) Historically, Ukrainian, which today has 36 million speakers, used to be regarded as a dialect of Russian. So when speaking of “major” and “minor” languages, what is meant is perhaps not so often how many speakers the languages have but rather their importance in the world, which is even harder to determine unequivocally. Here are two attempts to delimit the set of major languages: 1. One criterion would be whether a language has an official status in a political entity. The Wikipedia page “List of official languages” enumerates 119 languages under the heading “Official languages of sovereign countries.” A comparable number is listed as official regional or minority languages, but the list is said to be incomplete and partly overlaps with the first one. It can be estimated that no more than around 200 languages have official status in a political entity anywhere in the world. This would amount to around 3% of all languages. 2. The year 2009 saw the publication of the second edition of a book entitled The World’s Major Languages, edited by the well-known linguist Bernard Comrie (2009). The criteria for the choice of languages are here said to be “the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance.” For good reasons, the book keeps the delimitation of what counts as a major language a bit vague, but if we count the languages mentioned by name in the table of contents, their number is 44, which is as little as roughly 0.5% of the world’s languages. The 44 languages are, in the order of appearance: English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Greek, Sanskrit, HindiUrdu, Bengali, Persian, Pashto, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Burmese, Korean, MalayIndonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Yoruba, Swahili.



Chapter 1.  The “minor language” perspective

It appears safe to say that however we define “major” and “minor”, the overwhelming majority of the world’s languages will end up on the minor side. This impression is strengthened if we consider to what extent languages have written forms and how often these are used. There are no exact statistics as to how many written languages there are and there probably never could be, given the difficulties of defining a written language. Many languages have written forms invented by some linguist that have never been in practical use. One indirect way to get an idea of the number of languages with written forms is to look at the number of Bible translations. Owing to the diligent efforts of Christian missionaries, the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other text, and it seems safe to say that there will not be a large number of languages with a functioning written form that wholly lack a Bible translation. According to the United Bible Societies, in 2007 there was at least a partial translation into 2,454 languages. But the number of full translations is much smaller (438), and it is highly likely that in the majority of the languages with a full or partial Bible the written language is hardly used in non-religious contexts. It appears that the number of languages that can be claimed to have a fully functional written language is even smaller. One criterion for such a language might be the existence of a daily newspaper. No exact statistics seem to exist, but a qualified guess is that the number of languages in the world with daily newspapers is around one hundred – many countries in the world lack a newspaper in a local language. Another criterion would be the existence of a version of Wikipedia of significant size. Here, exact statistics are available on the Wikipedia website. In September 2012, there were 285 official language versions of Wikipedia, but most of these contain only a small number of articles. There were 116 languages with more than 10,000 articles, and 41 with more than 100,000 articles (the top language, English, has more than 4,000,000 articles). The first figure is about the same as the estimated number of languages with a daily newspaper, the second is very close to the number of languages in The World’s Major Languages, and indeed, the lists also overlap to a large extent, although about ten languages among the top Wikipedia versions are not mentioned in the table of contents of the book, notably Ukrainian, Catalan, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Slovenian, WarayWaray, and Estonian. If we take the intersection of the two lists, we arrive at the following set of “major languages”: English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian. There is also a noteworthy historical connection between “major languages” and writing. Writing systems developed independently in at least three regions of the world, the Middle East, China, and Mesoamerica – whether India should be

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added to this list is controversial. From these centres of development, the use of writing spread primarily over that part of the Old World located in the northern hemisphere. Figure 1 shows the approximate extent of what we can call the two “literate zones” around the year 1500, at the point when the European expansion was about to begin. I think this yields an interesting partitioning of the world as an alternative to the one where European or “Western” civilization is pitted against the rest. One striking fact is now that all the languages listed among the top Wikipedia languages and deemed worthy of inclusion in The World’s Major Languages trace their origins within the Old World literate zone. Furthermore, even if not all of them can be said to have had a fully functioning written form in 1500, they tend to go back on quite long literary traditions. The conclusion is that it takes a long time to become a major language, and that having a firm footing in a literate society is also important.

Figure 1.1  Approximate extent of the use of writing in 1500

Again, it seems that no matter how we define “major language”, it will exclude 95% of the languages in the world, which would then have to be seen as “minor”. However, I suspect that if one speaks of “minor languages” (as in the call for papers to the FILLM Congress), the languages of which people primarily think are actually “major” according to many of the criteria given above. Consider Estonian, for instance, which has a million speakers and would most certainly be seen as a “small” language by most people. But having a million speakers puts it among the top 5% with respect to the number of speakers. Furthermore, Estonian is the official language of a sovereign country and, somewhat surprisingly, boasts a Wikipedia version which ranks as number 41 in size. It is fairly clear that our view of the world’s languages is biased towards the top group, which perhaps is not so strange considering that most people in the world actually speak one of the top languages. To put these languages in perspective, however, it is worthwhile considering the languages at the other end of the



Chapter 1.  The “minor language” perspective

scale, or perhaps better stated, the lower half of the scale, viz. the approximately 3,500 languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers, the overwhelming majority of which lack official status and a functioning written form, but are still as important to their native speakers as the “major” languages are to theirs. One example of such a small language of which I happen to have some firsthand experience is Sirionó, a language belonging to the Tupían family spoken by a few hundred people in the province of Beni in Bolivia. Until well into the twentieth century, the Sirionó led a semi-nomadic existence as hunters-gatherers with limited cultivation of crops such as tobacco, cotton, wild cane, cassava and maize. For a long time, the Sirionó were not well-known to the outer world; they had the (possibly undeserved) reputation of being ferocious warriors. Attempts to “civilize” them were initially not very successful, but in the beginning of the twentieth century many Sirionó were working on haciendas in the region under slave-like conditions, and attempts were being made to “reduce” the Sirionó to various missions. Of these, only one would be successful in the long run – Ibiato, founded in 1932 by the American missionary Thomas Anderson, whose son Jack (“Juanito”) continued his project to transform the Sirionó into a Christian and sedentary society. Without the efforts of the Andersons, the Sirionó would most probably not have survived as a group with their own identity, even if a large part of their original culture was lost in the process and the missionary regime was no doubt a rather authoritarian one. Today, most members of the ethnic group live in the village of Ibiato and the more recent settlement of Pata de Aguila (Nguiray), about 60 km from Trinidad, the departmental capital. Sirionó is a heavily endangered language: Spanish has gradually grown stronger in the group, a large part of the younger generation no longer having an active knowledge of the ethnic language. The process of language shift seems to have started in the generation born in the 1970s. Contributing factors have probably been the closeness to the departmental capital, the abolition of bilingual teaching in 1982, and the increase in exogamy following the epidemics in the preceding decades, which decimated the population to an all-time low of 250. Where are the small languages of the world spoken? They are far from being evenly distributed over the globe. According to data in the Ethnologue, roughly half of the languages with less than 10,000 speakers are spoken in four countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia (primarily the Indonesian part of New Guinea and surrounding islands), Nigeria and Australia. Another fifth are spoken in Mexico, Brazil, the US, Cameroon and Vanuatu. With a few exceptions, the areas with concentrations of small languages are well outside of the “literate zones” as defined above. The small languages in Australia and the US are overwhelmingly spoken by a handful of elderly people and are thus on the verge of extinction.

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Why are these languages small? Once upon a time, all languages had small numbers of speakers. In hunter-gatherer societies, speech communities usually have (or had) no more than a couple of thousand members, often much fewer. This means that the number of languages in the world before the Neolithic revolution (about 10,000 years ago) was probably comparable to that of today, even if there were only a few million people living on Earth. Only one or two centuries ago the pre-Neolithic situation was still preserved in areas such as Australia, California, and the Kalahari desert in southern Africa. Larger speech communities appeared only after the introduction of agriculture and were particularly favoured by largescale political expansions such as the Roman empire, the spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the European colonial expansion after 1500. Are small languages structurally different from big ones? In the nineteenth century, it was almost axiomatic that “primitive peoples” had “primitive languages”. Later on, both concepts came under heavy criticism; in particular, linguists who studied the languages of pre-literate peoples found that they often had what seemed to be very complex grammars. As a reaction to earlier views, which were now found ethnocentric and downright racist, it became almost a dogma among linguists that there are no differences in complexity among languages, and that complexity in one area (e.g. morphology) is always balanced out by simplicity in another. Now this view is also being questioned. It is increasingly being acknowledged that there are differences in complexity in the structure of languages and that they are related to what can be called the ecology of a language, that is, the societal environment within which it is learnt and used. It is important to emphasize, however, that this does not entail a return to the old view of a positive correlation between cultural and linguistic development; in a way, it is rather the inverse picture, since it is the languages of small, pre-literate communities that seem to be most complex, at least in some important respects. In 2005, the first version of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) was published (now online as Dryer and Haspelmath 2013). WALS maps the distribution of a large number of grammatical, phonological and lexical features in the world’s languages, which has made it easier to draw statistical comparisons between the structures of different languages; recent investigations of linguistic complexity often build upon the material in WALS. It should be emphasized that making statistical generalizations about languages is a risky enterprise. 7,000 may seem a large number, but it should be kept in mind that there is reliable information only about a minority of the world’s languages. Furthermore, the numbers are often not large enough to sort out a bias due to common historical origin or areal convergence. Thus, for establishing the connection between linguistic features and the number of speakers of a given language, one difficulty is that there is a much higher percentage of small languages among the indigenous



Chapter 1.  The “minor language” perspective

languages of the New World (Australia, the Pacific and the Americas). But even so, certain tendencies are fairly well documented. Some differences between big and small languages that can be seen in the WALS data can be fairly clearly related to extralinguistic factors having to do with social structure. Thus, the existence of politeness distinctions in pronouns (such as that between tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German) seems to presuppose a hierarchical structure of a kind that is not found in hunter-gatherer (forager) and small-scale agricultural societies. As a result, such distinctions are virtually absent in Australia and the Americas – except in languages such as varieties of Nahuatl and Quechua, which are descendants of the languages of the Aztec and Inca states. Numerals are another example: “restricted numeral systems”, defined as systems in which counting beyond 20 is not possible, are exclusively found in Australia, Amazonia, New Guinea, and the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. This has a natural explanation in the lack of any need to express higher numbers in a preNeolithic society, but was in earlier times adduced as an example of the primitive cognitive abilities of those groups. Recently, the Amazonian language Pirahã has been claimed to lack numerals entirely, this being one of the more striking among the features which linguist Dan Everett says are unique to this language. A third, somewhat less obvious example from WALS is the lexical distinction between words for “finger” and “hand.” Languages that use the same word for these concepts are largely found in Australia, the Pacific, and the Americas, and predominantly in “groups who are not fully agrarian” (Brown 2013), that is, groups with a forager economy. Brown points to a possible explanation, viz. the less frequent use of finger rings among those groups. Other differences cannot very easily be explained in this way. In recent years, evidence has accumulated of statistically significant differences in the complexity of morphological systems, in particular as regards the inflections of words. The most comprehensive study to date, conducted by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale (2010), is based on an analysis of data from WALS and speaks of two different “niches” (or contexts) for languages, viz. esoteric and exoteric niches. Languages spoken in the esoteric niche have smaller populations, are spoken over smaller areas, and have fewer linguistic neighbours. Languages spoken in the exoteric niche have larger populations, are spoken over larger areas, and have more linguistic neighbours. Lupyan and Dale enumerate about fifteen features that can be shown to be more common among languages in the esoteric niche, most of them having to do with distinctions that are marked inflectionally – typically by prefixes and suffixes on nouns, adjectives and verbs. Thus, languages in the esoteric niche have more cases on nouns and more often mark subjects and objects on verbs, and also more often display such distinctions as that between recent and remote past

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tense on verbs and “alienable” and “inalienable” possession on nouns (in such a language, “my father” and “my knife” would be expressed differently). It should be emphasized that what we are speaking of here are tendencies rather than absolute differences. As already noted, the observation that small languages – which are largely spoken in pre-literate societies – are more likely to have complex morphological systems goes counter to the expectation that the complexity of a language would be positively correlated to the degree of cultural development as traditionally understood. What is then the explanation of these differences in complexity? A crucial role seems to be played by second-language learning by adults. Languages with large numbers of speakers are also those that have large proportions of secondlanguage speakers, who have acquired the language less than perfectly. If the language is passed on to the next generation via such speakers, it is “filtered” through their imperfect linguistic competence, which may lead to simplifications in the components of grammar that are less easily acquired by adults, such as inflectional morphology. Extreme cases of these processes are found in creole languages, which result from a situation where speakers of many different mother-tongues had to communicate in a language that was alien to them. But the issue of the relationship between linguistic complexity and the ecology of languages is itself a complex one. It has also been argued that there is a positive correlation between the size of the phonological system of a language and the size of the community that speaks it, which would appear to make small languages less complex than big ones. More research is needed here before we fully understand the processes involved, but it is clear that different kinds of complexity may well work in different ways. Today, the linguistic situation is changing very rapidly in many parts of the world. A large proportion of the “minor languages” that exist today are disappearing fast. This is true in particular of the small languages discussed here, but can also hit languages with fairly many speakers. In Europe, the numbers of speakers of Occitan in France and Low German in Germany and the Netherlands have been drastically reduced, whereas they used to have more than ten million speakers each. Language death is to a large extent a result of major changes in the ways in which people live – one should take into account the effects of urbanization, increased mobility, the introduction of universal education and mass media. Partly, it is also a result of active language policies and downright oppression of minorities. One factor is the refusal to acknowledge various varieties as “real languages”. Particularly in Europe, many small languages have disappeared before anyone even thought of regarding them as languages – they were just seen as “dialects”. This is still an ongoing process. In linguistics, the awareness of the situation has spread during the last two or three decades, and significant efforts and resources



Chapter 1.  The “minor language” perspective

are being spent on the documentation of endangered languages. In many places, there are active programs aimed at ensuring the survival of local languages. At a global level, UNESCO’s Endangered Languages Programme has as its aim to support communities, experts and governments in such efforts. Several NGOs have similar goals. The question that arises is if there are parallels within literature. The peoples who speak minor and/or small languages usually have rich literary traditions. The problem is precisely that these traditions are oral and are likely to disappear with the languages. It seems to me that in the same way as unwritten languages are not always recognized as “real languages”, oral literature more often than not suffers the fate of not being esteemed as “real literature”. Things may be changing also here, as witnessed, for instance, by the recent entry of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) into FILLM, and by international initiatives such as the World Oral Literature Project, based at the University of Cambridge. Another good sign is that UNESCO’s Convention 290 for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage covers both languages and literature. But much remains to be done, and it may be time for individual literary scholars to consider how they can contribute to the process.

References Brown, Cecil H. 2013. “Feature 130A: Finger and Hand.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, ed. by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin S. Haspelmath. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/feature/130A. Comrie, Bernard. 2009. The World’s Major Languages. London: Routledge. Dryer, Matthew S., and Martin S. Haspelmath (eds). 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info. Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds). 2013. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com. “List of Official Languages.” Wikipedia. 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_ languages Lupyan, Gary, and Rick Dale. 2010. “Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure.” PLoS ONE 5 (1): e8559. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008559. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559

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chapter 2

The language milieu of the Old Order Amish Preserving Pennsylvania Deitsch Johanna Jansson Introduction Maintaining a minority language has become increasingly difficult in today’s world. The reasons for abandoning the use of a language, often a minority language, in favour of a more dominant language, are numerous and varied. Often the pressures on minority speakers to shift to a dominant language are, for both practical and ideological reasons, overwhelming. In many minority language communities intergenerational transmission is no longer occurring naturally, and attitudes and feelings towards the minority language, among both dominant language speakers and minority speakers themselves, may be negative. In these situations the prospects for language maintenance and revitalization can seem discouragingly bleak, and we may well ask whether it lies in the power of any individual or group, however well-intentioned, to arrest the decline. My aim here is to offer an insight into successful language maintenance among a community which is facing considerable pressure from English and which, according to usually accepted criteria for language maintenance, should by now be seriously endangered if not extinct. What I shall provide is an overview of the linguistic situation of the Old Order Amish, based primarily on findings from an on-going ethnographic research project on language maintenance among an Old Order Amish community in Michigan. These findings I shall discuss in relation both to the linguistic context of the United States and to issues of language endangerment more generally.

The state of the world’s languages There are between 6,000 and 7,000 living languages in the world today (UNESCOa and Ethnologue), but between 50 and 90 per cent of these are predicted to be extinct by the year 2100 (Krauss 1992; Grenoble and Whaley 2001; Campbell 2007; Romaine 2007; UNESCOa). In the past, the causes of language endangerment doi 10.1075/fillm.1.02jan © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

26 Johanna Jansson

have included colonization, industrialization, and the rise of the nation-state. More recent causes include a shift from the use of traditional languages in favour of more dominant languages, urbanization, and strong sociopolitical pressures against the maintenance of minority and threatened languages (Mithun 1998; Grenoble and Whaley 2001; Romaine 2007). As pointed out by Grenoble and Whaley (2001), the socio-political pressures at work in the modern world and its economic system include educational policies, telecommunication technologies and media practices which in effect promote monolingualism. The sheer displacement of minority populations and the disruption of their cultural patterns can also lead to language decline. And young people in particular sometimes leave their minority communities in search of greater material prosperity. Even religion and literacy can have a negative impact on a language’s vitality and status. True, one of my main points here will be that in the case of the Old Order Amish (OOA) language maintenance has actually been assisted by religion. Yet missionary work certainly can threaten small languages, simply because missionaries often speak the dominant languages. Missionaries have actually been rather arbitrary in the way they have ranked various languages, sometimes engaging in an insensitive kind of language planning which works by marginalization. Particularly vulnerable here are oral languages, and literate languages with low literacy rates among speakers. One factor calling for special attention in this connection is globalization. As Fishman (2001) puts it, globalization is from some points of view a constructive and unifying tendency, but from others destructive, divisive, and anything but neutral. In Fishman’s view, the globalization of pan-Western culture is the main motor of language shift in today’s world, and since America-dominated globalization has become the major economic, technological and cultural thrust of worldwide modernization and Westernization, efforts to safeguard threatened languages (and, therefore, inevitably, weaker languages) must oppose the very strongest processes and powers that the world knows today. That, in a word, is exactly why it is so hard to save threatened languages.  (Fishman 2001: 6)

The status of the world’s languages is very unequal and the functions for which a language is used may tell us much about its vitality. Fewer than four per cent of the world’s languages have any kind of official status; only a small minority of dominant languages prevail as languages of education and government. The fact that most languages are unwritten, not officially recognized, restricted to local communal and domestic functions, and spoken only within small groups reflects the balance of power in the “global linguistic marketplace” (Romaine 2007: 122).



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

Languages usually have the standing that their speakers have. So if a people have power and prestige, the language they speak is that much more likely to enjoy high prestige as well. If a people have little power and low prestige, their language is less likely to be well regarded (Dorian 1998), and unlikely to have either pressure groups campaigning for its use or media resources for active language maintenance.

Reasons for concern All this raises two important questions. Why should we care? And why is language maintenance important? It is frequently observed that in the world as a whole bilingualism and multilingualism are more common than monolingualism, and that there are probably far more bilingual and multilingual speakers than monolingual speakers (cf. Crystal 1987; Baker and Prys-Jones 1998; Hamers and Blanc 2000; Dewaele et al. 2003). Yet monolingual speakers of a dominant language such as English often assume that monolingualism is the norm (Edwards 1994). The plain fact is that, for many people, using more than one language is simply an everyday reality, and that this can also be a matter of personal and group identity, not least when one of the languages they use is a “small” and threatened language. This helps to explain why UNESCO has prioritized the safeguarding of the world’s linguistic diversity, and of the cultural heritage that is found in languages. Indeed, endangered languages are now acknowledged as one of humanity’s major challenges, raising issues that are both moral, practical, and scientific (Campbell 2007; UNESCOb). The arguments for safeguarding them are not merely sentimental or romantic. Some of the more cogent are: 1. Ethical / human rights. It should be every person’s right to use their own language, and language loss is often not voluntary. 2. Humanistic considerations. As Campbell (2007: 8) argues: “the life-enriching value of literature is no less true of the oral literatures of indigenous peoples – they, too, have grappled with the complexities of the world and problems of life, and their insights represented in their literatures are of no less value to us all.” 3. Historical reasons. Many aspects of history are recoverable from language, all of which are lost when a language becomes extinct without adequate documentation.

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4. Scientific concerns. Loss of linguistic diversity means a loss in the range of potential ways of experiencing and understanding the world, since languages contain and give expression to the world’s accumulated knowledge. When a language is not transmitted to the next generation, the knowledge of the natural and cultural world encoded in the language may also fail to be transmitted (Campbell 2007). In this sense, it could be argued that linguistic diversity contributes to humankind’s very survival: “reduction of the language diversity diminishes the adaptive strength of the human species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw” (Campbell 2007: 9; see also Hale 1998; Romaine 2007). For linguists who want to understand “human cognition and the limits of human language capacity through the study of what is possible and impossible in human languages” the extinction of a language is “an unspeakable disaster” (Campbell 2007: 10). Further elaborating this last point, Fishman (2001) observes that a considerable part of every ethnoculture is indeed linguistically expressed. So much so, that most ethnocultural behaviours would be impossible without these expressions via the particular language with which they have traditionally been associated. For its associated culture, such a language is more than just a tool of communication. It is often viewed as a gift, an identity marker, and a specific responsibility that people have towards future generations. As Romaine (2007) notes, the preservation of a language in its full richness ultimately entails the maintenance of the group who speak it. In the last analysis, arguments for action to save minority languages and reverse the trend to language death are about preserving and maintaining cultures and habitats.

The language context of the United States Despite an appearance of linguistic uniformity, the United States has always been linguistically diverse. True, almost everyone speaks English. But a large portion of the population has some other language as their first language, or is bilingual. This diversity is due partly to immigration, and partly to land purchases and annexation. All this needs to be understood in more detail if we are to grasp the situation of the country’s minority languages. Language in the United States is the topic of a number of widespread myths: that the official language of the country is English; that today’s immigrants are not learning English as quickly as before; that language diversity is a recent problem due to unprecedented levels of immigration; and that the different languages spoken in the country threaten its national unity (Potowski 2010; see also Ferguson and Heath 1981).



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

In point of fact, the United States does not have an official language; even though 80 per cent of Americans speak English as their native, and only language (US Census Bureau 2011), there is no law or constitutional amendment establishing a national language. Wiley (2010) explains that English achieved sufficient status to become the dominant language during the British colonial period, and that at the time of the founding of the republic the country had no need for an official language. Even though the founders respected linguistic diversity and minority rights, a tolerance which partly reflected a reluctance to offend minorities who had supported the revolutionary cause, English has always functioned as if it were the official language (Wiley 2004, 2010). In effect, the United States has a monolingual English ideology (Wiley 2004) and a “monolingual linguistic culture” that “supports the use of English to the exclusion of almost all other languages, so that an explicit policy that would officialize English is not necessary, and probably never will be” (Schiffman 2005: 121). Even so, Wiley (2010) argues that the country needs a comprehensive language policy, which would be based on the demographic reality of multilingualism, and which would acknowledge the value of promoting not only English but languages in general. According to Potowski (2010), US immigrants and their descendants do learn English, and they learn it quickly; overall they speak English “well” or “very well”. This has been the pattern for most immigrants in the past as well, and research has shown that immigrant communities typically shift completely to English within three generations. An older generation may be largely monolingual and fail to acquire good English, whereas the youngest generation tends to become monolingual in English (Romaine 2010). This supports the idea of the United States as a “linguistic graveyard” (Rumbaut, Massey and Bean 2006: 458) in which, for a variety of reasons, immigrants abandon their native languages: peer pressure; lack of opportunity to use the language; fear that it will affect their ability to learn English or to get ahead in American society; shame at being different and attracting negative reactions from others. Yet loss of a native language can itself have serious consequences: feelings of linguistic insecurity; loss of identity; and a weakening of home and family ties – especially in cases where parents and children no longer communicate easily with one another, so hindering the transmission of family and ethnic values (Potowski 2010). The geographical area that is today the United States has always been ethnolinguistically diverse, and technically all the languages apart from those spoken by indigenous Native Americans are immigrant languages. Claims that there is now an unprecedented proportion of new immigrants, and consequently an unprecedented linguistic diversity, do not bear close historical scrutiny, since the proportion of immigrants in the country today is actually smaller than in the past (Potowski 2010). Also, even though census data show that there are more than

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300 different languages spoken in the United States (US Census Bureau 2011), this diversity does not automatically lead to political problems. Fishman (1991a) found that linguistic diversity failed to correlate with either civil strife or a decline in gross national product,1 and that a multilingual society does not necessarily result in a divided society. True, in practice the country’s large-scale immigration, together with enduring ethnolinguistic stratification and inequality, has certainly fueled US language policy conflicts, even giving rise to Anglo-American anxieties that English itself is threatened, along with national unity and identity (Schmidt 2000; Wiley 2004; Potowski 2010). As Wiley (2004) argues, such fears have become even more outlandish than when Benjamin Franklin voiced them two decades before the founding of the republic. But today they are still fuelling lobby and advocacy groups such as US English and English-Only (Wiley 2004; Crawford 2006), and are leading to shifts in educational terminology as well. As part of the “No-Child-LeftBehind Program” of 2002, The Bilingual Education Act was retitled The English Language Acquisition Act, and the Federal Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs was renamed the Office of English Language Acquisition. As Potowski concludes, “‘bilingual’ has become almost a dirty word in educational circles, with more and more pressure to shift children to all-English classrooms as soon as possible” (Potowski 2010: 14). Potowski also notes that the real threat to national unity and peace between neighbours lies in the way that immigrants and minority language groups are bullied. Yet counter-forces have begun to emerge which challenge the country’s prevailing monolingual ideology. Wider criticism of English-Only policies has come from leaders of ethnic and immigrant groups, from ethnic-rights, minority-rights and immigrant-rights groups, and from many professional educational organizations. Some national groups, for example the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages, as well as city-based efforts like those in San Bernadino, California and Chicago, have gone public with their appreciation of such cities’ multilingual character, and are aiming to promote among immigrant children both the learning of English and the maintenance of heritage languages (Wiley 2004; Potowski 2010). This goal of English acquisition together with heritage language maintenance has been referred to as English Plus (cf. Wiley 2004; Crawford 2006). Now of the more than 300 languages spoken in the country, all but English are minority languages, and 21 per cent of the population (c. 61 million people) speak a “language other than English” (LOTE) at home. The minority languages are divided into four major language groups: Spanish; other Indo-European languages; Asian and 1. Levels of civil strife and productivity were both tied up with deprivation, strong power relations, modernization, and industrialization.



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

Pacific Island languages; all other languages. The majority (62 per cent, c. 38 million people) of all LOTE speakers are Spanish-speaking (US Census Bureau 2011). As I say, the geographical area that is today the United States has always been ethnolinguistically diverse. Early settlers included English-, French-, Spanish- and German-speaking people, not to mention the 300-plus Native American languages that were already being spoken. So in colonial Pennsylvania, German-speaking immigrants made up one third of the population, had their own German-language newspapers, conducted their businesses in German, educated their children in German, and drew up legal contracts in German (Potowski 2010). To take analogous examples: the US Articles of Confederation were printed in both English and German; Louisiana’s Constitution of 1845 established that the state legislature would conduct business in both English and French; Spanish, having been spoken in California from the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1540s right up until the first Anglo-settlers began to annex their homelands in the 1820s, was recognized in the 1849 Constitution of California, which stipulated that all laws, decrees, and regulations be published in both English and Spanish – by 1880 press publications in German, Yiddish, Spanish, Czech, Polish and Italian were also common; and the 1876 Constitution of Colorado was printed in English, Spanish and French (Potowski 2010). The fate of German in the United States has sometimes been cited as the major proof of the “inevitability of language shift” (Wiley 2010: 261). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the use and maintenance of German was flourishing, even though German speakers were rapidly acquiring English. There was a steady supply of immigrants, German was widely used in churches and schools, and there were German newspapers. Nineteenth-century German newcomers themselves were very consciously interested in questions of ethnicity and language maintenance – in which connection the word Schmelztiegel was first used in 1857, long before its English equivalent (melting pot) – and there were those who dreamed of creating areas where the German language and the associated way of life would be preserved (Ludanyi 2010). With the entry of the United States into the Great War against Germany, however, the German language, and indeed all things German, became exposed to widespread xenophobic disapproval, from which, given further stigmatization during the Second World War, they have never recovered (Wiley 2010; Ludanyi 2010). All the same, two groups of immigrants who spoke variants of German were able to create lasting social and linguistic communities: the Yiddish-speaking communities centered mostly in New York, and the German-speaking Anabaptist groups, i.e. the Amish, the Mennonites and the Hutterites. As Ludanyi (2010: 161) remarks, “The stability of German dialects in the Amish, Hutterite and Mennonite communities over a period of centuries represents the greatest area of success in

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language maintenance in the United States, and there is no sign that this situation will discontinue in the near future”.

Pennsylvania Deitsch German presence in the United States dates back to colonial times. In 1608 German craftsmen helped create the first American settlement in Jamestown, and in 1683 thirteen families of Mennonites and Quakers arrived in Pennsylvania and created Germantown, the first German settlement in the United States (Ludanyi 2010). A few hundred Amish people subsequently arrived in two distinct waves (1736–1770, 1815–1860) which coincided with major movements of some 70,000– 81,000 German-speaking Europeans to North America (Louden 2006; Nolt and Meyers 2007; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013). The descendants of German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania are called Pennsylvania Germans (Huffines 1980). The Amish immigrants brought their distinct religious convictions and traditions to the New World, but also shared many folkways with other Pennsylvania Germans, as well as a German dialect that came to be known as “Pennsylvania Deitsch” (PD),2 or commonly “Pennsylvania Dutch”. Despite being commonly called Pennsylvania Dutch, PD has nothing to do with the Dutch language of the Netherlands, and the term “Dutch” is often thought to be a historical misinterpretation of the word Deutsch. As noted by Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt (2013), however, in the eighteenth century the word Dutch was (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) the proper English word for people and places in the Rhine Valley. So English sources of that period spoke of Dutch immigrants, whereas later sources spoke of Germans. The way eighteenth-century English sources described residents of the Netherlands was as Holland Dutch or Low Dutch (Louden 2006). Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt (2013: 38) explain that PD “was a product of immigration and resettlement as arrivals from various parts of Germany mixed their speech-ways in North America and produced a dialect that was not precisely the same as anything spoken in Europe”.3 Buffington (1939, cited in Hostetler 1993 2. Some also call it “Pennsylvania German”. 3. Whether PD is a German “dialect” or a separate language can be debated. Here I sometimes refer to it as a dialect, but on the whole I tend to see it as a language, so following Louden (2006). It is after all socially and geographically autonomous, as well as structurally distant from European varieties of German, just as Yiddish is. And its speakers “have formed a sociolinguistic identity independent of any association with German speakers in Europe or elsewhere” (Louden 2006: 92).



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

[1963]: 242) argued that it was not, as earlier thought (Louden 2006), “garbled English” or “corrupted German” but a distinct dialect of the German language; contrary to a common belief, only about 15 per cent or less of the PD vocabulary is English derived, and its core grammatical structures remain Palatinate German (Louden 2006; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013). Throughout the nineteenth century, PD was the linguistic variety of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, and of non-religious Pennsylvania Germans as well, collectively referred to as “nonsectarians” (Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013). So there have been, and may still be, PD speakers in North America who are not Anabaptist,4 even if it is among the Old Order Amish and some Old Order Mennonites that PD is mainly still used today.5 In fact of the original PD speakers in the United States, less than four percent were “sectarians” belonging to Anabaptist and Pietist groups, even if by the year 2030 the Amish will probably be the only speakers of PD (Louden 2006). During the formation of PD, Pennsylvania Germans of all confessions lived in close proximity of one another, but by the early nineteenth century sectarian and nonsectarian Pennsylvania Germans were concentrated in separate areas, and contact between the two groups became limited. Then, as the Amish moved from Pennsylvania to other states, the language spread, and in time developed its own features specific to each part of North America. Whereas, while the Amish had been in Pennsylvania they had shared the dialect with other Pennsylvania Germans, when they resettled outside PD’s region of origin they ended up as the only local speakers of PD (Nolt and Meyers 2007). PD, having once been a uniting factor, could thus become a symbol that sets its speakers apart. As noted by Hurst and McConnell (2010: 15), “[p]erhaps the most powerful symbol of the cultural distinctiveness of the Amish is the use of Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deitsch, one of a handful of minority languages in the United States that is neither endangered nor supported by continual arrivals of immigrants”. The other such languages are American Sign Language, Romani, Yiddish, and Hutterite German. And in every case, language maintenance is due to specific sociolinguistic factors that are rooted in a unique social or socio-religious identity. American Sign Language and Romani are the distinctive media of Deaf and Roma cultures, while Yiddish, Hutterite German and PD are associated with conservative religious communities who distance themselves from the rest of American society: the ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidim), the Hutterites, the Old Order Mennonites, and the Old Order Amish (Louden 2006).

4. Worldwide, the congregants in Anabaptist-related churches speak at least 75 different languages (Kraybill 2010). 5. See also Stolberg (forthcoming 2015).

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Traditionally, the Amish have been viewed as trilinguals, in PD, English and High German: they use PD as their mother tongue; they use English for communication with the wider society, for all written communication, and also as the language of instruction in schools; and as their liturgical language they use an older form of High German, which is archaic in German-speaking Europe and sometimes referred to as Amish High German, so leading to terminological confusion (Huffines 1994). Speakers perceive “High German” as meaning the “correct” form of the language; thus for them “Low German” logically refers to dialects or forms of the language perceived as corrupt. The fact that PD is itself a “high” (i.e. southern) German dialect is simply not understood. To complicate the picture still further, there is also a small minority of so-called Swiss Amish, who speak a form of Bernese Swiss German, and these two dialects, i.e. Palatinate PD and Swiss German, are so different that their speakers can often communicate with each other only by switching to English.6 It is difficult to give exact numbers of PD speakers, because not all OOA agree to be counted. Kraybill (2010) offers a total number of PD speakers (adult and children) of about 256,000 as of 2010. This estimate is a conservative one, he says, because it only includes people affiliated with a group that uses German or PD or both languages in church services, so excluding speakers whose churches now use English in their services but who may still speak some PD at home. The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (2014a) estimates that in 2013 the total Amish population was almost 282,000. Since this number includes only horse-and-buggy Amish, it represents the conservative branches of the Amish, who in turn are fluent in both PD and English, but it does not include those Old Order Mennonites who use the language on a daily basis. There may also be ex-OOA who still use PD, plus descendants of other Pennsylvania Germans who may also know the language to some extent. In other words, the total number of PD speakers could be more than 300,000. Be that as it may, one statistic is truly thought-provoking: during the 21-year period from 1992 to 2013, the Amish of North America (adults and children) more than doubled in population, increasing from an estimated 128,000 in 1992 to 282,000 in 2013, a net gain of 154,000 and an overall growth rate of 120 per cent (The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College 2014b). If I may underline the point: the number of PD speakers is growing, and very rapidly. Given that today as many as 80–90 per cent of the OOA youth stay in the OOA church, Louden (2006) estimates that by the end of the present century PD speakers could well number over a million.

6. For more information on the Swiss Amish see e.g. Nolt and Meyers 2005, 2007.



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

Old Order Amish language use and language maintenance The OOA live in a “naturally bilingual ecology” (Louden 2006: 94), where they are fluent in PD and English, and have a passive knowledge of High German. As already noted, each of these three languages has its own domains, both formal and informal, as well as roles and functions. PD is the mother tongue and the dominant language of the home and community. Although certain texts such as the New Testament have been produced in PD, the language lacks a single standard for spelling and grammar and as a result is seldom written. Nor is it ever taught or read in school. Its use is considered to symbolize Amish separation from the world; it is the language of their heritage, of valued tradition, setting them apart from the English7 and mainstream society (Huffines 1994; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013). The Amish learn English as a second language in school; when entering school Amish children usually know only a few words and phrases in English. English is the exclusive medium of instruction in the Amish schools. The Amish value the English language as well, because without knowledge of English it is impossible to survive in the world they live in, but they feel that it should not be used in PD domains: to use English in prayers or religious services is considered worldly. English is the medium of communication with the outside world, with which the Amish are in regular contact, for instance through neighbours, co-workers and customers in their businesses. In fact the Amish are very sensitive towards non-PD speakers, never hesitating to switch to English for the outsider’s benefit. Practically all writing is done in English, from grocery lists to letters, and most reading, except for key religious documents, is done in English as well. Interestingly, many business owners develop an extensive English vocabulary related to their line of work, but may stumble when trying to discuss something else in English (Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013). High German is used for preaching during church services, on formal ceremonial occasions, and when reading the Bible or stories from the Martyrs Mirror. The Amish do not converse in High German, although the ordained must be able to preach from and quote the High German Bible, a version of the original Lutheran translation.8 Prayers and hymns, for example the hymns from the Ausbund, are also in High German, which is taught in schools from the third grade onwards with the goal of understanding both written and spoken texts. This

7. “The English” is the term the Amish themselves use for outsiders. 8. Many appear to see the Luther Bible as more conducive to religious life than the English version and some feel the Luther Bible is more accurate (Johnson-Weiner 1998).

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means that High German can serve the community as a special language mainly for liturgical purposes. What is clear from all this, then, is that, for the OOA, PD is the preferred language for intragroup settings. It is the daily decision to use PD that has enabled the language to survive in America, a language choice which is supported by a set of favourable factors which I shall now try to indicate, with examples from my on-going ethnographic study of language maintenance in an OOA community in Mapleville, Michigan, with special emphasis on the experiences of an OOA family, the Yoders.9 The main reasons for the maintenance and survival of PD can be summarized as: the strength of community traditions, the significance of the language as an identity marker, the persistence of farming as a way of life, the tendency of the OOA to interact in dense and multiplex networks (Milroy 1987 [1980]), and successful intergenerational transfer. The Yoders say that “being Amish is all about tradition”, and that it is good to keep traditions. Traditions for the OOA include the traditional way of life, with horse and buggy, the old-fashioned attire, the absence of technology, and their own schools. Their motto is to “do as our forefathers did” and “stick to our guns”. To this they also link the use of PD: “language [is] not most important, but goes together with belief, way of life, and schools”, as Amanda Yoder puts it. Daniel Yoder says that PD is “a finger of the hand – it’s not the top of everything but it goes together with helping others, having no electricity and no cars, and with having our school”. Cultural identity, being OOA, goes side by side with language identity, using PD and High German. The OOA form an “archipelago” of speech islands (Louden 2006: 105) in 30 states and one Canadian province (The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College 2014a). This, however, does not mean that they live in social or geographical isolation from the English speaking world, but that they live close to other OOA families, and form church districts among their English neighbours. They also form extremely dense and multiplex networks, in which everybody knows everybody, and most often in more ways than one. For example, the ordained have paid professions as well; your sister may also be your teacher; your father may be your boss. Compared to communities in for instance Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, the Mapleville community is a small one, with some 70 families – in one of the three schools there were 25 students of whom 23 were related to one another.10 The OOA have limited social 9. The informants in the Yoder family are Mollie (b. 1926), Daniel (b. 1950), Amanda (b. 1976) and Jared (b. 2001). The Mapleville community has three church districts: the Yoders belong to the West church. All the names I am using here, including that of Mapleville, are fictive. 10. Numbers from October 2012.



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

and geographical mobility, but they do sometimes move to other communities or move away to found a new community.11 So the notion of “tradition” should not be taken to imply a total fixity or rootedness in one place. And when new members move into an already established community they adopt their new community’s way of doing things and way of speaking, which means that there is only a limited influx of new linguistic influences into OOA communities. Daniel Yoder notes that farming has helped maintain PD: the fact that the majority of Amish men were for many years able to continue as farmers meant that they could stay at home and were not exposed to the English world. Today this has changed to some extent: fewer families are solely farming families because farm land is getting scarce and expensive, so that Amish men have to look for work outside the home. But the relevance of farming for language maintenance is particularly visible in the Yoders’ church, whose bishop and teachers point out that the children in the West church school use more English, and know more English when they start school, than the children in the two other schools. This they say is because the other two churches have more members who are farmers – the West church has only one farming household out of a total of 32, whereas the other two churches have nine and eight farms out of 21 and 18 households respectively.12 The bishop says that farmers’ children are more sheltered, and have less interaction with the English world. For a language to survive, intergenerational transfer must occur (cf. Fishman 1991b; Pauwels 2004). “It is important that parents teach and push for the use of PD”, Daniel Yoder says, and adds that his own family is very precise about this. He does not like English being used in exchanges with other Amish, and stresses the special importance of maintaining the use of PD in the family: it is “important to keep the mother tongue, mudda sproch”, he says, and especially important that mothers use PD because they are at home with the children. During many visits to this community, I have noticed that small children do not understand English, or if they do, their English skills are very limited. Even so, the Yoders, together with the bishop and the teachers, all note that children today know more English when they start school than used to be the case. Mollie Yoder points out that, when she was a child, and when her own children were small, it was still possible to keep secrets from children by speaking English. Nowadays this is not always the case: “children know much more English than they used to do some decades ago”, she says.

11. The Yoders have been highly mobile: they have lived in several communities in Delaware, in Ohio, in Ontario, Canada, and in two different communities in Michigan. 12. Numbers from October 2012.

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Discussion and conclusion The reasons for successful language maintenance in OOA society have been described above, and they include a traditional way of life with dense and multiplex networks, PD as a symbol of in-group identity, and above all intergenerational transfer. Louden (2006) remarks that while social conservatism and separateness are clearly important factors in the OOA and PD setting, we must note that the OOA have no need for overt efforts to promote or preserve the language. With no special government support or curricular activities, children grow up naturally as fully bilingual. And although the OOA are used to a regulated way of life, where for most aspects of life each community has its own set of rules decreed in the Ordnung, the Ordnung does not include rules about language use, and there is no “language police” or other authority which would punish members for using the “wrong” language in a certain situation or domain. Language use and maintenance is an unconscious thing, and choices are made intuitively. The OOA are well aware that an Amish person who starts using English in PD domains may soon adopt an English way of life. Likewise, among those who choose not to become baptized, or who leave the church as adults, the shift to English monolingualism is often quite rapid. The informants in my research project have confirmed this, pointing out that some non-Amish family members no longer use PD, while others are very specific in their use of PD with their grandmother (Mollie Yoder), for instance. Louden (2006) also comments that most sectarians, though not particularly anxious about English encroachment, “would strongly endorse the importance of maintaining PD and High German as a tangible expression of commitment to their Christian heritage” (2006: 97). Through my interviews I have discovered that many OOA do eventually become actively concerned about the risk of English encroachment, and admit that language maintenance should perhaps be a more conscious issue for them. My informants have explained that, for them, one language is not better than another, but that there is nevertheless an appropriate language for every situation. Domain allocation is clearly important for them. But what outsiders think about their lifestyle and speech-ways is of no interest at all. After all, their forefathers, too, were misunderstood, and were even persecuted for their beliefs and way of life. What I have tried to show, then, is that the linguistic diversity of the world today is for a number of different reasons endangered. I have also explained that the United States is a linguistically diverse country, but that the overwhelming dominance of the English language and culture has led to a critical decline in the use of languages other than English. On the other hand, there is a handful of minority languages that not only persist but even prosper transgenerationally



Chapter 2.  The language milieu of the Old Order Amish

without the support of new immigrants. PD, which emerged in eighteenth-century colonial Pennsylvania, is one of these languages. For reasons which I have tried to spell out, the OOA, who today form the majority of PD speakers, show a remarkable strength in their way of life and language choice, despite all the pressure from the English language and mainstream culture. In the words of Mollie Yoder, “it’s how we’ve always done things”.

References Baker, Colin and Sylvia Prys-Jones. 1998. Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Campbell, Lyle. 2007. “What is Gained in Endangered Language Documentation?” Guest lecture at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 19.11.2007. PowerPoint slide show. Crawford, James. 2006. Official English Legislation: Bad for Civil Rights, Bad for America’s Interests, and Even Bad for English – Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Education Reform. http://www.elladvocates.org/documents/englishonly/Crawford_Official_English_ testimony.pdf. Retrieved 21.3.2014. Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge encyclopaedia of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewaele, Jean-Marc, Alex Housen, and Li Wei (eds). 2003. Bilingualism: Beyond basic Principles. Festschrift in Honour of Hugo Baetens Beardsmore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dorian, Nancy. 1998. “Western Language Ideologies and Small-language Prospects.” In Endangered Languages. Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. by Lenore A. Grenoble and ­Lindsay J. Whaley, 3–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, John. 1994. Multilingualism. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203430927 Ethnologue. http://www.ethnologue.com/. Retrieved 21.3.2014. Ferguson, Charles A., and Shirley Brice Heath. 1981. “Introduction”. In Languages in the USA, ed. by Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, xxv–xxxviii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, Joshua. 1991a. “An Inter-polity Perspective on the Relationships between Linguistic Heterogeneity, Civil Strife, and per capita Gross National Product.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 1 (1): 5–18. DOI: 10.1111/j.1473-4192.1991.tb00002.x Fishman, Joshua. 1991b. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, Joshua. 2001. Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Grenoble, Lenore A., and Lindsay J. Whaley. 2001. “Endangered Languages.” In Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics ed. by Rajend Mesthrie, 465–467. Oxford: Elsevier. Hale, Ken. 1998. “On Endangered Languages and the Importance of Linguistic Diversity”. In Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, 193–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamers, Josiane F., and Michel H. A. Blanc. (1989)2000. Bilinguality and Bilingualism. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hostetler, John. 1993 [1963]. Amish Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Huffines, Marion Lois. 1980. “Pennsylvania German: Maintenance and Shift.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 25: 43–57. Huffines, Marion Lois. 1994. “Amish Languages.” In Old and New World Anabaptists Studies on the Language, Culture, Society and Health of the Amish and Mennonites. Internal and External Perspectives on Amish and Mennonite Life #4 ed. by James R. Dow, Werner Enninger, and Joachim Raith, 21–32. Essen: University Printshop. Hurst, Charles E., and David L. McConnell. 2010. An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Community. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson-Weiner, Karen. 1998. “Community Identity and Language Change in North American Anabaptist Communities.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 2 (3): 375–394. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9481.00051 Krauss, Michael. 1992. “The World’s Languages in Crisis.” Language 68: 4–10. DOI: 10.1353/lan.1992.0075 Kraybill, Donald B. 2010. Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kraybill, Donald B., Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt. 2013. The Amish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Louden, Mark L. 2006. “Pennsylvania German in the 21st Century.” In Sprachinselwelten – The World of Languages, ed. by Nina Berend and Elisabeth Knipf-Komlósi, 89–107. Bern: Peter Lang. Ludanyi, Renate. 2010. “German in the USA.” In Language Diversity in the USA ed. by Kim Potowski, 146–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779855.010 Milroy, Lesley. 1987[1980]. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Mithun, Marianne. 1998. “The Significance of Diversity in Language Endangerment and Preservation.” In Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, 163–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolt, Stephen M., and Thomas J. Meyers. 2005. An Amish Patchwork: Indiana’s Old Orders in the Modern World. Bloomington: Quarry Books, Indiana University Press. Nolt, Stephen M., and Thomas J. Meyers. 2007. Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pauwels, Anne. 2004. “Language Maintenance.” In Handbook of Applied Linguistics, ed. by Alan Davies and Catherine Elder, 719–737. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9780470757000.ch29 Potowski, Kim. 2010. “Language Diversity in the USA: Dispelling Common Myths and Appreciating Advantages.” In Language Diversity in the USA, ed. by Kim Potowski, 1–24. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779855.002 Romaine, Suzanne. 2007. “Preserving Endangered Languages.” Language and Linguistics Compass 1: 115–132. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00004.x Romaine, Suzanne. 2010. “Language Contact in the USA.” In Language Diversity in the USA, ed. by Kim Potowski, 25–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779855.003 Rumbaut, Rubén G., Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean. 2006. “Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California.” Population and Development Review 32: 447–460. DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00132.x



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Schiffman, Harold. 2005. “Language Policy and Linguistic Culture.” In An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, ed. by Thomas Ricento, 111–124. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schmidt Sr., Ronald. 2000. Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Stolberg, Doris. forthcoming. 2015. Changes Between the Lines - Diachronic Contact Phenomena in Written Pennsylvania German. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton UNESCOa. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/. Retrieved 21.4.2014. UNESCOb. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/linguisticdiversity-in-unesco-normative-texts/ Retrieved 21.4.2014. US Census Bureau. 2011. “Language Use in the United States: 2011”. https://www.census.gov/ prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf. Retrieved 15.4.2014. Wiley, Terrence G. 2004. “Language Planning, Language Policy, and the English-only Movement.” In Language in the USA. Themes for the Twenty-first Century, ed. by Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford, 319–338. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511809880.019 Wiley, Terrence G. 2010. “Language Policy in the USA.” In Language Diversity in the USA, ed. by Kim Potowski, 255–271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779855.017 Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. 2014a. “Amish Population Trends 2008–2013, 5-Year Highlights.” http://www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/ Population_Trends_2008_2013.asp. Retrieved 17.3.2014 Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. 2014b. “Amish Population Trends 1992–2013, 21-Year Highlights.” http://www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/Population_Trends_1992_2013.asp. Retrieved 17.3.2014.

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English – The Last Lingua Franca?* Nicholas Ostler

Although The Last Lingua Franca is the title of my most recent book, it has only now occurred to me that the word last makes it ambiguous. Am I referring to English as just the latest lingua franca to date, or am I making the much stronger claim that English is the final lingua franca? Is last here the converse of next, or of first? This double entendre is relatively late in establishing itself in English: before the Norman conquest, certainly, I should have had to have made up my mind between ġingest (i.e. youngest, most recent) and æftermost (final). This made me wonder how widespread this ambiguity of last is in the languages of the world. Although I am reputed by one of my publishers to enjoy “functional command” of 26 languages – a claim whose credibility I shall leave to the judgement of my audience – this was a question I felt incapable of answering without some external check. So I turned to Google Translate, which at the moment allows interchange of 71 tongues. Looking at the results of translating “Last week I read about the last days of the Roman Empire” (with correction where I felt I could do better than the automaton – notably in the case of Latin), I discovered that only 12 out of the 71 show this ambiguity, just 16.9%. (Specifically, the languages with ambiguous last are: Basque, Danish, English, Esperanto, Filipino, French, German, Gujarati, Icelandic, Lao, Tamil, Yiddish – about which list one can make few generalizations, except that two thirds of them are of western European origin, and five of them Germanic.) Clearly, then, I owe my audience some more clarity in interpreting this title, and by the end of this chapter I promise to make good on this. In the meantime, however, it is interesting to examine the claim from either side. If last is interpreted as latest, it draws attention to the recency of the dominance of English. Its reign was inaugurated in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended * Most of the details in this chapter are discussed at greater length, and with explicit reference to sources, in my book The Last Lingua Franca (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011). The details on trends in the global production of scientific papers, and citations of them, are derived from Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century (London: The Royal Society, 2011). doi 10.1075/fillm.1.03ost © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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the First World War in 1919. In this the English text was given (by American request) equal validity with the French. So English as a lingua franca for the world has hardly even completed its first century. Previously, since the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714, French had been the accepted diplomatic language, so that it had lasted twice as long as the reign of English has hitherto. Even within Britain’s own domains, it was only relatively recently that English had been appointed as an effective high-level lingua franca. In India, for example, Persian had been maintained as the language of the courts until 1837; and even after the abolition of Persian, the replacement had largely been the Indian vernacular languages, notably Hindustani (identifiable with today’s Hindi and Urdu), English only inheriting the higher courts. The then displaced Persian had been of some antiquity, having been used as the court language throughout Western Asia since the days of the Abbasid caliphate. The twelfth-century Turkish dynasts had successively spread it from its home in Khorasan in the east of Iran to Anatolia, to Central Asia, and to the greater part of India. If, on the other hand, last is interpreted as final, we are driven to wonder if English is really set to endure as long as humanity finds use for a lingua franca. The celebrated linguist David Crystal has opined in his English as a Global Language (2003: 191): “It may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever.” This is almost too apocalyptic to take seriously. But it is the kind of thing that representatives of imperial powers come to believe: one is reminded of Jupiter’s promise to the Romans (as imagined by their national poet Virgil): “imperium sine fine dedi” (I have given you empire without bound). This covenant did not ultimately come true, although the empire did last in the west until the fifth century, in the east till the fifteenth, and the Latin language turned out to have some currency as a language of power, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, really until the late eighteenth century. Latin is a hard act to follow. But even if it should turn out that English is the final world lingua franca, that does not – in itself – mean that English will last indefinitely. How this can be is one thing I shall try to hint at in this chapter. The first task is to try to enrich our powers of imagination. What sequences of events might there be that would shake English from its current commanding position among the languages of the world? To identify these, we need to try to understand more about the dynamics of lingua francas. Luckily, these are richly illustrated in the history of the world over the last few thousand years. A lingua franca, as I define it, is a language learnt through recruitment, i.e. it is a language learnt deliberately. As such, a lingua franca can be opposed to a mother tongue, which is a language acquired more naturally, through cohabitation in a home environment. Some languages – perhaps most lingua francas, in fact – are



Chapter 3.  English – The Last Lingua Franca?

learnt in both ways, and have both statuses. But there have been languages which have existed for a long period merely as a lingua franca. Latin would be one such, maintained for the millennium from 600 to 1600 AD, purely through conscious learning in the school system. Before taking a look at history, we need to get clear conceptually about what might drive a change in dominance among lingua francas. There are two possibilities for the causal framework: either a lingua franca needs to be sustained by particular forces which have brought it to prominence, and risks fading away if those forces weaken or cease; or else a lingua franca may retain its position once established, even if the driving forces disappear, and will lose that position only if supplanted by the rise of some other lingua franca, or substitute for it. The former possibility suggests that we should try to identify potential causes, and assess their durability; the latter, that we should check rising potential challengers. A lingua franca itself comes into being wherever there is diglossic bilingualism, viz. wherever there is more than one language in use within a given space, without total equivalence or availability to all participants (i.e. diglossia), but where subsets of those participants are bilingual in a single common language. Since not everyone will know the lingua franca which acts as a bridge among different language groups, and perhaps also to the outside world, it is typically only a subset that will do so. They can easily become seen as an elite, and the lingua franca becomes seen as a perquisite of that elite. This “rarity value” in knowing the language often confers status, and is one reason why people will make the effort deliberately to learn the language in addition to any mother tongue they may speak. This kind of institution has a determinate kind of history. Lingua francas may be spread by imperial powers, through conquest, the attempt to create larger taxraising domains for some central power; by merchants or businessmen, across commercial networks; and by missionaries, in the course of seeking conversions to a new faith. All of these tend to create communities which extend beyond the range of pre-existing mother tongue communities. Other such wider communities may come about for other reasons, e.g. the global spread of aviation, or scientific research and criticism, and if so, they will very likely select a medium for their communication that will become a lingua franca. Aviation has never had any language but English, but European science, beginning with Latin, ran the gamut of western European languages before largely settling on English in the second half of the twentieth century. These processes have created a very wide range of lingua francas over the past 5,000 years, though naturally the most recent two millennia are better stocked with well-known examples. Imperial lingua francas have included Akkadian in the third and second millennia BCE of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, yielding to Aramaic in the

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first millennium BCE; this latter language was then taken up by the successor empire of Persia, and so projected into use across most of Iran. Chinese early established itself in eastern Asia, and has subsequently encroached on other language areas, particularly to the west in Xinjiang, and towards the south and Southeast Asia. Alexander the Great spread Greek across western Asia and Egypt in the late fourth century BCE, and the Romans spread Latin over western Europe, starting in the late third century BCE, but only achieving real progress linguistically from the first century CE. Subsequently, largely in the early second millennium CE, potentates spread the use of Persian over west, central and southern Asia – though, surprisingly, most of them had a form of Turkic as their own mother tongue; and most recently, in the last 500 years, European imperialists have carried Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and French across wide swaths of new territory. In the Americas Nahuatl and Quechua had widespread use across the zones of other languages, and it is clear that they were – at least partly – put there by imperial conquest. Commercial lingua francas tend to include all the above imperial creations, but also go beyond them in language owing to independent trade networks: consider the Chinook jargon, which flourished before European contact along the western shores of North America, and the Mobile trade language Yamá, which was used a little later in the south-east of the same continent. Other examples include Hausa in central and western, and Swahili in eastern Africa; and Malay in southeast Asia. In Europe, Phoenician was such a language round the Mediterranean in the early and mid-first millennium BCE, later in contention with Greek. In the second millennium CE the original “lingua franca” became current in the eastern Mediterranean, principally, it seems, to mediate the activities of Italian traders. And in central Asia, along the Silk Road, Sogdian traders spread their language in the first millennium CE, only to have it largely replaced by Persian in the early second millennium. Religious languages, too, have been many. Arabic is of course widely associated with the spread of Islam, though where it has become the dominant lingua franca (in north Africa and west Asia) it seems likely that the pervasive spread of the faith came rather later than the establishment of Arabic-speaking overlords. Aramaic spread eastward from Syria in association with a number of faiths, including Manichaeism, but principally as the vehicle for the Christian church of the east. Its use remained co-extensive with that faith for most of the first millennium CE, and petered out in its Asian diaspora over most of the second millennium, ending up pretty much where it had started. Latin spread with the Roman church into central and nordic Europe in the latter first millennium, and Church Slavonic with Orthodox Christianity into eastern Europe in much the same period. Ge’ez



Chapter 3.  English – The Last Lingua Franca?

was similarly spread in Ethiopia as the language of Christianity. In other religions, Sanskrit spread with Hinduism (e.g. into South-east Asia during the first millennium CE), and Pali (a closely related language) became identified with Buddhism, especially the Theravada tradition which spread toward southern India, Sri Lanka, and again South-east Asia – but now in the second millennium CE. Looking back over the historical record, the long-term life-cycle of these languages is also comprehensible. From a review of the careers of lingua francas, it is clear that without specific changes in role, a lingua franca will not survive the decline of the forces which spread it. But when such a change is effective, I call it a Regeneration. There are essentially two ways this can happen: either people find a new purpose for learning the lingua franca, which keeps it in position as a lingua franca; otherwise, it ceases to be a lingua franca, but begins to be acquired naturally through use in the family: in short, it becomes a mother tongue. If no Regeneration occurs, a lingua franca will sooner or later go into decline, when it is no longer supported through its role in society. These declines can be identified in three ways: as Relegation, whereby a political authority simply terminates the use of the language for official purposes; as Ruin, whereby the forces which put it in place cease to operate, for example when a trade lingua franca loses its commercial raison d’être; and thirdly, as Resignation, whereby the elite that has used the language fragments and loses coherence, ceasing to mark its status and role by use of the language. These paths of change for a lingua-franca can be instantiated as follows. Latin was regenerated in two ways, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west. For one thing, it was spread by missionaries to the furthest parts of Scandinavia and central Europe, becoming the lingua franca of Roman Catholic Christendom throughout mediaeval Europe, far beyond the limits of the erstwhile Roman Empire. At the same time, in its heartlands where it had previously been spread by the Roman army (through settlement of veterans, and widespread recruitment into Roman institutional life), it made the transition from lingua franca to mother tongue, or rather to a variety of mother tongues (e.g. Francian, Occitan, Catalan, Castilian, Galician, Tuscan, etc.), since outside its use in the Church it was released from any central control. Analogous changes can be seen in the career of Sanskrit in the early first millennium CE. On the one hand its use, which had focused on religious observances, was broadened to make it a medium of secular poetry and prose literature. The rule-governed nature of Sanskrit did not change during this transition. On the other hand the Aryan speech, which had been spread through empire across northern India, and of which Sanskrit was seen as the perfect form, became the mother tongue of the communities in various places, even as the empires broke up.

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Relegation is possible because a lingua franca has an institutional existence, and is not, as such, propagated naturally within families. This way, it can be discontinued through administrative fiat. This happened to Persian in India in 1837, when the British government ended its use in the courts, thus terminating a good seven centuries of official use. At a later time, Persian was discontinued in a similar fashion in Russian Turkestan, north of the Hindu Kush. The Islamic community there, which had always recognized the official use of Persian (or Dari), was converted into a set of (Soviet) states, each with its own vernacular language; Persian (now to be known as Tojiki) was reduced to the official language of the (rather small and depopulated) state of Tajikistan. The official lingua franca used in all these states was now made Russian. English, too, found itself relegated in various states on the Indian Ocean after the advent of independence in the 1950s–60s. It was made to yield much official use to Malay in Malaysia, Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Swahili in Tanzania. Given its as yet undiminished role as an international lingua franca, at least in this period, these governments may have been getting a little ahead of themselves, and in some cases, they attempted to withdraw or modify these policies. Nevertheless, they all effectively reduced the role of English as a lingua franca in their own countries. Ruin of a lingua franca is clearly seen in the career of Portuguese, which had spread around the Indian Ocean earlier on as a trade language. It had been so useful in practice that by the mid-sixteenth century (a mere 50 years after the first journey of Vasco da Gama) it was used for diplomatic correspondence between the native kingdoms of Arakan (in Burma) and Ceylon (in Sri Lanka). In the late eighteenth century, it still was the primary lingua franca for the British East India Company’s trade in India, although actual Portuguese trade interests in the Indian Ocean had been wiped out by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Therefore, the Portuguese language increasingly lacked powerful friends and users: by the nineteenth century its use survived only in the form of creoles (i.e. mother tongue communities) in pockets of Roman Catholic converts. Portuguese shared this fate with most trade pidgins, provided they survive at all. Lacking any institutional backing (e.g. as national languages) they can have no continued existence without the trade that brought them into being. Resignation is the most insidious of paths for lingua franca decline, since it can afflict even languages which seemed to have established themselves beyond contest. However, the shifting sands of political preference can undo most establishments. Sanskrit’s official use in India could not survive the preference given to Muslim (and Persian-speaking) elites after the conquests by Turkic potentates (beginning in 1001), which would set up the Delhi Sultanate, and many other Muslim states in North India: latterly, under Akbar, in the later sixteenth century, even Hindus learnt Persian rather than Sanskrit. This would also be the



Chapter 3.  English – The Last Lingua Franca?

explanation for the strange disappearance of Latin as the effective European lingua franca in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as European enterprise was beginning to dominate the wider world. The new elite was associated with nationstate politics and trade, and displaced the old hierarchies of clerics, monks and university men. More recently, it has taken part in the undermining of German as a language of global scientific research. Until the 1930s, German was on a par with English as a language for scientific publication, owing to the particular prowess of German-speaking scientists in every field. However, from 1930 a decline set in that was never reversed, and has essentially eliminated the language from international science. It is not a coincidence that in this period the Nazi government of Germany and Austria actively discouraged Jews from scientific participation, and so drove their best researchers overseas to the English-speaking world. This elite did not so much resign as find its conditions of employment terminated. This, then, shows what happens when the forces that have made for a lingua franca go into reverse. It is fair to say that all the forces that have brought English to the fore as today’s world lingua franca have ceased to operate. For the last two generations, the British Empire has ceased to apply military, political and diplomatic power to keep large sections of the earth’s surface under British administration. Economic growth (and technological innovation) has ceased to distinguish the English-speaking world. In the past four years to 2012, the UK’s growth rate averaged 0.2%, the USA’s 0.8%, Canada’s 1.15% and Australia’s 2.3%, while China’s stood at 9.2%, India’s at 7.1% and Indonesia’s at 5.9%. One measure where some Anglo-Saxon countries have stood apart is in the publishing of scientific articles, a proxy measure of influence in innovation: traditionally the USA and UK have led, and in 1996, they held 31% and 7.5% respectively of articles published, holding first and third positions. (Japan was second, slightly ahead of the UK). Here, China’s performance is rising steeply: it has gone from 2.5% of all publications in 1996 to 5% in 2002, to 10% in 2005, and 12% in 2008. At this rate, the Royal Society estimates that China will have overtaken the USA’s proportion as soon as 2013, since a direct, arithmetical result of the increase in China’s share has been a decrease in the USA’s. As for shares of article citations (a better measure of quality), comparing the two periods (1999–2003) and (2004–2008), the USA had fallen from 36.8% to 30.4% and the UK from 8.6% to 8.1%, while China had risen from 1.3% to 3.7%. Clearly there is still some way to go in getting recognition of quality, but this may partially reflect the extra artificial constraint that Chinese scientists are put under in order to get their work published in English. Increasingly, this somewhat gratuitous aspect of the modern scientific world will be resisted – and first of all by the one linguistic power which will soon feel its pre-eminent position deserves recognition. Another statistic which may be

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revealing on this prospect is two surveys of Chinese opinion conducted by Pew Research in 2002 and 2008: “Do children need to learn English to succeed in the world today?” In 2002, 92% of Chinese asked agreed, but by 2008 this had already fallen to 77%. It is unlikely that this trend, already downward, will reverse itself as Chinese scientists (and their fellow citizens) increasingly see themselves as equals, and soon as leaders, in humanity’s global scientific enterprise. Looking now, more widely, at potential challengers to the continued reign of English as world lingua franca, it is first of all clear that there are a small number of major languages that are associated with native-speaker populations (and economies) that are growing faster than the native English-speaking world. These may be called “The Big Beasts” and they include Mandarin Chinese (873m), Spanish (329m), Hindi-Urdu (243m), Arabic (206m) and Portuguese (178). Chinese already has three times the population of native-speaker English (at 331m); the others are still smaller, but on current rates will have equalled or overtaken English by 2050. This growth in these absolute speaker numbers disguises the Big Beasts’ relative weakness as lingua francas. Some of these languages are being actively spread by government policy, through a process of “cultural diplomacy”, which has mushroomed in the last decade. (Notable are the Chinese Confucius Institutes – of which over 400 have been founded since 2004; and there is an Instituto Cervantes for Spanish, and Instituto Camões for Portuguese.) But none of these languages shares the crucial property of English, that its speakers as a lingua franca equal, or even outnumber, its native speakers. 71% of English-speakers are non-native. To find languages like this, we need to go to a different list of world languages, the Great Lingua-Francas: these include Swahili (with 98%), Malay (73%), Persian (67%), Urdu (60%), and marginally Russian (with 43%). But the absolute size of each of these languages varies between 1/25 of English (for Swahili) to 1/4 (for Russian). Furthermore, a quick look at the map shows that none of these languages is distributed as widely as English is, with a significant presence on every continent. Rather, every one of them is essentially a regional language: among the Big Beasts, Chinese is strong in eastern Asia, Spanish in central and southern America, Hindi-Urdu in southern Asia, Arabic in northern Africa and western Asia, Portuguese in South America. Even the Great Lingua Francas have this regionalized property: Swahili in East Africa, Malay in South-east Asia, Persian in West Asia, Urdu in South Asia and Russian in North Asia. In foreseeable world conditions, none of these languages is likely to be associated with the world-spreading foreign policies – essentially global imperialism and settlement – which have put English where it is today. The rest of the world is just too well-connected, and in many ways too equal, to allow individual powers



Chapter 3.  English – The Last Lingua Franca?

to seed the world with their influence, their settlers, and specifically their language, as European powers, and most powerfully the British, were able to do in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. There is perhaps a partial exception in Africa, where Chinese enterprise has become widespread in the early twenty-first century. But in general none of these languages is going to get the opportunity to spread itself globally through widespread recruitment. Does this mean then that English – despite coming to the end of the globedominating good fortune which put it where it is today – is set to remain the world’s language, simply because no other language is in a position to knock it off its perch? Might it even, as a global lingua franca, become detached from its native-speaker community, and become a sort of “Wimbledonized” language – comparable to those other great British successes, the Wimbledon tennis championships and the (financial) City of London, where the central institution continues to lead the world, even though most and perhaps all of its constituent players and users are no longer British at all? This is dubious. We have already noted how Latin lost its seat as Europe’s lingua franca without any other single language taking up its position. All that is necessary is for the Big Beasts to lose interest in maintaining it. But the need to learn a lingua franca is an extra burden, not to be borne longer than necessary. And when the Big Beasts have realized the greater wealth and influence that are predicted for their respective states, there is little doubt that they will lose interest in maintaining English: this, despite all the inconvenience that may be caused to other more marginal players, who would still value an apparently “neutral” intermediary language. Yet the current situation is like none that has gone before, in at least one respect. This is because it has seen the development of language technology, and specifically of statistically-based machine translation, which will ultimately lead on even to automatic interpretation. The free systems on display – and at everyone’s disposal – at Google Translate on the internet begin to show what is in preparation. Already in 2013, 71 languages are available there, with inter-convertibility that depends on no explicit or evident intermediate language. The techniques that make this possible depend crucially on the availability of vast and ever-growing quantities of language data, which allows correlations to be identified automatically between texts and recordings in different languages. This data is not interpreted through pre-existing work that has identified (through explicit knowledge of grammar and lexicon) rules for conversion between specific languages, but uses general algorithms to establish and analyse correlations. As a result, it is a technique applicable to literally any language – or pair of languages. None of the world’s languages – however small – need ultimately be left out of

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this technology, with its ability to make all languages accessible and hence usable as gateways to international communication. All that is necessary that it should build up a body of digital text. The implication is that, in a future which has absorbed the utility of language technology, the need for individuals to learn lingua francas and use them directly will fall away. The future will be not so much multilingual, and not so much monolingual (through a designated lingua franca), as multi-monolingual, with the international communication mediated technologically. Everyone – not just the lucky native speakers of Big Beast languages – will be able to speak as they please, and the world will understand. When this happens, English will clearly be shown to have been the last lingua franca, to be succeeded by no lingua franca at all.

Reference Crystal, David. 2003 [1997]. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 4

National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia Language conflicts, 1784–1848 Lav Subaric The eastern part of the Habsburg Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offers a particularly interesting case for the study of language conflicts. This is largely due to the unique and complex role played by the Latin language in this conflict, and in the process of forging new, language-based national identities in the kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia. Before I turn to the historical background and the specific conflicts, a few remarks are needed on the interconnectedness of language and national identity and on the concept of language conflict itself. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, language played a crucial role in the gradual construction of modern nations in Europe. Here it is important to differentiate between the concepts of state and nation, the former being largely an institutional concept, defined in terms of territory, population and government, while nation is a cultural formation, based on the shared will of the members to recognize common traditions, myths and cultural practices (Connor 1970: 91–92; Smith 1992: 61–62). Most modern nations are historically built around one dominant ethnic group, even when they belong to the civic type prevalent in Western Europe (Smith 1991: 9–13, 37–42; Oakes 2001: 23–28), in which the core criterion of the nation is ideally the adherence to common laws and rights (as with the USA or France), and not to the ethnic type prevalent in Eastern Europe, in which an imagined common ancestry and therefore a common language constitute the central markers of nation (as with Turkey or Poland). Because language is arguably the most important among the cultural practices defining ethnicity (Oakes 2001: 9–11), it also becomes, in both types of nation, an important element in the self-image of the nation constructed around the given ethnic group. The elevation of a language to the status of national language includes its emancipation from any previously dominant, mostly foreign official language (like Latin or Greek in parts of Europe, or English or French in the former colonies), its standardization, its investiture with a symbolic capital and, if successful, its doi 10.1075/fillm.1.04sub © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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introduction as official language. The standardization stimulates a greater cohesion among the speakers of different, often mutually unintelligible dialects, thus augmenting the number of the members of the nation. It is frequently accompanied by a drive to purge the language of foreign influences and provide it with newly coined “indigenous” vocabulary. The speakers raise the symbolic value of their language by asserting its ability to fulfil all the needs of any field of culture, science or public life just as well as, or even better than, any other language, and by investing it with a set of values such as “pristine,” “pure” and “beautiful.” In societies that were originally multilingual the choice of the national language and its introduction as the official language often become both the symbol and the means of political domination of one group over others, reflecting, and at the same time cementing, the already present social and economic hierarchy of different groups within the community. It leads either to a gradual assimilation of language minorities or to language conflicts, with the minorities struggling to achieve the same official status for their languages, plus all the benefits this brings to their (native) speakers. The language conflict in this context is a conflict between the speakers of different languages about the use of these languages in different domains of public life, and about their relative symbolic value. In most cases such linguistic tensions are interconnected with other types of conflict based on real or imagined social and economic conditions (Mattheier 1987: 290–292). The conflict usually ensues when a minor language is tending to overthrow the dominance of the major language. Major and minor languages can be defined numerically, such that major languages are those with speaker populations larger than the average population of all other languages (Stolz 2001), or in terms of attitudes towards language, in which case a language is minor if so considered by its speakers (Scherzer and Stolz 2003: viii). An overlapping concept is that of majority and minority languages, which are easier to define as, respectively, the languages of the sociological majority and minority within the particular community. If the minority is strong enough to resist assimilation, the speakers of the minor/minority language try to create a standardized national language of their own out of their vernacular, often modelling their efforts on the language politics and language institutions (like academies and theatres) of the majority. To classify the languages involved in the Hungarian and Coatian language conflicts in terms of minor/major and majority/minority is a by no means straightforward procedure. German was a major European language, but a minority language within Hungary. In the mid-eighteenth century Magyar was considered a minor language, and even a threatened language by some commentators, but by the mid-nineteenth century had become an official language which, in the eyes of its users, was a major language, even if it failed to achieve numerical majority. As



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

for the Slavic languages, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian or Ruthenian, they were seen, depending on the perspective, either as individual minor languages or as different manifestations of one major Slavic language. Taking both kingdoms together, Croatian was a minority language, whereas, in Croatia alone, it was the majority language. And then there was Latin, whose classification is indeed far less complicated. Latin, widely used in both Kingdoms, is a special case. On the one hand, as it was nobody’s native language and had to be acquired through education, its speakers, mostly members of the social elite, formed a numerical minority. On the other hand, as a language with immense historic and cultural significance it had a high symbolic value and was perceived by both speakers and non-speakers as a major language. The language conflicts within late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Hungary and Croatia provide an interesting example of complex negotiations of language and national identities. These two kingdoms had had close connections since the end of the eleventh century, when the Hungarian king Coloman defeated the last king of Croatia and inherited his territory. The exact nature of the subsequent union has long been the subject of a historical controversy, owing to the scarcity of the mediaeval sources and the contested validity of the central document of the union (Jurčić 1969: 17–19). From the Croatian point of view, it was a personal union, two autonomous kingdoms ruled by the same king, whereas the Hungarians tended to see Croatia as an annexed province and therefore a part of Hungary. Croatia had its local governor, its own laws and its own parliament, while it also had representatives in the Hungarian parliament, where not only the laws for Hungary proper but also the laws common to both kingdoms were voted upon. It was at the same time a kingdom and, as “partes adnexae”, a part of the wider Hungarian realm. In the early sixteenth century, after being defeated by the Ottoman Turks, both kingdoms separately accepted the Emperor Ferdinand I as their King and entered the larger complex of lands ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. Within the Habsburg Empire they retained their status as an independent coherent entity, known as the “lands of the crown of St. Stephen,” with their own administration, laws and official language – Latin. In both kingdoms, Latin remained in official use much longer than in other parts of Europe, right until the middle of the nineteenth century. Generally speaking, Latin had almost completely disappeared from most aspects of public life in Europe by the end of the sixteenth century. The only domains where it continued to thrive and even to dominate were within academia, within the international scientific community, then called “res publica litteraria”, and within the Catholic Church (Burke 2004: 48–60; Waquet 2001: 7–99). In contrast, in the lands of the crown of St. Stephen, Latin remained the language of politics, education, the

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judiciary, and the administration, and was furthermore the common colloquial language among the elite. There is a substantial body of evidence for the use of Latin in everyday life, although the quality of this living Latin must have varied widely. The writings of European travellers visiting Hungary and Croatia never failed to register surprise at the everyday use of the Latin language by a variety of people. Hungarian travellers in Western Europe, on the other hand, such as the Hungarian officer encountered by Giacomo Casanova in Cesena in 1748 (Casanova 1960: 25), were often correspondingly surprised to find that almost nobody could talk with them in Latin, and that even men of learning could only write Latin, being unable to use it for conversation. Recent research has cautioned against the generalization of such evidence, because a significant number of lesser nobles in Hungary also had great difficulties in understanding and using the Latin language (Tóth 2000: 130–145). But even so, Latin undoubtedly played a unique role in the public life of Hungary and Croatia (Rapant 1927: 3–91; Sikirić Assouline 2009: 257–263). In fact the only comparable example of such a widespread use of the Latin language is in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where Latin was the second language of the elites right up until the end of the Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century (Axer 1998: 132–135). There was a good reason for keeping Latin, a language used only by an educated minority, as the official language in the lands of the crown of St. Stephen. The territory was populated by different ethnic groups: in the kingdom of Hungary there lived Slovaks in the north, in what is now Slovakia, Ruthenians in the northeast, in what is now western Ukraine, Romanians in the east, Serbs in the south, Germans in dispersed, smaller communities as well as in nearly all the kingdom’s towns, and of course Magyars almost everywhere. I denote the ethnic Hungarians by the endonym “Magyars” and reserve the exonym “Hungarians,” which stems from the Latin name Hungarus, for all the inhabitants of the kingdom regardless of ethnicity. This distinction, which was used in the contemporary discussions (e.g. Horvatović 1833: 1), will be important in the following argumentation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Magyars, while being the biggest ethnic group in Hungary, comprised only around 40% of the population (Evans 2007: 202). They were, however, the most important group, since they composed the majority of the nobility, which in turn dominated the political institutions. Croatia was ethnically somewhat more homogeneous: there were Serbs, especially in the militarily administered borderlands, and Germans living in greater numbers in the towns, while the Croats themselves were linguistically divided by strongly diverging linguistic varieties with corresponding literary languages, which today are considered dialects. And as for the kingdom’s political body, it was “Natio Hungarica,” the Hungarian nation. This was not yet a nation based around the ethnic core. The term denotes the collective composed of all



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

the noblemen of the kingdom. Their principal identity was defined, regardless of ethnicity and native language, by class membership and by participation in public affairs (which were mainly conducted in Latin). So it was possible for a lesser noble who did not speak a word of the Magyar language to consider himself first and foremost a Hungarian patriot and a part of the “Natio Hungarica”. Latin, a minority language within society, but very prestigious owing to its symbolic value, was a neutral language which did not favour any particular ethnic group, but which rather favoured, regardless of ethnicity, the social groups able to obtain the education necessary for its use. As long as there was no majority language, there were also no minorities, a situation which suited the elites very well. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the example of Germany and the influence of the Enlightenment began to have an impact. So a new concept of nation started to form, no longer rooted in class and in the territorial sense of belonging, but instead making language the main criterion for nationhood: the national language (Evans 2006: 101–113). The traditional prestige of Latin was simultaneously weakend by Enlightenment utilitarianism, which favoured education in the vernacular and regarded the learning of Latin as a waste of time (Waquet 2001: 175–176). The process of emancipation of the respective national languages and the gradual abolition of Latin in Hungary and Croatia shows significant interdependencies and parallels. The first changes in the language situation came from outside of the Hungarian realm. In 1784, the enlightened Habsburg Emperor Joseph II issued a decree abolishing Latin and introducing German as the official language in Hungary and Croatia. “The use of a dead language, like Latin, in all public affairs shows sufficiently that the nation has not yet reached a certain degree of enlightenment,” wrote the Emperor in his explanation (“Ungarn” 1784: 1458). In his view Magyar was not yet sufficiently developed to take over that public role from Latin, and he therefore concluded that the official language should be German. The introduction of German, he believed, would benefit the economic and cultural development of Hungary while at the same time simplifying and harmonizing the administration of the Habsburg Empire as a whole. His decree set very short transitional periods in which different parts of the administration and judiciary had to replace Latin with German, varying from six months to three years. After that time, no one was supposed to get an administrative, educational or indeed an ecclesiastical position who did not speak German, the courts were to use German in their proceedings, and no child was to be admitted to a school higher than the elementary school without the knowledge of German (“Ungarn” 1784: 1460). This was only one in a series of measures by which Joseph sought to modernize Hungary. Others included the introduction of religious tolerance, the abolition of serfdom, and the reorganization of the local authorities, resulting in

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the break-up of the traditional structures. These measures, and the speed with which they were introduced, plus a number of provocative symbolic gestures, as when Joseph rejected the formal act of the coronation with the holy crown of St. Stephen, infuriated and alienated not only the nobility but (for different reasons) almost everyone in Hungary and Croatia, including the Hungarian Germans, who would have profited from the new language situation but were aggrieved at the loss of their cities’ autonomy in the reform of local administration. The language decree was the measure which provoked the strongest emotional reaction, since it touched a question of identity. Joseph himself saw it merely as a means by which to achieve uniformity and efficiency of administration in all of his domains; in most other Habsburg territories, after all, German was already the official language. For Hungarians, the measure was an attempt to Germanize Hungary, to rob it of its soul. On the symbolic level, the introduction of German, one of the major and most prestigious European languages, as the official language would have made the realm’s other languages minor languages. On the socioeconomic level, it would have deprived large parts of the political class of the possibility to participate in political activity, to obtain administrative positions, and to protect their interests in the courts of justice. Since the Hungarian parliament was not active (it had to be summoned by the King, who had no interest in summoning it), the official protests agains the language decree could come only from Hungary and Croatia’s counties, who argued that Latin was not a dead language but was very much alive in Hungary. It was a native language of Hungary and much more welcome than German, which was foreign. Hungarians chose Latin, the counties claimed, as the common language of all cultured nations, so as to avoid having to learn a whole multitude of languages (Katona 1810: 388, 390). In face of the increasing opposition, on his deathbead in 1790 Joseph  II revoked most of his reforms, including the language decree, so restoring Latin to its official status. But his failed attempt to introduce German in Hungary had not only resulted in the Hungarians’ insistence on Latin, but had also destabilized the region’s entire language system, giving a decisive impulse to the surge of Magyar language and literature in reaction to the imposition of German. The new language-based concept of a nation became very widespread during subsequent decades. Faced with the threat from a major language, and conscious of the arguments against the use of Latin, proponents of this new concept sought to counteract that threat by standardizing Magyar and raising its status to that of the official language. The language nationalists’ zeal was further incited by a prophecy of the influential German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who believed that after another few centuries the Magyars and their language were bound to disappear from view amid the Slavic, German and Romanian masses (Herder 2002: 633). The



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

cultivation and spread of Magyar was seen as a key measure for survival between the dangers of Germanization on one side and assimilation into the Slavs on the other (Sundhaußen 1973: 74–82). The spread of the language among the nonMagyar population of Hungary was expected to strengthen the Magyar nation, bolster its numbers and ensure its survival. This was why Magyar had to become official language, had to replace Latin in administration, politics, higher schools and universities, and had to replace other vernacular languages in elementary schools and in the church within the predominantly non-Magyar areas. New institutions were set up – a national museum, an academy, newspapers, libraries and societies for the promotion of national culture – which all spread the same propaganda. And the language itself was expanded by thousands of newly coined words in order to be fit for its new tasks. The new Magyar identity dominated public discourse, but was not unchallenged. In 1808 several German newspapers advertised a prize set up by a Magyar patriot for the best answer to his questions: “Would it be practical and useful to introduce Magyar as the only language in public affairs, judiciary and education in the kingdom of Hungary and the annexed provinces [i.e. Croatia]? Is this language developed enough for these tasks? And what would be the political, economic and cultural benefits and disadvantages of such a course?” (“Preisausschreibung” 1808). Among the seventeen monographs that were submitted in answer, some advocated the introduction of Magyar, some insisted on Latin, and a few even proposed the reintroduction of German. Latin was still in favour within segments of Hungarian society which held on to their old identity as Natio Hungarica as opposed to Magyars. This attitude was to be found within what were traditionally the society’s most cosmopolitan strata: the higher nobility and the higher Catholic clergy. Their representatives in the upper house of the Hungarian parliament simultaneously defended Latin and their own feudal privileges, which they saw as coming under attack from a liberal nationalistic opposition rooted partly in the middle nobility represented in the lower house of parliament, and partly in the new Magyar intelligentsia. But then, under the pressure of the burgeoning Magyar nationalism, a new identity based purely on the territorial principle became increasingly attractive to commoners of non-Magyar origin, who socially were not a part of the old Natio Hungarica. The proponents of this so-called Hungarus identity often came from ethnically mixed parts of the kingdom, many of non-Magyar or mixed background (Miskolczy 2009). Some of the Hungari even accepted, albeit grudgingly, the need for a partial introduction of Magyar into public affairs, with the reservation that its use was to be in no way compulsory. Others wanted to preserve Latin, which according to one spokesman, Gabriel Kováts-Martiny, was “the common bond of all cultured nations and scholars in Europe” and the “main source of

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every culture, of good taste and the real Enlightenment” (quoted in Miskolczy 2009: 32). One proponent of the Hungarus identity, Gregor von Berzewiczy, even wanted to extend the use of Latin as the official language to Habsburg domains such as Austria, Bohemia and Italy, since this would “suggest a state-based nation and promote state nationalism, which has to be preferred to language nationalism” (Berzewiczy 1817: 289). The calls for raising Magyar to the status of official language came as early as 1790, when the parliament assembled after Joseph’s death. They were blocked by, among others, the delegates from Croatia, who not only rejected the notion of Magyar as the official language in Croatia and in the common affairs of both kingdoms, but who also argued against the introduction of Magyar in Hungary proper. Here a parallel was drawn between the Hungarians’ feelings at the time of Joseph’s recent attempt at Germanization and the feelings of non-Magyars in the present case (quoted in Fancev 1933: 33–37). For them, and for the majority of the higher nobility, Latin, the “neutral” language, was the only just and non-discriminating medium for public affairs. But such arguments could only slow down national aspirations, not stop them. The next fifty years saw the Magyar language gradually taking over from Latin in all aspects of public life, starting with the introduction of Hungarian as an obligatory subject in gymnasia and culminating in a proclamation of its status as the only official language of the realm in 1843 (Szekfű 1926). Non-Magyars were powerless to stop this process, as they had, for the most part, no stake in the feudal political institutions dominated by lesser and middle Magyar nobles. Even so, the emancipation of the Magyar language was slowed by resistance from three main quarters. First, there were still aristocrats in the upper house of parliament who clung to the old concept of Natio Hungarica. Secondly, the Habsburg court in Vienna feared the new national movement in Hungary just as much as it feared the German national movement in the west, which was eventually to lead to the revolution of 1848. Thirdly, there was the resistance from Croatia, a response to the Magyar nationalists’ attempts to extend the validity of their language laws beyond Hungary proper to Croatia, which they saw as a dependent territory essential for the nation’s survival, providing access to the sea and direct foreign trade. The Croatian parliament at first actually endorsed some of the Hungarian parliament’s measures, not least the introduction of non-obligatory Magyar lessons in schools. But it strongly opposed any attempts to replace Latin by Magyar in public affairs, and especially in the internal administration of Croatia itself. Again, as in 1784, the introduction of a major language not widely spoken by the local elite, this time Magyar, would have practically excluded most Croatian nobles from administrative post and political activity.



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

The importance of Latin to the Croatian feudal elites and their value system is best reflected in a speech against the introduction of the Magyar language by one of the senior Croatian magnates, Count Vojkffy. Delivered in the Croatian parliament in 1832 and subsequently printed, the speech contains a lengthy apology for the Latin language from the perspective of a nobleman. Vojkffy’s arguments, which partly echo those of his predecessors from the 1780s when Latin was under attack from Joseph II, centre on Latin’s usefulness, on the injustice and illegality of its abolition, and on the sheer impossibility of the introduction of Magyar in the extremely short period of three to ten years recently proposed by the Hungarian parliament (Vojkffy 1832). But at the core of his argumentation lies the firm belief that Latin, “a language we use in everyday conversation instead of our mother tongue” (Vojkffy 1832: 7),1 is an inseparable part of the Hungarian and Croatian constitution, and thus of the national identity (Sikirić Assouline 2006: 19–22). Vojkffy was a member of the older, more conservative generation, which saw Latin not just as a useful defence against Magyar aspirations, but as a constitutive part of their identity as Hungarian nobles, per se worthy of preservation. However, the younger generation in Croatia no longer shared Vojkffy’s beliefs. Inspired by the Magyar example, they had already started adopting a new, language-based concept of a nation, and had their own ideas as to what the official language should be. The year 1832, in which Vojkffy delivered and published his speech, also saw the first publications advocating the introduction of Croatian instead of Latin as the official language in Croatia (Derkosz 1832; Drašković 1832). This attendant surge of propaganda came about as a part of Croatia’s emerging Slavic national movement, later known as the Illyrian movement, a name deriving from the Illyrians, the ancient inhabitants of the Balkans, whom the Croatian nationalists at the time believed to be the ancestors of the southern Slavs. Among the aims of the Croatian Illyrians was not only the substitution of Slavic for Latin as the official language in Croatia, the preservation of Croatian autonomy, and opposition to Magyarization but before long the cultural unification of all southern Slavs through the creation of a common “Illyrian” language of literature (Maissen 1998: 45–65). From the Illyrian point of view, Latin had a role only as a neutral language for all dealings with Hungary. Paradoxically, in the early years of the Illyrian movement the crucial publication advocating the Croatian language, Johannes Derkosz’ Genius patriae, had to be published in Latin. Otherwise, it would never have reached the politically significant part of the society, the Croatian noblemen, for whom the reading of pamphlets in Croatian would have brought little pleasure.

1. All translations into English are my own.

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In 1843 the Hungarian parliament, which was in the meantime officially conducting its affairs in both Magyar and Latin, but in reality only in Magyar, took the final step in the abolition of Latin as the official language. Provoked by the Croatian delegates’ insistence on speaking in Latin, the Magyar majority implemented a regulation by which speeches in Latin would from now on be ignored and not even minuted (Révész 1968: 66). But the Croatian insistence on the use of Latin was no longer based on any affection for that ancient language. As one delegate tried to explain to the Hungarian parliament, the attitude of most Croats had changed: “The Croatian estates,” he said, “have the following view of this affair: by their opposition they in no way want to preserve the Latin language, but to preserve their right, which they have exercised for more than seven centuries, to choose for themselves the official language in which their public affairs are conducted in their midst, and to preserve a possibility of replacing the Latin language by their own Croatian language at the time of their choosing” (Busan 1v–2r). In 1843, the same year in which Latin was banned from the Hungarian parliament, the first non-Latin speech was delivered in the Croatian parliament. The speaker, Ivan Kukuljević, one of the leading Illyrians, categorized Latin as a dead language and as no less foreign and pernicious to the Croats than Magyar: The dead language of the Romans and the living ones, Magyar, German and Italian, they are our masters. The living ones threaten us, the dead one holds us by the throat, strangles us and hands us powerless over to the living ones. Now we still have enough strength to confront the dead one, soon we will not be able to resist the living ones if we do not stand on our feet, that is, if we do not bolster our own language and make it the official one. (Kukuljević 1997: 158)

For the Illyrians, Latin had lost all the inherent value it still had for the likes of Vojkffy in 1832. Its only value was now tactical, as a means of stalling Magyar aspirations. Inside Croatia the Illyrians propagated the use of the national language by publishing newspapers, by founding a patriotic society for the promotion of language, and by establishing a national theatre and similar institutions, so imitating the successful Magyar model. Not everyone in Croatia was pleased with the progress of Croatian in the public sphere. In 1845 the conservative opposition unsuccessfully requested that only Latin, not Croatian, be spoken in the Croatian parliament (Bogdanov 1958: 291). Opposition to Croatian language in Croatia was not confirned to the non-Croat elements of the population, like the German town-dwellers or Magyar noblemen and officials, where it was only to be expected. The Illyrians, hoping to create a common literary language for all the southern Slavs and thus achieve the numerical advantage characteristic of a major language, chose as the national language,



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

and as a candidate for the official language, the particular, most widespread variety of the linguistic continuum used in Habsburg-ruled Croatia, Dalmatia and Vojvodina, in Turkish-ruled Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro. This variety, highly regarded for the literature written in it, was at the same time chosen by the linguist Vuk Karadzic as the basis for the standardization of the Serbian language. But it was not actually in use in north-west Croatia, the centre of the Croatian political life, where a very distinct variety with a highly developed, though not yet standardized literary language was spoken. Under these circumstances, the language variety favoured by the Illyrians seemed alien to many Croats, who preferred Latin to such a “foreign” kind of Croatian. The Illyrian’s establishment of the new national language was transforming these people’s vernacular into a minority language in their own territory. Their attitude is well suggested by an anecdote from the memoirs of Imbro Tkalac, a liberal Croatian intellectual and later emigrant anti-Habsburg agitator. As a young man of some 20 years and a sympathizer with the national movement, Tkalac had overheard an old man from the rival political camp bitterly complaining about the decline of the “Lingua patria,” the language of the fatherland. I was puzzled, as this complaint seemed strange and I remarked that people now more than ever talked Croatian in public and in cafés. The old gentleman informed me that he was talking of the Latin language. I had to restrain myself from laughing out loud, because this Latin-speaking Croat was in no way a Roman and neither Caesar nor Cicero would have recognized him as a compatriot. However, like the whole older generation, he spoke Latin with more grammatical precision than he spoke Croatian. (Tkalac 1894: 263)

In spite of such lingering sympathy for Latin, its era as the official language was irrevocably over. In 1847 the Croatian Parliament followed the example of the Hungarian Parliament and abolished it, proclaiming Croatian (of the “Illyrian” variant) as the official language. In the next year revolution broke out in Hungary, leading to a civil war, in which the Croats sided with the Habsburg Court against the revolutionaries. After the revolution was supressed, the victorious emperor Franz Joseph  I imposed German as the official language in both the defeated Hungary and in the loyal Croatia once again, until the compromise measures of the 1860s reintroduced Magyar in Hungary and subsequently Croatian in Croatia as the official languages. Latin was now a “dead” language once and for all. Looking back over the whole period in question, from the late eighteenth century to the eve of the revolution of 1848, the same pattern is visible in the interplay of Latin and the national languages in Hungary and Croatia. The attitude towards Latin repeatedly changed from seeing it as a cornerstone for one’s identity and defence against foreign aspirations to a perception of it as a positive obstacle to

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the nation’s development. Confronted with the threat of the imperial politics of Germanization under Joseph II, the elite of the lands of the crown of St. Stephen, united in their Hungarian identity, reacted by insisting on the use of Latin. After the threat was removed, the emerging Magyar national identity saw Latin as a problem and tried to replace it with the national language. Other inhabitants of Hungary and Croatia, faced with the Magyar aspirations, initially held on to Latin, but the Croatian national movement soon saw Latin as a problem and tried to abolish it. Finally, inside Croatia, those who opposed the new national language saw Latin as a safeguard of their political identity. The dual role of Latin in this series of language conflicts, and especially its role as a defence for the national identity has faded from collective memory. What remains is the simplified story of the heroic struggle for a national language, against both Latin and the oppressing major language, as one of the constitutive myths of the respective nations. In later times, a superficially similar pattern of language conflict repeatedly appeared during the post-colonial era, when minority populations of newly independent states at first preferred the “neutral” language of the former colonizers as their official language rather than a new national language imposed by the majority, as with the Sri Lankan Tamils, for instance. In other new states, the “neutral” language has been retained as official or co-official language to this day, not least in order to avoid or alleviate language conflicts. However, these “neutral” languages are not really neutral. As part of the historical burden of colonialism, they are fraught with negative connotations, whereas Latin in Hungary and Croatia, a language which could not be associated with any particular ethnic group, was for a long time seen as un-foreign and truly neutral.

References Axer, Jerzy. 1998. “Latein als Sprache der Adelsnation in der polnisch-litauischen Konföderation (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert): Eine These.” In Latein und Nationalsprachen in der Renaissance, ed. by Bodo Guthmüller, 131–135. Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung 17. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz. Berzewicy, Gregor von. 1817. “Etwas über Nationen und Sprachen.” Archiv für Geographie, Historie, Staats- und Kriegskunst June 13–16: 287–289. Bogdanov, Vaso. 1958. Historija političkih stranaka u Hrvatskoj: Od prvih stranačkih grupiranja do 1918. Zagreb: Novinarsko izdavačko poduzeće. Burke, Peter. 2004. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511617362 Busan, Hermannus. [Oratio]. MS 3736. Nacionalna i sveucilisna knjiznica u Zagrebu, Zagreb. Casanova de Seingalt, Jacques. 1960. Histoire de ma vie: Édition intégrale: Tome Deux. Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus; Paris: Librairie Plon.



Chapter 4.  National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia

Connor, Walker. 1970. “Ethnic Nationalism as a Political Force.” World Affairs 133: 91–97. Derkos, Ivan. 1832. Genius patriae super dormientibus suis filiis. Zagreb: Suppan. Drašković, Janko. 1832. Disertacija iliti razgovor darovan gospodi poklisarom zakonskim i budućem zakonotvorcem kraljevinah naših. Karlovac: Prettner. Evans, Robert John Weston. 2006. Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c. 1683–1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, Robert John Weston. 2007. “The Politics of Language and the Languages of Politics: Latin and the Vernaculars in Eighteenth-Century Hungary.” In Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms, 200–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511496899.011 Fancev, Franjo (ed.). 1933. Dokumenti za naše podrijetlo hrvatskoga preporoda (1790–1832). Građa za povijest književnosti Hrvatske 12. Zagreb: NadbiskUpska tiskara. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 2002. Werke: Band III: Textband und Kommentarband: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. by Wolfgang Proß. Munich: Carl Hanser. Horvatović, Domoljub. 1833. Sollen wir Magyaren werden? Fünf Briefe geschrieben aus Pesth an einen Freund an der Theis. Karlstadt: Prettner. Jurčić, Hrvoje. 1969. “Die sogenannten ‘Pacta conventa’ in kroatischer Sicht.” Ungarn-Jahrbuch 1: 11–22. Katona, Stephanus. 1810. Historia critica regum Hungariae stirpis Austriacae ex fide domesticorum et externorum scriptorum concinnata. Tomulus XXI, ordine XL. Buda: Regia Universitas Hungarica. Kukuljević, Ivan. 1997. “Prvi od davnina zastupnički govor na hrvatskom jeziku koji je održao Ivan Kukuljević 2. svibnja 1843. u Hrvatskom saboru.” In Programski spisi hrvatskog narodnog preporoda, ed. by Miroslav Šicel, 157–161. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska. Maissen, Anna Pia. 1998. Wie ein Blitz schlägt es aus meinem Mund. Der Illyrismus: Die Hauptschriften der kroatischen Nationalbewegung 1830–1844. Geist und Werk der Zeiten 89. Bern, et al.: Peter Lang. Mattheier, Klaus J. 1987. “Sprachkonflikt: Terminologische und begriffsgeschichtliche Überlegungen.” In Soziokulturelle Perspektiven von Mehrsprachigkeit und Spracherwerb. Sociocultural Perspectives of Multilingualism and Language Acquisition, 289–299. Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 320. Tübingen: Narr. Miskolczy, Ambrus. 2009. “A ‘hungarus alternatíva.’ Példák és ellenpéldák: (Fejes Jánostól Rumy Károly Györgyig).” Regio. Kisebbség, Politika, Társadalom 26 (2): 3–45. Oakes, Leigh. 2001. Language and National Identity: Comparing France and Sweden. Impact: Studies in Language and Society 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/impact.13 “Preisausschreibung.” 1808. Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. April 4: 324. Rapant, Daniel. 1927. K počiatkom maďarizácie: Diel prvý.:Vývoj rečovej otázky v Uhorsku 1740–1790. Spisy Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenského v Bratislave 8. Bratislava: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Komenského. Révész, Lászlo. 1968. Die Anfänge des ungarischen Parlamentarismus. Südosteuropäische Arbeiten 68. Munich: Oldenbourg. Sherzer, Joel, and Thomas Stolz. 2003. “Introduction.” In Minor Languages: Approaches, Definitions, Controversies, ed. by Joel Sherzer and Thomas Stolz, vii–xii. Diversitas Linguarum 3. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Sikirić Assouline, Zvjezdana. 2006. U obranu hrvatskih municipalnih prava i latinskog jezika. Govori na Hrvatskom Saboru 1832. godine. Zagreb: Srednja Europa.

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Sikirić Assouline, Zvjezdana. 2009. “Latinitet u hrvatskom drustvu prve polovice 19. stoljeća.” Radovi zavoda za hrvatsku povijest filozofskoga fakulteta sveučilista u Zagrebu 41: 257–265. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin. Smith, Anthony D. 1992. “National Identity and the Idea of European Unity.” International Affairs 68: 55–76. DOI: 10.2307/2620461 Stolz, Thomas. 2001. “Minor Languages and General Linguistics (with Special Focus on Europe).” In Minor Languages of Europe, ed. by Thomas Stolz, 211–242. Bochum – Essener Beiträge zur Sprachwandelforschung 30. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Sundhaußen, Holm. 1973. Der Einflluß der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie. Buchreihe der Südostdeutschen Historischen Kommission 27. Munich: Oldenbourg. Szekfű, Gyula. 1926. Iratok a magyar államnyelv kérdésének történetéhez, 1790–1848. Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat. Tkalac, E. I. von. 1894. Jugenderinnerungen aus Kroatien (1749–1823. 1824–1843). Leipzig: Wigand. Tóth, István György. 2000. Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe. Budapest: CEU. “Ungarn.” 1784. Wiener Zeitung, June 26: 1458–1460. V[ojkffy], F[ranciscus]. 1832. Dissertatio de introducenda in regno Hungariae et regnis ac provinciis eidem adnexis in cunctis negotiis publicis lingua hungarica. Zagreb: Suppan. Waquet, Françoise. 2001. Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. London, New York: Verso.

chapter 5

Error and innovation in postcolonial composition The implications of World Englishes* David Huddart World Englishes and cultural translation  The global spread of English can seem to be an extension of linguistic imperialism which marginalizes not only other languages but also the role of translation. Yet on the other hand, over recent decades there has been increased interest in studying varieties of what are now termed Englishes (plural). Instead of one dominant global English, it is argued that there are numerous World Englishes, sometimes competing but often complementary. What each of these varieties suggests is that the kind of complex and “instantaneous” transversal movements of culture so typical of globalization in general are just as evident in language. World Englishes, then, are yet another example of the precarious magic of so-called cultural translation – the moving across of values, thought-worlds and ways of life from one culture to another (Buden and Nowotny 2009). Although commentators tend to see this process as improving intercultural understanding, any such benefits are in fact unevenly spread, especially when no “translation proper” takes place and English is reconfigured to meet the needs of a local population. Under such circumstances, English undergoes processes of localization, acculturation and sometimes indigenization, each of which can be seen as an aspect of a more general cultural translation. Cultural translation regularly goes on within World Englishes, even in the absence of translation in the traditional sense. Whatever our perspective on this element of cultural translation, it has implications for the practice of English composition in the postcolonial classroom. These implications derive in particular from a blurring of the distinction between

* I would like to acknowledge that the work recorded in this chapter was supported by a grant from the Hong Kong General Research Fund, sponsored by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Reference No. 446611). doi 10.1075/fillm.1.05hud © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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error and innovation. Given the widened “ownership” of English implied by World Englishes, it is difficult to justify the corrections entailed by composition classes as traditionally conceived. Needless to say, however, there is no single postcolonial classroom, and no abstract model of cultural translation can help us understand all the many different instances of World Englishes. It seems necessary, therefore, to compare instances in which cultural translation is embraced with instances in which it is to some extent rejected. One way to make this comparison is precisely to place postcolonial theory and World Englishes in the context of composition studies, a branch of education which in some traditions, and in certain, especially North American contexts, is increasingly seen less as a matter of policing a sameness of standards, than of liberating potential differences. Both postcolonial theory and World Englishes have much to offer the theory and practice of composition studies so conceived. Indeed, it is increasingly common to find composition theorized in terms of World Englishes (e.g. Canagarajah 2006), and even as inherently postcolonial (e.g. Lunsford and Ouzgane 2004). Nor is there any denying that student writers’ errors are often indistinguishable from incipient creativity, a consideration which has a central place in some approaches to World Englishes, and which is obviously relevant to any composition programme which seeks to embrace creativity-in-difference. Yet before we unreservedly endorse a postcolonial composition practice which coincides with the presuppositions of World Englishes, we must consider possible counter-arguments. For one thing, composition studies obviously have both an institutional grounding and a geographical location. For another, composition is actually not the same thing as creative writing, and is not even something to be found in all anglophone institutions of tertiary education. This specificity of composition as a pedagogical object might well allow us to at least consider its political and philosophical openness to postcolonial theory and World Englishes. But it can also spur us to question any universal application of the insights arising from that background. My approach here will be to consider some of the arguments for a postcolonial composition studies in somewhat more detail, and then to re-contextualize them in terms of one particular historically postcolonial context, within which I myself operate: a trilingual university in Hong Kong. Although, or more precisely because, the Chinese University of Hong Kong has some distinctive features of its own, when the standard political-philosophical arguments of the postcolonial perspective are brought to bear it provides a suggestive case. Ever since its foundation in 1963, this university has been (albeit with moments of controversy, especially since 1997 and the onset of a more fundamental presence of Putonghua in the local environment) a multilingual institution. And within that context, the English



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Department has a peculiar role, not least because the university’s entire raison d’être has been as a response to the perceived elitism of the Anglophone University of Hong Kong. So the scope allowed to English language creativity for students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is a useful gauge of the values and attitudes vis-à-vis English that are prevalent within Hong Kong at large. According to certain commentators (e.g. Phillipson 1992), postcolonial cultures should retain (at the least) a healthy scepticism with regard to the ongoing presence of English in their educational institutions. With some hesitation and uncertainty, the Hong Kong university system has begun to embrace a realistic view of international or globalized tertiary education, which has entailed a multilingual vision of not only curriculum delivery but other aspects of education as well. In embracing this vision, Hong Kong has acknowledged the fact that historically speaking monolingualism has been rare, and the likelihood that in the relatively near future bi- or (more likely) multilingualism will become the global norm. This raises the question of the long-term consequences of such multilingual education, particularly with regard to the future varieties of English. And then there is the question of what such educational practices may mean in political terms. As a philosophical-political framework, World Englishes at first sight seems to celebrate the potential of multilingual education, and in this sense coincides with postcolonial theory in many of its guises. Such a position would valorize cultural translation for its inherent creativity. Yet before accepting this take on things, we need to consider possible limitations.

Bilingual creativity and composition studies When the cultural translation entailed by World Englishes is held up as vindicating the basic assumptions of postcolonial theory, the possible limitations can easily disappear from view. One of the most important writers on World Englishes, Braj Kachru (1985, 2006), is known for his emphasis on bilingual creativity, particularly in the context of “outer circle” countries like India or Singapore. It is Kachru’s contention that the true creative vitality of English today is to be found in precisely such contexts, and not in what we usually think of as native speaker cultures, which appear more or less monolingual (though with interesting exceptions complicating the picture). Through this argument, Kachru approaches a position familiar from several traditions within postcolonial studies. As a set of basic political and philosophical assumptions, postcolonialism tends to criticize monolingualism as convergent with or consequent upon imperialism. Michael Holquist, for instance, argues that “monolingualism

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has at its heart a passion for wholeness, a desire for unity, a lust for order in a world in which variety and contingency seem to rule” (Holquist 2003: 24–25). Conversely, multilingualism is seen as living with, and often endorsing, the fragmentary and disordered, the various and contingent. This may be true in the abstract, but as a tenet of Kachru’s postcolonial (or, as Randolph Quirk would say, “liberationist”) linguistics – a linguistics which reconsiders the significance of different Englishes – it is not unproblematic. If there are such things as World Englishes, what does the future hold for monolingual native speakers of English? And how do those World Englishes relate to the (multiple) native speaker norms? Viewed from a position such as Holquist’s, monolingualism represents a tyranny of the same, which has to be countered by a philosophy and politics of difference, with a stress on variety and contingency. Yet linguistics is a field in which difference comes into conflict with other priorities, for example in language acquisition. Although to espouse a philosophy of difference and sing the praises of multiple Englishes can be an appealing line of action, it runs the risk of descending into empty political pronouncements, whose lack of substance is sharply highlighted when the alleged beneficiaries of the philosophy of difference find themselves in need of sameness. In the matter of composition classes, there can be a clash between the postcolonial valorization of difference and what is in practice postcolonial students’ own no less clear demand for standardization. The salient point was made by Bruce Horner in his comment on marginality: “Of any seemingly ‘marginal’ tradition we need to ask what it is marginal to, to what effect, in what social historical circumstances, according to whom. We cannot simply label cultural practices marginal or central, dominant or residual, outside history and circumstance” (2000: 180). As many commentators have pointed out over the last twenty years, postcolonial theory can be criticized precisely for embracing difference beyond history, circumstance and context in general. Within the postcolonial framework itself, Alain Badiou (2001) and Peter Hallward (2001) have now mounted a challenge to the paradigm of difference, as a way of reconfiguring postcolonial studies so that teachers will not necessarily demand difference from their students, or be disappointed when difference is not forthcoming. Yet within English studies generally, and within the study of the English language world-wide in particular, the valorization of difference still has a strong hold, largely deriving from the political and cultural considerations thrown up by those colonial histories which led to the spread of English in the first place. Kachru, for instance, has written that “the impression now is that with the diffusion of and resultant innovations in English around the world, universally acceptable standards are absent” (Kachru 1985: 242). From the standpoint of such postcolonial linguistics, de-control is taken to remove English from the tyranny of standards, and to liberate differences from the tyranny of the same. And certainly,



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it is easy to feel, with David Crystal (2004), a certain sadness when the “kaleidoscopic diversity” of “Englishes” is reduced to the sameness of just “English”, a reduction which really can be experienced as tyrannical, and which really does tend to make the world more monochrome. The postcolonial celebration of cultural translation in the form of multiple Englishes is, in its way, positively attractive. After all, any recognition of the various forms of human otherness deserves some credit as an ethically appropriate generosity. But as Quirk (1985: 6) notes, the fact remains: “Ordinary folk with their ordinary common sense have gone on knowing that there are standards in language and they have gone on crying out to be taught them.” And postcolonial linguists ought to be rather disconcerted if and when (some of) the people their teachings have (in theory) empowered to use their own Englishes demand (in practice) what they perceive as the native speaker standard. The point here is not so much that Quirk’s comments are directly opposed to postcolonial theory, but that postcolonial theory will have to be re-thought, in order to take care of the need for difference and the need for sameness at one and the same time. More precisely, it will have to negotiate the relationship between those two needs in specific contexts. Cultural translation can indeed be a cause for celebration, but not always and everywhere, since in some situations the need for sameness seems frankly more important. A theory and practice of education are needed which will reconcile ontological universality with the singular, in an economy of sameness and difference. In the next section I hope to show that the example of Hong Kong illustrates exactly what postcolonial theory has so far overlooked.

Sameness and difference in a postcolonial classroom The questioning of the postcolonial paradigm, particularly in relation to the English language, is relevant to how teaching is conducted in a postcolonial classroom, even if not for all such contexts or for all teachers. Certainly in some contexts, there is ambivalence concerning the “death of the native speaker”, and by no means all the students taking composition courses accept that the native speaker is a “myth”. The survival or the so-called death of the native speaker has been much debated. On the one hand, Ben Rampton (1995: 108) argues that the categories of native speaker and mother tongue have persisted partly because “political interests often have a stake in maintaining the use of these concepts”. Rampton proposes that we displace the genetic, naturalized assumptions behind these concepts with ideas of expertise and symbolic allegiance. On the other hand, though with similar intentions, Kingsley Bolton (2008) argues that by using the category of “native

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speaker” for speakers of, for example, Indian or Philippine English, we may better understand the category as applied to speakers of American or British English. Clearly, then, the category of native speaker has become increasingly open to adaptation or re-invention. In a discussion of the territorialization of language and the native speaker’s “geohistory”, John Trimbur (2008) explains the importance of the 1966 Dartmouth Conference on the Teaching of English for the development of U.S. college composition, an analysis which is also relevant to, and owes much to, contexts outside the US-UK axis. Trimbur describes the native speaker as “an ideological and political problem” that implied “cultural and linguistic homogeneity” and functioned increasingly as “an emblem of threatened national unity” (2008: 144). Despite the spread of English, the assumption continued that English was the prerogative of the Anglo-American centres, within which nativeness was accordingly naturalized. Not only does this assumption seem questionable from the point of non-native speaker nations. Even within the US it can hardly seem completely straightforward. Trimbur particularly highlights the contribution to the Dartmouth conference made by Joshua A. Fishman, who argued that “Anglification does not amount to a simple triumph of monolingualism” (Trimbur 2008: 162), and who urged his colleagues to remember and explore the United States’ ambivalent linguistic history in more depth. That ambivalence has been a fact of history, to which the present-day situation has added continuing immigration and attendant changes of attitude among composition teachers. Bruce Horner argues that what is now needed is “a radical shift from composition’s tacit policy of monolingualism to an explicit policy that embraces multilingual, cross-language writing as the norm for our teaching and research” (Horner 2006: 570). So one way in which postcolonial studies and composition might come together would be through recognizing difference. Perhaps we could indeed muddy the waters when it comes to distinguishing error and innovation, and it is even possible to imagine composition studies “becoming” creative writing. With the necessary qualification that “composition studies” and “creative writing” mean different things in different contexts, what we call composition studies could actually become creative writing, if not at an institutional, practical level, then certainly in theory. In that case we could say that, in a postcolonial context, composition studies was now assuming that error and innovation are at origin indistinguishable, as they very obviously are in much student writing, a circumstance which lends support to postcolonial theory. At the same time, postcolonial theory would have to be revised and enlarged in order to be adequate at the level of individual instances of writing. For the risk is that postcolonial theoreticians may overindulge their tendency to speak for the postcolonial subject. In their concern for that subject’s “subaltern voice”, such theoreticians have at best



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done much to champion marginalized identities, but have sometimes generalized away the specific needs of specific individuals. Especially when it comes to nonliterary, as opposed to literary, writing, there are postcolonial subjects who simply see no need for the postcolonial philosophy of difference. My concern is to explore the challenge to postcolonial theory arising from the classroom experience of Hong Kong, particularly the ambivalence as regards the death of the native speaker. This ambivalence implies, in and of itself, some resistance to a postcolonial philosophy of difference, and to the assumption that cultural translation is an undifferentiated good. Hong Kong is of course just one case among many, and does not necessarily have general relevance. In some postcolonial contexts, to abstain from distinguishing between error and innovation could make perfect sense. But in others, it does not do so, and postcolonial political prescription will not persuade opponents to the philosophy of difference that they should start to use English in any way they please. Composition can become creative under specific political and cultural circumstances. But in some situations, there is no need to blur the distinction between originality and error, and no need to embrace a postcolonial English or a multiplicity of World Englishes. My line of argument obviously raises the question of what actually constitutes, historically and philosophically speaking, a postcolonial context, and also the question of whether composition is actually being practised in historically postcolonial contexts. As already mentioned, the Chinese University of Hong Kong was founded as an alternative to the “colonial” University of Hong Kong, as a multilingual institution. Its different channels for curriculum delivery (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) are kept separate, so that on one level multilingualism is being held at bay. But within the English Department, matters are less controversial and apparently much more straightforward. There is a composition stream, which is distinct from the university’s general English programme taken by all other students, and there are also creative writing courses. As Shirley Lim (2001) has suggested, these creative writing courses provide evidence that Hong Kong students do not fit the stereotypes of materialistic and utilitarian attitudes, and the creative writing training may well provide a designated opportunity for certain forms of creativity deemed unacceptable elsewhere, precisely because these courses are optional, and distinct from the composition classes. This separation chimes with Hong Kong students’ own general theorization of their relationship with English, which is something I take up in a mandatory course “World Englishes and their Cultures.” Students are perfectly capable of recognizing the innovative vitality of, say, South Asian Englishes and Singlish, yet nevertheless distinguish themselves from this stream of creativity in World Englishes. Rather than identifying themselves as practitioners of bilingual creativity, Hong Kongers seem to agree with David Bunton, author of Common English Errors in Hong Kong (1989), who argues

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for the clearest possible distinction between error and innovation, and assumed that native speakers have the authority to make this distinction. Bunton’s book has remained in print for more than two decades, providing some confirmation that many Hong Kongers agree with its perspective. Horner reminds us that we should not equate official pronouncements about language with students’ actual attitudes, because then we risk essentializing the student writer: “Such an approach assumes a false uniformity to student consciousness: it overwrites the articulation of any emergent oppositional consciousness by tuning in only the voicing of official consciousness” (Horner 2000: 38). This warning is particularly relevant for a context often compared with Hong Kong, Singapore, but my point here is that Hong Kong students recognize the partiality of institutional pronouncements about English, but without taking the next step apparently required by postcolonial theory. They do not embrace a marginal expressiveness. In a way they actually distance themselves from Hong Kong English, so qualifying its status as one of the World Englishes. Although Hong Kong English is highly innovative in its blending of different forms of Chinese and English (as is evident from even a cursory investigation of students’ online presence), students tend to disallow its validity beyond any but the most superficial or “non-serious” uses. They would certainly not want their study of composition to blur into creative writing. Some of the reasons for their self-positioning here are obvious enough, having to do with emotional distance, for instance, and with their motivation for learning. Another factor is suggested by some comments made by Ackbar Abbas before the restoration of Hong Kong to China in 1997: “Of all the binarisms that keep things in place, perhaps the most pernicious in the Hong Kong context is that of East and West. This is not to say that there are no differences, but that the differences are not stable; they migrate, metastasize” (1997: 117). This East-West binarism is not only institutional, but also operates at the level of ordinary everyday practice, and especially in matters of language. Outside the university classroom, English is everywhere used creatively, clashing with, transforming, and being transformed by Cantonese. Inside the university classroom, attitudes and practices are as I have indicated. Among the approximately 18% of high school leavers who go on to study at university, there is a resistance to ownership of English. It is almost as if English were indeed “not theirs” but a western prerogative. Another, complementary explanation would be psychoeconomic. Students are conditioned to value investments (of time and money) that are less risky than creativity, especially creativity in English. Discussing creativity in general, Mark Runco makes the point that “different cultures value different things and some of these values directly influence the development and expression of creativity” (Runco



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2004: 12). From culture to culture, the perceived appropriateness of deviation and creativity do vary. In Hong Kong, creativity in English may well seem inappropriate, and something quite distinct from the mainstream “seriousness” of university language-learning. Runco is actually out to tweak a number of stereotypes. He argues that “Western individualism”, although quite possibly real, is not necessarily more conducive to creativity in the Asian classroom than “Asian emotional control”. Other commentators, such as Aik Kwang Ng and Ian Smith, see the entire project of promoting classroom creativity as a paradox: “The more creative a class of students becomes, the more undesirable their behavior appears to the teacher” (2004: 87). This suggests that attitudes are not changing fast enough to foster any desire there may be for in-class creativity, and there may even be cases where creativity is recommended for reductively instrumental reasons, which could again result in inadequate economic and attitudinal resourcing for the creativity desired. At least for some teachers of composition, this could be a cause of concern, even though some other teachers might think differently, perhaps depending on whether they are native, local, or non-native, just as the opinions of students’ parents may vary as well – postcolonial teachers cannot be essentialized any more than postcolonial students (see Braine 2010). The psychoeconomic explanation is realistic, in that it recognizes the global linguistic situation and Hong Kong’s place as an international financial centre (like Singapore). Kingsley Bolton (2003: 200), considering English in the light of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, says that, “[o]ffered a choice between affirming Hong Kong’s identity as a southern Chinese city or as a ‘global’ city, Hong Kong’s Beijing-vetted government has opted for the latter. Such an identity choice inevitably involves the retention of English, if only for ‘pragmatic’ and ‘business’ considerations.” English may well be a colonial legacy, but that is hardly the whole story. Out of hard-headed practicality, English has been fostered for access to the global economy, as was only to be expected of a city which wants to be a major financial hub. This in turn explains why international English has been imagined in terms of a standard form, why Hong Kong English is viewed as exonormative, and why innovation is not valued when it can be written off as error. Students’ reasons for denying the death of the native speaker are formidably down to earth. At the same time, the reality of Hong Kong English is no less indisputable, and extends beyond accent to the grammatical and lexical specificity that defines a variety. As pointed out by Terence T. T. Pang, the fact that this variety is not accepted by the general population, and is not a viable expressive medium in the university classroom, means that it can only be seen as localized but not indigenized:

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While … [Hong Kongers] insist on speaking and writing Standard English (whatever that may mean), and resist the development of a local variety of English, they appropriate the English language by absorbing it into their own language through relexification (as evident in the use of loan words), regrammatization (as evident in code-mixing) and rediscoursaliation (as evident in code-switching). Such language use is not only indicative of an inventive and dynamic culture, but also various pragmatic norms and conventions.  (Pang 2003: 17)

As Pang indicates, there is a dynamic, hybridizing, postcolonial vitality at work, which evinces cultural translation. At some time in the future, this cultural translation may even come to be endorsed and harnessed at an official level. But for the present, it receives no official recognition of any kind, and this remains the case despite some significant shifts in education policy more generally. In fact many of the people who celebrate Hong Kong English are non-local professional linguists. Pang himself records its local non-acceptance with a certain neutrality, and such cold-eyed objectivity is probably the best that Hong Kong English can hope for even now, more than a decade after he first published his remarks. The cultural awareness that would have to accompany its codification is still not in place (see Poon 2006) and, given this widespread lack of endorsement, it simply cannot be the staple of university composition classes.

World Englishes: The promise of a term To explain cases of resistance to creativity in World Englishes is at the same time to explain resistance to the postcolonial injunction to embrace difference in English. The explanations are valid and persuasive for specific contexts, and none of them can be dismissed from the vantage point of a theory which blankly rejects their underlying assumptions. Postcolonial theory, with its paradigm of difference, is actually impatient with the true realities of postcolonial situations, which are far too various to be reduced to a single theoretical model, no matter how relevant the model may be in certain cases. In postcolonial situations there will always be a certain fundamental level of cultural translation. But the particular forms that such translation takes, and particular resistances to it, must also be taken into account. Postcolonial theoreticians cannot responsibly advocate “creativity” when it goes against the perceived best interests of those they hope to make its exponents. There are situations in which the seductiveness of creativity and difference give pause for thought. The qualifications I am seeking to lodge against postcolonial theory obviously run the risk of overgeneralization or essentialization. If postcolonial theoreticians have sometimes essentialized “the student writer”, my rejoinder does tend



Chapter 5.  Error and innovation in postcolonial composition

to essentialize “the native speaker.” Composition training in the US is far more thoroughgoingly postcolonial than in historically poscolonial Hong Kong, where any attempt by teachers to de-essentialize the native speaker will not really be acceptable to students, even though they may understand the altruistic reasoning behind it. Even if they themselves question the native speaker’s privilege, they would not want to replace this with a wholehearted embrace of difference. So for English in Hong Kong as an international language, the way forward might rather be something of a paradox, involving a sense of standards or sameness that is at once restrictive and broadened. On the one hand, Hong Kong students of English are relatively uninterested in symbolic allegiance to their local variety of English, being almost entirely focused on linguistic expertise. On the other hand, and despite their own pragmatic motivations, they probably still assume that cultural identities come first, and are then translated, which would be a plausible and seductive interpretation of the cultural translation that clearly does exist in Hong Kong identity, partly expressed in its specific usage of English. The idea that globalization poses a risk to a localized production of know­ledge is understandable. Globalization is assessed as generally standardizing, and in the specific case of language use (particularly for the non-native speaker) implies restriction, the exonormative, the instrumental, and the emotionally distant. In face of powerful linguistic globalization, the desire to liberate difference, to allow the “death” of the native speaker, and to valorize non-native creativity as a form of cultural translation makes one very good kind of sense, and may even render the pursuit of sameness of standards too disappointing a pedagogical concern. Or this, at least, will probably be the case in certain contexts. For to repeat, contexts do differ. In Singapore, there may well be a threat to localized knowledge production, and one of the manifestations of that threat may well be the Singaporean government’s “hard” and “soft” attempts to rid itself of Singlish. In Hong Kong, at least for the moment the dichotomy of “native-speaker versus non-native-speaker communication” retains pragmatic validity.

Conclusion While this chapter is pessimistic about the scope for creativity in English in Hong Kong university classrooms, such pessimism will be overridden by new developments in the medium term. Writing about Hong Kong in general, and particularly about Hong Kong and English, Bolton (2010: 465) suggests that “until recently, at least, the space available for English – for business, government, international communication, law – has been usually defined in pragmatic terms alone, but attitudes here also seem to be changing”. Given that the Hong Kong government

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has begun to place emphasis on creativity and language arts, and in English no less than in other languages taught, a shift from pragmatic assumptions may indeed be under way (see Burton 2010). In any case, my argument has not been that idiom needs to be barred from English language expression in university contexts, not even (in the postcolonial context, least of all) in a place such as Hong Kong. As Elaine Ho (2010: 435) has recently argued: “For a long time, anglophone Hong Kong writing has been triply marginalized, labelled as elite discourse, as the specialized language of literature divorced from the pragmatic adoption of English by the majority of locals, and as written rather than spontaneous oral performance.” It is not my wish to lend weight to a further marginalization of either Hong Kong English or the Asian Englishes to which recent Hong Kong creative writing is increasingly oriented. Even so, increased integration with China could well lead, as Brian Chan (2007) suggests, to closer identity and linguistic ties, in which case Hong Kong English might remain for ever larval. And insofar as our focus as Hong Kong teachers is on English composition rather than English creative writing, we would do well to prevent the former from becoming the latter. The reality of language learning and language use does not necessarily coincide with political and philosophical impositions such as postcolonial theory and the linguistics of World Englishes, especially when these uncritically assume the absolute desirability of cultural translation. Postcolonial theory seeks to displace the traditional politics of English language use, with its privileging of native speaker creativity. The linguistics of World Englishes, in celebrating those present-day phenomena, tends to displace traditional assumptions about the pragmatics of interlocution, in that so-called non-native speakers are described as increasingly using English to communicate with other non-native speakers. In both cases, what is missing is a sense of realism, a sense that the displacements, to the extent that they are achievable at all, may result in pedagogies which, for particular students in particular contexts, are counterproductive and give rise to negative reactions. In many postcolonial contexts, resistance to the “death of the native speaker” and reluctance to embrace World Englishes obviously do reflect prejudices that are residually quasi-colonialist. Yet even so, every context involves its own responses, which deserve a more neutral manner of description than that of which postcolonial theory has usually been capable. As postcolonial theory further deepens its examination of World Englishes, my hope is that it will become more attuned to the everyday politics and philosophies informing individual postcolonial contexts.



Chapter 5.  Error and innovation in postcolonial composition

References Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. P. Hallward (trans.). London: Verso. Bolton, Kingsley. 2003. Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolton, Kingsley. 2008. “English in Asia, Asian Englishes, and the Issue of Proficiency.” English Today 94: 3–12. Bolton, Kingsley. 2010. “Creativity and World Englishes.” World Englishes 29: 455–466. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-971X.2010.01674.x Braine, George. 2010. Nonnative Speaker English Teachers: Research, Pedagogy and Professional Growth. London: Routledge. Buden, Boris, and Stefan Nowotny. 2009. “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem.” Translation Studies 2: 196–219. DOI: 10.1080/14781700902937730 Bunton, David. 1989. Common English Errors in Hong Kong. London: Pearson. Burton, Pauline. 2010. “Creativity in Hong Kong Schools.” World Englishes 29: 493–507. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-971X.2010.01677.x Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2006. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication 57: 586–619. Chan, Brian Hokshing. 2007. “Hybrid Language and Hybrid Identity? The Case of CantoneseEnglish Code-Switching in Hong Kong.” In East-West Identities: Globalization, Localization, and Hybridization, ed. by Kwok Bun Chan, Jan Walls, and David Haywood, 189–202. Leiden: Brill. Crystal, David. 2004. The Stories of English. London: Allen Lane. Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ho, Elaine. 2010. “Language Policy, ‘Asia’s World City’ and Anglophone Hong Kong Writing.” Interventions 12: 428–441. DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2010.516100 Holquist, Michael. 2003. “What is the Ontological Status of Bilingualism?” In Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. by Doris Sommer, 21–34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Horner, Bruce. 2000. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press. Horner, Bruce. 2006. “Cross-Language Relations in Composition.” College English 68: 569–574. Kachru, Braj. 1985. “Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle.” Reprinted in World Englishes: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, vol. 3, ed. by Kingsley Bolton and Braj Kachru, 241–269. London: Routledge. Kachru, Braj. 2006. “World Englishes and Culture Wars.” In The Handbook of World Englishes, ed. by Braj Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil Nelson, 446–471. Oxford: Blackwell. Lim, Shirley. 2001. “English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process.” Pedagogy 1: 178–184. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lahoucine Ouzgane (eds). 2004. Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Ng, Aik-Kwang, and Ian Smith. 2004. “Why is there a Paradox in Promoting Creativity in the Asian Classroom?” In Creativity: When East Meets West, ed. by Sing Lau, Anna Hui and Grace Ng, 87–112. Singapore: World Scientific. DOI: 10.1142/9789812567192_0005 Pang, Terence. 2003. “Hong Kong English: A Stillborn Variety?” English Today 74: 12–18. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poon, Franky. 2006. “Hong Kong English, China English and World English.” English Today 86: 23–28. DOI: 10.1017/S0266078406002045 Quirk, Randolph. 1985. “The English Language in a Global Context.” In English in the World, ed. by Randolph Quirk and Henry Widdowson, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, Ben. 1995. “Displacing the ‘Native Speaker’: Expertise, Affiliation and Inheritance.” ELT Journal 44: 97–101. DOI: 10.1093/elt/44.2.97 Runco, Mark. 2004. “Personal Creativity and Culture.” In Creativity: When East Meets West, ed. by Sing Lau, Anna Hui, and Grace Ng, 9–23. Singapore: World Scientific. DOI: 10.1142/9789812567192_0002 Trimbur, John. 2008. “The Dartmouth Conference and the Geohistory of the Native Speaker.” College English 71: 142–169.

chapter 6

Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills through selected literary works A strategic approach to writing development in English Amporn Srisermbhok Introduction The significant role of English as a medium for communication in the world today is obvious. Sánchez (2004: 40) remarks that the need for communication among people of different cultures and languages, triggered by traveling and globalization, puts pressure on people to learn languages more quickly and efficiently. For teachers in Thailand, however, teaching English, especially at high school level, still poses a lot of problems. Of the four major language skills, writing would seem to be the most difficult. This may be because Thai teachers actually spend very little time on it. But be that as it may, writing skills are of the utmost importance, and for many reasons. Nunan (2007: 125) points out “at a very general level, written language serves the same function as spoken language.” Or to be more exact, one can speak of several functions: 1. transactional: “public signs in the street, product labels on canned and bottled goods, instruction manuals, maps, television programmes, cheques, newspapers and magazines, advertisements, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, post-it notes”; 2. interpersonal: “letters, e-mails, postcards, diaries”; 3. aesthetic: “novels, comics, movie/play scripts, poems, computer games.” Nunan adds that “in comparison with speaking, writing is more demanding.” Davies et al. (2000: 100) conclude that

doi 10.1075/fillm.1.06sri © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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while spoken communication is supported by tone of voice, gesture, and context, a written text has to communicate through language alone. This usually means more carefully constructed sentences and a greater range of vocabulary and grammar. As a consequence, writing may often be more complex than speech.

The ability to write professionally involves understanding many aspects of language features at work. Otherwise, one will be guilty of grammatical errors and inconsistencies. There have been many attempts to enhance writing skills by means of error analysis, in order to distinguish between errors, which are systematic, and mistakes, which are not. Error analysis is an approach by which, under the influence of behaviourism, applied linguists sought to use the formal distinctions between learners’ first and second languages to predict errors. A key finding of error analysis has been that many learner errors are produced when learners make wrong inferences about a rule in the target language. And as Pitt Corder (1974: 25) noted, “a learner’s errors provide evidence of the system of the language that he/she is using at a particular point of the course.” The research presented in this chapter involved an experiment with a strategic approach to honing the writing skills of twenty senior high school teachers in Thailand. The underlying assumption was that these individuals would quickly improve their writing skills if there were a strong emphasis on process procedures and problem solving, a careful lesson plan, and an explicit presentation of materials. And the hope was that, with improved writing skills, the participants’ own teaching techniques would improve as well. As experienced English teachers, they were in a better position than their senior high school students as regards grammar and vocabulary. But their teaching practice had hitherto reflected the constant changes and variety in language teaching methodology, and in particular what Sánchez (2004: 40) describes as the two main trends: the “grammatical” and the “conversational” approach. These contending approaches represent a dichotomy that seems to reappear again and again in different ways and formats: the dichotomy of written versus oral language. Research has shown that different language skills cannot be singled out as completely separate units. Writing skills are interconnected with other skills, especially reading. In my experiment I therefore used a selection of authentic reading materials, including extracts from the great classics,1 partly in order to make the participants’ learning experience more interesting and inspiring, and partly so 1. The literary texts used were: Emily Dickinson, “There is no frigate like a book”; A. E. Housman, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now”; Robert Frost, “The road not taken”; and John Boyle O’Reilly, “A white rose”; excerpts from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and excerpts from Bertrand Russell’s Prologue to his autobiography. The non-literary texts used were: an extract from Frieda Fordham, “An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology” and Dr Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

as to improve their grasp of grammar. I shared what Weaver (1979: 88) describes as a very common assumption: that the teaching of grammar “will have a positive effect upon students’ ability to use the language.” And grammar as we were thinking of it included a functional dimension of the kind described by Richards (1996b): an emphasis “on how the purpose for which language is used and the contexts in which it appears affect the choices speakers and writers make.” So as teacher-researcher I not only corrected the participants’ grammatical errors but gave them feedback on practical implications and consequences of different manners of expression, so reinforcing what they were learning. As Richards (1996a: 188) points out, “providing feedback to learners on their performance is another important aspect of teaching”. There is no single theory or teaching method that can guarantee success, and if teachers want to become truly professional they need to come up with their own approach to teaching, and work to make learning successful. This experiment was an attempt to inspire the teachers who took part in it to strive for professional excellence by coming up with their own ideas for making the teaching and learning of English a rewarding and worth-while experience. Above all, English teaching cannot afford to rely too much on practices that may seem artificial, cerebral, and out of touch with reality. The experiment reflected a gut feeling about this which coincided with the “ strongly felt pedagogic intuition” described by Piabhu (in Sánchez 2004: 40) as arising from classroom experience and professional discussion in India. What is needeed is not “systematization of language inputs or maximization of planned practice”. Above all, “the development of competence in second language requires … the creation of conditions in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication.”

Rationale and significance of the study To begin with an axiomatic observation, teaching a foreign language is a challenge, especially teaching English to non-native speakers. As English plays a vital role in international communication, students need to be educated to communicate successfully. So it is important to develop teachers’ competence in English so that they can further develop young students’ English proficiency so as to match up to the world of communication today. One still helpful attempt to set benchmarks is a document sponsored by the American government over two decades ago: Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century (1993). This squarely recognizes that the purposes and uses of foreign languages are as diverse as the students who study them. Some students study another language hoping to start a rewarding career

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in the international marketplace or in government service. Others are interested in the intellectual challenge and cognitive benefits accruing to those who master multiple languages. Still others seek greater understanding of other people and other cultures. Many approach foreign language study, as they do other courses, simply to fulfil a graduation requirement. But regardless of the reason for study, foreign languages have something to offer everyone. It is with this in mind that the authors of Standards for Foreign Language Learning identified five goal areas that encompass a variety of motivations: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. Obviously, communication is at the heart of language study. But although, in face-to-face communication, one needs speaking and listening skills, writing and reading skills are also required to further knowledge and understanding and to develop proficiency in all four skills, the most demanding skill of all being writing. Davies et al. (2000: 96) remark that writing is probably the linguistic skill least used by most people in their native language. Even in the most “advanced” societies a significant percentage of the adult population write with difficulty. Good writing skills will not usually develop without some specific training, a good deal of practice, and extensive reading. The beneficial interconnection between writing and other forms of activity, especially reading, has come in for much comment and research. Brown et al. (1991: viii) say that writing is not the act of planning everything you want to communicate ahead of time and then putting it on paper. Writing is a means for thinking, a method of developing ideas and of fleshing out arguments. Recent research in writing suggests that students write more freely and creatively when their writing emerges gradually from a number of sources of insight such as reading material, class discussions, and a teacher’s individual attention.

Srisermbhok (2010: 143) shows that extensive reading can improve students’ writing ability as reflected in their writing journals. Although not all the participants in her study were able to write, as a result of reading experiences most of those with moderate ability did improve their writing. They became able to use correct tenses, and the best of them also improved their writing style. Others researchers have pointed out that even when student writers make a lot of mistakes in spelling, vocabulary and grammar, they may still be able to communicate, which leads Ur (1988: 4) to comment that there is no doubt that a knowledge – implicit or explicit – of grammatical rules is essential for the mastery of a language: you cannot use words unless you know how they should be put together. But there has been some discussion in recent



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

years of the question: do we have to have “grammar exercises”? Isn’t it better for learners to absorb the rules intuitively through “communicative” activities than to be taught through the special exercises explicitly aimed at teaching grammar?

Through reading selected materials outside the classroom ahead of time, students will have more time to absorb them. This means that, as Dawson (2002) puts it, extensive reading in many ways resembles jogging. As it is under the control of the individual, the teacher’s role is “merely” to inspire, suggest, sustain, guide, and enthuse. Intensive reading, by contrast, is like weights training with a personal trainer, requiring great effort and close supervision. Dupuy (1997) has shown that this affects the way students respond, in his study of the preferences as regards instruction and exercises in grammar versus extensive reading of 49 intermediatelevel students of French as a foreign language. An overwhelming majority of these students found extensive reading to be not only more pleasurable than grammar instruction and practice, but also more beneficial for language acquisition. The students explained that whereas reading was fun, interesting, and beneficial for language acquisition, grammar instruction and practice was dull and boring, and its effects small and short-lived. Clearly reading involved a kind of “feel-good” factor here, and one that can be of considerable value to a trainee writer, for as Smith et al. (1996) point out, to be a good writer, you also need confidence. You need to trust your insight, to believe you have good ideas. If you are anxious about your authority, hesitant about your ability to solve problems through writing, you will produce writing that is obscure, riddled with jargon, impenetrable, and confusing.

To which Clouse (2008: 3) adds the point that “the connection between reading and writing” is especially important for college students because “writing in response to reading is the most important way scholars, including student scholars, communicate with one another”. Bailey et al. (2007: xiii), having argued that “college writing – especially writing paragraphs and essays – can enhance students’ lives and help them achieve their goals,” say that “in an integrated approach reading is treated as a prelude to speech, speech as a prelude to composition, and composition as a prelude to further speech and further refinement of thinking.” To repeat, then, what this entire discussion tends to suggest is that writing, the most difficult skill, can be improved through the integration with other skills, especially reading. Given this, it is a natural step to introduce extracts from suitable literary texts not only to enrich students writers’ ideas and imagination as required for good writing but also to enhance their general proficiency. A renewed interest in the use of literature in the communicative classroom for ESOL students (English for

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Speakers of Other Languages) was noted by Strong (1996), who explained that literature may be part of a communicative pedagogy in three ways: (1) as a context in which to develop students’ reading strategies and knowledge of non-fiction and literary texts; (2) as the basis of an extensive reading programme, with attendant acquisition of new vocabulary and grammatical forms; (3) as an opportunity to explore cross-cultural values. One reading strategy found particularly useful for encouraging reading is the exploration of story grammar, which provides common terms of reference and a direction for group discussion. While students are learning to apply story grammar to stories they are reading, an extensive reading programme can be undertaken, with students selecting their own reading materials from a classroom shelf or from a self-access area in the library. Related classroom activities can include discussions, book reports, teacher book-presentations, small-group book sharing, and sustained silent reading periods. Book content, including cultural and thematic information, can be used for a variety of language and cultural learning activities (e.g. in cloze procedures), timeline construction, and response to specific passages or events. Despite the benefits of such methods, in Thailand reading needs special encouragement, since reading is not an activity which Thais greatly enjoy. The experiment described in the present chapter assumed that the best way to try to improve the situation was to begin with English teachers, so that they would experience for themselves how reading techniques can become a stepping stone to improving writing ability. The experiment was undertaken as a professional development pilot project for twenty senior high school teachers, who were selected by their schools to participate in a sixty-hour intensive training workshop, divided into two sessions of thirty hours each. The first session was devoted to teaching pedagogy and testing, including lesson planning, while the second session was devoted to developing the participants’ writing skills by making use of reading as a tool for language reinforcement. This project ran from 28th September to 2nd October 2009. The fact that the participants could devote themselves to the workshop full time led to favourable results. First, they were encouraged to speak English all the time, both in and outside the classroom. Secondly, they had enough time to read selected materials and exchange ideas with their peers. Thirdly, their writing on different topics revealed their weak points, so that as teacher-researcher I could correct their mistakes with positive feedback and encouragement to improve their writing skills. Finally, they were inspired to continue developing their language skills by using the follow-up assignments provided at the end of the session. The assumption that good feedback can improve learning correlates with the findings of Brown et al. (1994: 7), who comment that learning involves “some



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

form of practices, perhaps reinforced practice.” Giving writing assignments after reading assignments definitely reinforced the participants’ writing skills. I then evaluated their writing, identifying errors, making comments, and quickly returning the assignments so that the participants learned to improve their writing. After the participants had made their corrections, they read their essays to the whole class. In this way, they became more confident in using English for communication with their peers. Moreover, they found that the approach could be usefully applied within their own teaching so as to improve the English of their senior high school students.

Objectives of the study The study aimed 1. to employ a strategic approach to develop the participants’ writing skills; 2. to use reading as a reinforcement to improve the participants’ writing competence; and 3. to motivate the participants to apply what they have learned to develop their teaching in their schools. The main research questions were: 1. How does reading impact the participants’ writing development? 2. In what way does the strategic approach help develop the participants’ skills? The following terms were used in the study: 1. The “participants” were twenty senior high school teachers from Education District  I and II who were selected by the Directors of twenty schools in Pathumthani Province. 2. “Strategic approach” refers to the techniques employed to integrate theory and practice interactively in order to motivate the participants for cooperative learning so as to improve their writing skills.

Methods used in the study The methodology included the data about the population, data about their writing, and data analysis. The research instruments consisted of the participants’ writing errors as reflected in the pre-test and subsequent writing assignments.

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The population The population in this research consisted of the twenty senior high school teachers selected from Pathumthani Education District I and II. Altogether there were 19 Thai teachers and one Filipino. Additional information about them is given below.

The procedures To recapitulate, the experiment investigated how a strategic approach helped develop the participants’ language competence, especially writing, and ran from 28th September to 2nd October 2009, with a total number of 30 hours for intensive language learning, and making particular use of authentic reading materials as inspiration and models. The contents of the programme covered: – – – – – – – – – –

interpersonal communication theory mapping communication space personal communication styles word power parts of sentences and parts of speech reading techniques selections relevant to global issues denotation and connotation selected poems and extracts from major fiction and non-fiction online articles on cultivating global literacy through English as an international language, learning English as a mother tongue, new ways of studying English, standards for foreign language learning, and the future of Englishes.

All the materials were given to the participants on the first day together with the details of the workshop course syllabus so that they could prepare their study ahead of time. The course began by analysing the participants’ language needs as reflected in a pre-test on “Myself,” in which the participants introduced themselves by writing a short paragraph of about 100 words. Then they read this aloud to their peers. No in-depth comments were made, but as teacher-researcher I asked each participant to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses as a preparatory warm-up session. As the workshop moved on, I applied theoretical perspectives on language learning, with a lot of related authentic materials, making use of the content in order to educate the participants about language teaching and learning, and highlighting the skills of not only writing but reading, speaking and listening as well. As the medium of instruction was English, all the participants practised



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

their listening skills during their peers’ presentations. Skimming, scanning, and other reading techniques were introduced to enhance participants’ reading skills and comprehension, and participants were encouraged to use all four skills as much as possible. For oral practice, a lot of discussion took place in class for about thirty minutes after reading, so as to make sure the participants clearly understood the reading passages, and this was followed by remedial work on grammar: parts of sentences and parts of speech with illustrations from the reading selections, then writing assignments on related topics. All the participants were encouraged to write their assignments in class, since I could be immediately ready to offer any help needed, and to make sure that the participants understood what they were expected to write, applying the things they were learning as the workshop moved ahead. On average, the length of each essay was to be approximately 150 words. When they finished their writing, all participants read their essays to the class for about five minutes each and then handed in their assignments for evaluation and corrections. After the assignments were returned to the participants, they had to make corrections, and individual conferences were arranged for weaker participants so as to make sure they understood the corrections.

Method of data collection The main research instruments were the participants’ written assignments based on the topics given in class. Their writings were evaluated according to the standard criteria for writing in Jacobs et al. (1981): organization, topic sentence, supporting detail and conclusion, including the use of structures, choice of words, spelling and punctuation. Each assignment was corrected with feedback and returned to the participants during the next meeting. As noted, individual feedback was also arranged so that the weaker participants would understand their limitations and be able to improve their other writing assignments. All in all, there were 80 essays on four topics, including 20 Haiku poems. Each corrected assignment was copied as data collection for analysis. At the end of the workshop, the participants presented their overall communication mapping activities to the class and then gave their written evaluation and feedback on the workshop.

Data analysis All the participants’ writing assignments were corrected, analysed and classified according to types of mistake, which were then presented in tables for clarity.

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Findings The findings include further data about the participants’ writing errors and writing improvements. Their feedback on the workshop was also analysed and presented in tables. For clarity, the findings are divided into three parts: (1) personal information about the participants, (2) the participants’ writing errors, and (3) the participants’ writing improvement.

Part I: Personal information about the participants Personal information about the participants was obtained with an evaluation form. The ages of the participants ranged from 25 to over 50. However, 14 out of the 20 participants were aged over 41. There were 3 males and 17 females. Their teaching experience varied from 3 years to over 12 years. The participants also had experience of attending short-term workshops for professional development on various topics such as critical thinking, lesson planning, and testing. Eight participants had obtained a Master’s degree, the others a Bachelor’s degree. Part II: The participants’ writing errors in the pre-test The types of errors found in the participants’ pre-test consisted of various grammatical errors according to their background. Obviously those with little writing skills made a lot of grammatical mistakes, from the very basic to the more complex, such as the misuse of articles, modifiers, subject/verb agreements, parts of speech, parts of sentences, and punctuation. Other errors had to do with organization of the subject matter and spelling. As researcher-teacher I adopted the scales defined in Jacobs et al. (1981) in evaluating the participants’ writing ranging from Level 4 to Level 1, using the scores as the criteria for classification of the participants’ writing skills. Level 4 is considered “good” (scores between 75 and 100), Level 3 “fair” (scores between 65 and 74), Level 2 “rather poor” (scores between 45 and 64), Level 1 is “very poor” (scores between 0 and 44).The data from the pre-test on the writing assignment “Myself ” were not evaluated, but were used to underpin the participants’ grammatical background. These data helped me pay more attention to the participants who needed more advice on how to use some grammatical structures in order to improve their writing. Since the participants were keen to develop their language skills, they were cooperative and alert to even simple mistakes. Hence, teaching and learning was rewarding for both the participants and me. In the pre-test, a wide range of grammatical errors were made. Findings from all the participants’ pre-tests show 239 mistakes. These are classified and ranked from the least frequent mistakes to the most frequent mistakes in Table 6.1.



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

Table 6.1  Grammatical and punctuation errors in the pre-test Type of mistake

Occurrence

Percentage

Gerund Parts of speech Run-on sentence Word order Connective verb Passive Pronoun reference Subject/verb agreement Fragment Infinitive Modifier Preposition Article Tense Vocabulary Total

4 6 6 7 8 12 13 14 15 16 18 27 27 32 34 239

1.67% 2.50% 2.50% 2.92% 3.35% 5.02% 5.44% 5.87% 6.28% 6.69% 7.53% 11.30% 11.30% 13.39% 14.24% 100.00%

The data in Table 6.1 reveal that prepositions, articles, tenses and verbals were problematical. Prepositions and articles may seem easy, but in practice these still posed a lot of problems, even among those who had extensive experience studying English. But the most serious problems involved errors to do with vocabulary. This may be because Thais (even teachers) do not read much, so that their use of vocabulary is limited, which was why this workshop focused on reading as a tool to enhance the participants’ writing skills.

Part III: The participants’ writing improvements After the pre-test, the participants were assigned to write in prose and poetry. There were 60 essays on three topics (“How a Strange Thing Happened to Me,” “The Moment I Got Enlightened,” “The Most Important Thing in My Life”) and twenty Haiku poems. Evaluation of the essays was adapted from the scales of evaluation in Jacobs et al. (1981), looking at content and organization in the traditional essay writing style, with such benchmarks as introduction, topic sentences, adequate detail, order of ideas, relevant detail, coherence, logic, and conclusion. In terms of language, attention was paid to vocabulary, form and usage, and structures. The findings showed that most of the participants improved their writing. These essays were quite well-written as regards the topics set, providing appropriate discussion with specific detail. In terms of organization, the essays provided clear supporting details in logical order. However, there were some grammatical mistakes. 45 essays were graded as Level 4, 15 essays as Level 3.

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Level 4. Types of grammatical and punctuation error Interestingly, the nature of grammatical mistakes and misused punctuation (see Table 6.2) in the essays classified as Level 4 differ remarkably from those presented in Table 6.1. Table 6.2  Grammatical and punctuation errors in Level 4 essays Type of mistake Fragment Modifier Spelling Run-on sentence Pronoun reference Connector Subject/verb agreement Comma splice Passive Preposition Article Vocabulary Tense Total

Occurrence 2 2 2 2 2 4 5 7 8 9 10 10 14 77

Percentage 2.59% 2.59% 2.59% 2.59% 2.50% 5.19% 6.49% 9.09% 10.38% 11.68% 12.98% 12.98% 18.18% 100.00%

The findings reveal that there were far fewer mistakes in this category than in the pre-test. However, the serious problems lie in the same features: prepositions, articles, tenses, and vocabulary. With regard to tenses, although 14 mistakes may seem a lot, it is rather low in comparison to the total number of essays. As for vocabulary, the mistakes are caused by translation or limited knowledge of vocabulary, as these teachers still needed to read more to become competent. One factor not to be overlooked is the interference from the mother tongue, which can be considered one of the great barriers among Thais learning English, since the structure of the Thai language and English is totally different. In Thai, there are no tenses: the speaker simply adds a particle like the word แล้ว {Laew} to mark the past action. In fact, most of the mistakes found involved a confusion of the present, past and perfect tenses, although the number of occurrences can be considered low. However, when mistakes do occur, they do not just come one at a time: there was a mixture of incorrect use of tenses, prepositions, articles and vocabulary, even among those who seemed to have mastered a certain level of language competence as classified in Level 4. The findings in Table 6.2 also reveal that the most serious barrier among Thais learning English is indeed the interference of the mother tongue, which causes



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

ineffective communication; although a sentence may be grammatically correct, somehow confusion arises, as can be exemplified with a sample of the sentences found in the writing assignments of the participants classified as Level 4. The original is marked in roman type, the corrections in italics.

(1) He ordered me by pointing with his toe; I can’t bear any more.

a. When he gave me an order, pointing me with his toe, I could no longer bear it. b. As soon as he pointed at me, using his toe, I quitted my job.

(2) I wish I will be a good teacher. I will teach them to be polite to the others.

a. I wish I were a teacher to teach my students to be polite to others. b. Because of that, I want to be a teacher to teach my students to treat people politely.

(3) I think everybody has at least one important thing in their minds, so don’t stop to think of it.

a. I think everyone knows what is important for him and tries to live by it. b. I think one lives by what he considers important.

(4) I passed the interview to be a teacher, That is all my destination.

a. Passing the interview to become a teacher, I have achieved my goal. b. I feel I have achieved my goal, passing the interview to become a teacher.

(5) It makes me feel like I am the one who do everything that I want but do not make the other in trouble.

a. It makes me feel free to do anything I want as long as I cause no trouble. b. I feel free to do anything without causing anyone any problem.

(6) I hope that the government will promote the teachers without doing the academic work.

a. I hope the government will promote teachers advance without imposing academic demand on them. b. I hope the government will provide incentives for teachers without a great demand on their academic development.

(7) Education makes me build opinions and capable of interpreting things rightly.

a. Education enhances my conceptual thinking skills and understanding of things around me. b. Education broadens my perceptions and world views.

Level 3. Types of grammatical and punctuation error There were 15 essays classified as Level 3. These essays showed moderate understanding of the topic with limited supporting details. The essays were wordy, and although the writers demonstrated some understanding of the vocabulary to be

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used, they got confused with the parts of speech. Hence, they made some grammatical mistakes. In addition, there were some spelling mistakes. In general, the subject matter or the message conveyed was understandable. The types of mistakes found in this level are presented in Table 6.3. Table 6.3  Grammatical and punctuation errors in Level 3 essays Type of mistake

Occurrence

Percentage

Fragment Run-on sentence Gerund Connector Comma splice Passive Subject/verb agreement Spelling Modifier Pronoun reference Preposition Tense Article Vocabulary Total

2 3 3 4 4 4 6 7 7 7 7 8 13 14 89

3.25% 3.37% 3.37% 4.49% 4.49% 4.49% 6.74% 7.87% 7.87% 7.87% 7.87% 8.99% 14.60% 15.73% 100.00%

The findings presented in Table 6.3 clearly show that tenses, articles, and vocabulary are the categories in which most errors occur. However, it is still interesting to discover that these are the most common errors among all writing assignments, including the pre-test, although the number of mistakes decreased significantly. In this category, the incorrect tenses again involved confusions of past, present and perfect tenses. With regard to articles, the writers confused the definite (the) and indefinite article (a/an). This may have been due to carelessness or lack of understanding on how to use these two articles in practice. Another factor may have been that the participants do not write often enough to use these articles correctly. But the most serious problem in Table 6.3 are vocabulary errors. As in Table 6.2, it is not surprising to find that the main barrier is the mother tongue interference; the writers render their thoughts in Thai before writing them in English. And in addition, participants’ vocabulary mistakes are caused by inadequate practice or not enough reading to broaden their vocabulary. These problems with vocabulary can be exemplified with a sample of the sentences found in the writing assignments of the participants classified as Level 3. The original is marked in roman type, the corrections in italics.





Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

(1) In young I had thought why did not I have a comfortable life.

a. Since I was young, I often wondered why my life was uncomfortable. b. I used to wonder, during my youth, why life was so difficult for me.

(2) Whoever did not believe in spirit, I did not mind.

a. I believed in a spirit, and did not mind if others didn’t. b. I did not mind if other people were not superstitious like me.

(3) Before I received the phone, my right eye had been blinking many times.

a. My right eye had blinked many times before I answered the phone. b. My right eye kept blinking before I answered the phone.

(4) Peace and self utility are the most inner treasures of virtue.

a. Peace of mind and public service are most treasured as virtues. b. Peace of mind and the utility of one’s service are most precious inner moral values. (5) Although you didn’t study there, you should try to study in some where. a. Although you could not afford to study there, you could try somewhere else. b. It did not matter if you could not study there. Try another place.

(6) We drove back to say something to apologise it.

a. We drove to back to make an apology. b. We drove back to apologise to the cat’s owner for our mistake.

Comparison of participants’ writing improvement These findings reveal the participants’ writing improvement from the beginning until the end of the workshop. The intensive workshop provided the participants with a communicative environment that encouraged them to use English inside and outside the classroom. The fact that they had to read authentic materials both intensively and extensively impacted all four skills of language improvement (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). They developed their writing, which is considered the most difficult skills, in both form and content. Participants’ understanding of grammar improved really quite considerably. When comparing the results of the pre-test (239 mistakes) with those of the assigned essays (166 mistakes in Levels 3 and 4 combined), we find that the mistakes decreased by 30.5%. Participants’ improvements in using discourse markers These findings show that the participants improved their essay writing as assessed by reliable and appropriate criteria. In addition to the decrease in grammatical mistakes, the participants improved the use of discourse markers in their expository writing as well. Below are some examples of the participants’ ability to use discourse markers in different contexts.

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1. Contrastive markers: when the participants wanted to signal contrasts in ideas, they used different discourse markers apart from but, by replacing it with although, on the other hand, or on the contrary. 2. Inferential markers: when the participants wanted to state a conclusion, they did so by using a series of transitional devices such as of course, as a result, because of this, or then, instead of just using the word so. 3. More elaborative markers: when the participants wanted to give additional details, they developed skills in using more elaborative discourse markers apart from and, e.g. above all, also, besides, furthermore, in addition, moreover, and too. 4. Signal words providing a reason: when providing a reason for their argument or explanation, the participants learned to use different discourse markers apart from because, e.g. since, for, after all, or that’s why. The raised awareness of the importance of signal words or discourse markers showed that their communicative skills improved, especially in writing, and that their communication became more fluently natural.

Participants’ writing improvement reflected in their haiku poems As mentioned earlier, different strategies were employed to encourage the participants to enjoy writing. Apart from the writing assignments assigned in their expository writing, on the last day of the workshop they were encouraged to develop their language skills through poetry, after having been exposed to different ways to use figurative languages. When they had received enough background to analyse the selected poems, they were assigned to write haiku poems expressing their own ideas on anything that interested them. The ideas could be concrete or abstract. The participants really enjoyed writing haiku poems, which gave impressive form to their own ideas or sense of values. Since haikus consist of only three verses, there were hardly any grammatical errors. Conclusions and implications This descriptive research explored the positive outcomes of a strategic approach to writing development of twenty senior high school teachers during an intensive workshop. The findings answered two research questions.

Research question 1. How does reading impact the participants’ writing development? The data from both the participants’ writing assignments and feedback to the questionnaire revealed that both intensive and extensive reading assignments had



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

a positive impact on their writing development, and on language learning in general. The participants felt that they had improved their vocabulary and felt more confident in communicating with their peers. At the same time, reading developed their overall language proficiency, which showed in their writing. When the writing tasks were relevant to what they had read, they could appropriately employ the structures and vocabulary in real communication. Moreover, they felt that they could read faster and had gained more confidence in using the language. This was attested by the participants’ improvement in the writing assignments. In the pre-test, more grammatical mistakes were made, especially by those with little practice in writing. The mistakes ranged from connective verbs, passive voice, pronoun references, subject/verb agreements, fragments, infinitives, modifiers, prepositions, articles, tenses and vocabulary. However, after the participants got acquainted with the reading texts and absorbed the way the language was used in both academic and natural settings, they improved their writing and other skills. Consequently, they made fewer mistakes and even when there were some rather insignificant mistakes, such as with prepositions and articles, their writing was still understandable. In other words, practice is necessary for the participants to improve their communication skills. Interestingly, the same types of mistakes still appeared, but they occurred less frequently. One barrier not to be overlooked is interference with the mother tongue, which is especially cumbersome for Thai learners of English. The data reveals a high correlation among the four communication skills, confirming that it is important to integrate the four skills in language teaching, even when one particular skill is emphasised. There are many ways in which the teacher can enhance the learners’ four skills in the classroom, e.g. by integrating reading with other related classroom activities. Group work is really useful to encourage interactions in class. So small group discussions, oral presentation, roleplay, questions and answers by peers, including cultural learning activities aspired by selected literary works, are all strongly recommended. The impact of reading on writing improvement is significant. The participants learned to communicate more effectively thanks to their improved use of different discourse markers: contrastive markers, inferential markers, more elaborative markers, including appropriate signal words in providing reasons to make their communication more fluent and natural.

Research question 2. In what way does the strategic approach help develop the participants’ writing skills? The participants’ feedback revealed that they learned best when the instructor had sound knowledge of the subject matter and was well-qualified for teaching, with good preparation and lesson-planning, and developing a good rapport with the

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class. The instructor’s teaching style was of the utmost importance in engaging the learners’ educational ambitions, so that they would find what they were learning useful both personally and professionally. All these qualities are necessary in order to make the learners feel truly comfortable to learn and share ideas with their peers. As experienced in this workshop, the participants felt rewarded and satisfied with their language improvement, especially in writing. As the teachers have a very important role in their classrooms, it is recommended that they are always well-prepared, active and lively. This way, they can achieve remarkable results. And if they are positive, up-beat, confident and patient, thay can create a lively learning atmosphere that will make learning enjoyable and rewarding. This can be applied not only in language learning, but in any other subjects as well. The outcomes of the workshop not only proved that the strategic approach was successful in developing the participants’ writing skills; it also made them more enthusiastic about improving the qualities of their teaching in the future. As reflected in the feedback, the participants had become interested in improving their teaching strategy, lesson planning, and use media and technology in class, and in enhancing their knowledge about linguistics, literature and culture, plus their awareness of themselves as communicators. This is very important since all the participants were senior high school teachers of English: in the long run, their own students would benefit from their enthusiasm to keep on developing themselves and to apply what they have learned to improve their own teaching.

Implications of the research outcome The findings presented here have shown that the participants improved their writing and other related skills with positive attitudes on language learning and teaching, and did so even in a short period of time. This outcome was the result of the applying a strategic approach involving the integration of both content and task-based approaches with a selection of appropriate teaching materials used as models both to educate the participants and enrich their knowledge about language teaching and to inspire them to improve their language skills with relevant class activities. In order to inspire the learner to learn, the instructor must be a role model, and the strategy used in this research can be applied in any other classes as well. This research is also useful for teachers interested in learning about the types of mistake that commonly occur among Thai learners of English, and how to improve their teaching. Comments have also been offered on evaluation, not least because sound and acceptable feedback or teaching evaluation is of vital importance to learners. If learners accept that the evaluation and feedback is fair, they will be willing to



Chapter 6.  Cultivating learners’ intellectual growth and conceptual thinking skills

improve their mistakes and are encouraged to learn. A teacher has to learn to be optimistic and patient, even when learners make many mistakes. That means providing positive feedbacks to encourage them to learn and keep on improving themselves. The impact of the teacher’s feedbacks on students’ performance is highlighted by Sharot’s (2011) remarks on the “optimism bias”. If the feedback is positive, it encourages students to become more motivated to learn and improve themselves. If it is negative, it will not only damage the student’s enthusiasm to learn, but also ruin their self-esteem.

Limitations of the study As the participants in this research were only from Pathumthani Province, they cannot represent all Thai teachers. Moreover, the participants in this research had an advanced educational background: some had a Master’s degree in English, and one participant was a Filipino whose English was equivalent to that of a native speaker. Therefore, the outcome may not be applied indiscriminately to other groups with different educational backgrounds. But even so, those interested in improving learners’ writing skills could well consider engaging in a similar research project with different target groups so as to see whether the same procedures can be applied.

References American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. 1993. National Standards in Foreign Language Education: A Collaborative Project of ACTF, AATF, AATG, AATI, AATSP, ACL/ APA, ACTR, CLASS/CLTA, and NCST/ATJ. New York. Bailey, Richard E., and Linda Denstaed. 2007. Destinations: An Integrated Approach to Writing Paragraphs and Essays. Boston: McGraw Hill. Brown, H. Douglas, et al. 1991. Challenges: A Process Approach to Academic English. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents. Brown, H. Douglas, et al. 1994. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents. Clouse, Barbara Fine. 2008. The Student Writer: Editor and Critic. Boston: McGraw Hill. Corder, Stephen Pitt. 1974. “The Significance of Learners’ Errors.” In Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition, ed. by Jack C. Richards, 19–27. London: Longman. Davies, Paul, and Eric Pearse. 2000. Success in English Teaching: A Complete Introduction to Teaching English at Secondary School Level and Above. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawson, Nick. 2002. “Jogging to Language Competence.” The Language Teacher 26 (11): 35. http://jalt-publications.org/old_tlt/articles/2002/11/op1.

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Dupuy, Beatrice. 1997. “Voices from the Classroom: Students Favour Extensive Reading over Grammar Instruction and Practice, and Give Their Reasons.” Applied Language Learning 8: 253–261. Jacobs, Holly L. et al. 1981. Testing ESL Composition: A Practical Approach. Rowly, MA: Newbury House. Nunan, David. 2007. What Is This Thing Called Language? New York: Macmillan. Richards, Jack C. 1996a. Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Richard, Jack C. 1996b. “Series’ Editor’s Preface.” In Functional English Grammar: An Introduction for Second Language Teachers, ed. by Graham Lock, ix–x. Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press. Sánchez, Aquilino. 2004. “The Task-based Approach in Language Teaching.” International Journal of English Studies 4: 39–71. Sharot,Tali. 2011. “The Optimism Bias.” Time, Saturday, May 28th. Smith, Edward L., and Stephen A. Bernhardt. 1996. Writing at Work: Professional Writing Skills for People on the Job. Lincolnwood IL: NTC. Srisermbhok, Amporn. 2010. “Exploitation of IT to Enhance Students’ Extensive Reading Skills: A Case Study of Fourth-Year Business English Major Students.” In Proceedings of the 17th Annual KOTESOL International Conference. Seoul, Korea, October 24–25, 2009. Korea TESOL. pp. 133–145. Strong, Gregory. 1996. “Using Literature for Language Teaching.” Thought Currents in English Literature 69: 291–305. ERIC Document Reproduction Service.No.ED407860. Ur, Penny. 1988. Grammar Practice Activities. Glassgow: Bell & Brain Ltd. Weaver, Constance. 1979. Grammar for Teachers. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.

part ii

Theoretical considerations Language, culture, literature

chapter 7

Critical glissantism Édouard Glissant’s views on language(s) Kathleen Gyssels



One day in Indonesia an educator and writer said to me: – How I envy you. – Why? I asked him. – The English language is your mother tongue, he told me. … You can appeal to a vast, world-wide audience. – Yes, I agreed. – But, Goddamit, they taught us Dutch! he stormed. What can I say in Dutch? To whom can I speak? (Richard Wright 1995: 37)

During his long and prolific career, the Martinican author Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) philosophized about the concreteness of place and the condition of belonging to a West Indian country still wrapped in a neo-colonialist package – in that Martinique was an Overseas Department of France, and not an independent country. He also explored what Caribbean consciousness meant in relation to Africa, Europe and the world at large, and his work here involved a double awareness: on the one hand, that West Indians express themselves in a minor language, but must shift to a major language if their voices are to be heard; and on the other hand, that West Indians must promote creolization and the idea of a rhizomatic identity in order to challenge the European and African hegemony, and to become audible in the concert of so-called minor literatures during an era of globalization. In the context of World Literature and World Language, Glissant’s rhetoric in fact sought to elevate the local to the global. Yet Glissant’s dream of promoting a “world literature in French” could not disguise his own willingness to take on a leading role in patronizing FrenchCaribbean literature (see Gyssels 2012a and 2013a), and in this anti-imperialist warmongering he showed some disturbing blind spots. Paradoxically, his grand theory of “Whole-World” literature completely obliterated Caribbean literature in Dutch, for instance (Gyssels 2000). When asked which contemporary writers he felt closest to, he named Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Wilson Harris (Guyana), and the Martinican politician and poet Aimé Césaire (Glissant 1997: 71). What he doi 10.1075/fillm.1.07gys © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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conspicuously failed to mention was a postcolonial literary tradition even older than that of the French Caribbean, and one which can be credited with newspapers in Papiamento, journals, and – perhaps most notably of all – theoretical discussions of the phenomenon of creolization. This and other omissions, though partly understandable in the absence of French translations of pioneering texts from the Dutch Antilles and Surinam, nevertheless confirm that Glissant’s own thinking about Centre and Periphery paradoxically repeated colonial reflexes. From some of his pronouncements one might have expected that he would become a mainstream authority in the field of postcolonial studies. But the fact that he did not is hardly surprising. The explanation lies not only in the opacity of his own writing but in his neglect of the three Guyanas as a whole. He did not consistently practise what he preached.

The vindication of Creole Of course, I am aware of these torments. For a long time now we have thought that languages can suffer, agonize, starve to death, harden into fruitless certainties. Not so long ago I have argued that a language could be neurotic, … a language one uses fearfully gains fragrance and intensity. (Glissant 2002: 8–9)1

The question of language and languages (multilingualism and diglossia) was a major concern for Glissant from his early Le discours antillais (1981) to his last essays, Une nouvelle région du monde (2006) and Philosophie de la Relation (2009). This interest arose from his own personal origins in an island ruled by French colonizers, where Creole had long been a forbidden language. Despised as “patois nègre” by whites and the coloured élite alike, Creole was considered a plantation language, a language which, along with slavery, was doomed to disappear in the event of the island’s becoming independent (Glissant 1989: 121). But herein lies Martinique’s first problem: it never did gain independence from France, because in 1946 Aimé Césaire secured the vote in favour of départementalisation, after which French Guyana, Guadeloupe and its dépendances, Martinique, Réunion, and St. Pierre and Miquelon had the status of French Overseas Departments. As a result, Glissant’s untiring exploration of language in terms of nation and the

1. “Bien entendu, je conçois ces tourments. Il y a longtemps que nous supposons que les langues peuvent pâtir, se démettre, agoniser, mourir d’inanition, se raidir en certitudes infertiles. J’ai soutenu naguère qu’une langue pouvait être névrotique, … une langue qu’on fréquente en tremblant gagne en fragrances et en intensité.” Unless otherwise indicated by the list of references, all translations into English are my own.



Chapter 7.  Critical glissantism 105

building of a Martinican community was doomed to fail. Or rather, perhaps, it was more or less bound to develop into a more ambitious project for the entire world, a project of somewhat ambivalent value for his own native island. For Glissant, obsessed as he was with the symbolic killing of the Father, it was important to distance himself from négritude and the “Fathers” of that movement: the Martinican icon Césaire, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and, to a lesser degree, the Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas, the third man of négritude. Nor did Glissant aspire to languish in the shadow of that other intellectual from Martinique, Frantz Fanon. The theorist of postcolonial violence, as Glissant (1989: 25) called Fanon, aptly entitled the first chapter of his Peau Noire, Masques Blanc (1952)2 “Le Noir et le langage”,3 quoting Damas’ most famous poem “Hoquet.” But Fanon also had a strong distaste for a certain alienation he noted among brilliant intellectuals from the Antilles, a kind of collective psychosis which began from the denial of one’s mother tongue in favour of the father tongue. So Glissant, in his own struggle for academic and public attention, heralded the concept of antillanité. Then later, when faced with the failed federation of Caribbean nation states, he launched créolisation as a new collective label, subsequently to be picked up by Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphäel Confiant as “créolité”, though Glissant himself, disavowing créolité because its suffix suggests fixity, stuck to créolisation. In his very first essay, Glissant recommended the use of Creole as one of the rare remains of ancestral memory, a direct tool to access the hidden and haunting past. But he also acknowledged that the conflict between the mother tongue and the official language French produced “in the Caribbean mind an unsuspected source of anguish” (Glissant 1989: 120). The last essays published before his death in February 2011 showed that his focus had gradually shifted. He realized that Creole was threatened, and that it would one day disappear (together with the island Martinique); he now mourned for the inescapable and irreversible extinction of a “small community” (see Gyssels 2008). And whereas he had earlier fought for the right to use Creole, at the end of his life he very strikingly warned users of Creole, and especially writers in Creole, against folklorizing their culture. Having earlier praised his native island and its community for offering a model for the creolization of “the whole world”, the “Tout-monde” at large, in his last works he turned to the global village and dealt with sombre questions such as genocidal violence, the Palestinian crisis, ecological disasters, and the threatened disappearance of his own native island and society into the “Chaos World.” 2. Black Skin, White Masks. 3. The Negro and language.

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Even so, for Glissant the challenge was always to preserve a distinct identity and not become diluted in the multicultural magma, and this concern was always rooted in considerations of language. Atavistic societies or conquering nations had imposed their language, religions and customs upon others. They had dominated by obliging the colonized or oppressed to speak the tongue of the colonizer. Martinique, as a non-atavistic society, a society not defined by a one-root-identity, in no way corresponded to this model and did not fulfil the ideal of a strong nation state. But although Glissant, like Homi Bhabha (1990) and Marc Redfield (2010), speculated on how a suitable narrative might be able to foster a strong sense of community, the political status of the French Antilles as Overseas Departments put a stop to any endeavour of this kind. Glissant realized not only that there was a threat to the French-dominated Creole idiom of the French Antilles, but that even French itself was rapidly losing ground, in a globalizing world where the unchallenged lingua franca was already English. The French Empire had exported the French language to many countries and far-away places, thereby assuring its prestige during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the long nineteenth century, it was French that had functioned as Europe’s lingua franca, being used in cultural contacts between France and the Low Countries, the Francophone part of Belgium, and remote or peripheral areas. But if Antoine Rivarol, in his famous essay De l’universalité de la langue française (1991 [1783]), could maintain that among all the languages of Enlightenment Europe French was superior, and the one mostly likely to become the world language, developments after the Second World War clearly showed his linguistic patriotism to have been mistaken. To adapt W. E. B. DuBois’s (1903) famous comment that the question of the twentieth century would be the colour line, one could say that the twenty-first century will be the century when French is irreversibly lined up behind English. Glissant came to see that the age of Anglomania was rendering his early utopian dream unrealistic. His ambitions were in some respects those of all writers of the Caribbean – not least of Anglophone and Hispanic authors such as Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Nicolas Guillén, Fernando Retamar and Alejo Carpentier, all of whom participated in the CARIFESTA festival in the 1970s (Glissant 1989: 118). But Glissant’s last essays reveal that he eschewed the world supremacy of English; when Nobel Prizes in Literature went to two Anglo-Caribbean writers, Derek Walcott (in1992) and V. S. Naipaul (in 2001), this was a real blow to his self-esteem. He actually had much in common with all authors of colonial origin, and especially with thinkers such as Albert Helman of Surinam, who published several anthologies and translated numerous poems from Sranan, one of the twenty-five languages threatened with extinction



Chapter 7.  Critical glissantism 107

there.4 So he became preoccupied, on the one hand, with the simultaneous evolution of quickly disappearing small languages and, on the other hand, with the growing dominance of English in the “Tout-monde,” as he called the world at large. In the family of world languages several were beginning to disappear. But even though he practised cross-cultural poetics and advocated a positive development of cultures and languages, he produced a body of writing which can only be described as opaque, and which therefore did not win a large hearing in the Anglophone intellectual world. Despite his tireless campaign for métissage, creolization, the “Poetics of Relation” and rhizomatic identity, his Anglo-Caribbean counterparts were apparently more comfortable writing in a derivative of Standard British English or (to use a term more fitting in a colonial and postcolonial context) the Queen’s English. Their position was of course bound up with the supremacy of English as lingua franca in many countries after colonization, and with the rise of the so-called global community and the accompanying break-up of nationalisms. Because of the strong global position of English, the future of Anglophone literary works was guaranteed, and Spanish-language texts were also pretty well placed, especially in the Americas, whereas Francophone and, still more to the point, Dutch-speaking Caribbean authors have often had a relationship with the “master’s language” that amounted to a deep-seated inferiority complex. But now that the minor languages in the Caribbean basin have become almost extinct, this problem, too, is becoming a thing of the past. The island of Saint Martin (Sint-Maarten in Dutch), which is partly Dutch-speaking and partly Frenchspeaking, already has a literature in English. Haiti, too, which several sociologists (e.g Wargny 2004) have described as a dying – if not dead – nation (even before the earthquake of January 12, 2010), has a growing number of authors who publish primarily in English – Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy come to mind –, an evolution parallel to that of authors in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, who often grew up in New York City or elsewhere in the States. Though sensitive to the role and position of various languages, Glissant understood very well the threat to French Caribbean literature in a globalized English-speaking world. In the postcolonial field, Anglophone (primary and secondary) literature is tantamount. So much so, that Glissant’s hermetic style ultimately limited his own appeal to a wider world-community of readers. Indeed, inlaying claim to “the right to be opaque” (“le droit à l’opacité”) he kept even many scholars at bay. Distancing 4. Albert Helman’s introduction (1994) to the evolution and destiny of Sranan could be set alongside Jean Bernabé et al.’s In Praise of Creoleness (1990), which vehemently defends the emancipation of the Creole language as literary language. First published in 1989, the manifesto was revised in subsequent interviews (see Taylor 1997).

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himself from “the French of France” (“le français de France”), as Damas (1972: 37) called it in “Hoquet”, Glissant organized poetry festivals where at least a dozen of foreign languages were presented to a mostly Parisian (French) public, who were thus confronted with the shock of not understanding the Other.

Language, the imaginary of language, and the question of Caribbeanness Although Glissant emphasized the elements of diglossia and the sheer difficulties which arose when he himself wrote in a language other than his mother-tongue Creole, a very large number of other authors have found themselves in the same boat. Some of them have become famous because of the “otherness” which filters through from the minor to the major language – writers from ex-communist countries (Kundera, Kafka), for instance, or writers fleeing from totalitarian systems, dictatorship (Semprún) or anti-Semitism (see Joubert 2006). So the fact that Glissant questions the major language which he himself uses, the language of the French colonizer, is not particularly remarkable. As Bernard Mouralis (1975) has demonstrated, plenty of other authors have produced their contre-littérature in an enemy’s language. Paul Celan and André Schwarz-Bart, for instance, were obliged to publish in German and French when they wanted to make themselves heard in their adoptive countries, thereby paradoxically estranging themselves from part of the audience on whose behalf they sought to testify. Having survived terrible ordeals, the Germanophone, the Francophone, and also other “-phones” have had to reconnect with audiences suffering the most frightful devastation and dispossession, whether resulting from Soviet regimes, the Shoah, or slavery. In fact the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, in her rather cynical style of humour, blames the slave trade for making her a French-speaking author in the first place, in that she happened to be born in Guadeloupe rather than in Cuba or in Puerto Rico. If I had been born some islands further up northwest from Guadeloupe in Cuba, for instance, I would have spoken Spanish. If I had been born some islands further south, in Trinidad, for instance, I would have spoken English. The hazardous razzias, the kidnapping and human trade are responsible for having put my ancestors, once they left the belly of the slave ship, totally desperate and exhausted, in the mangrove of this tiny island, possession of the king of France.  (Condé 1985: 36)5 5. “Si j’étais née quelques îles au nord-ouest de la Guadeloupe, à Cuba, par exemple, je serais de langue espagnole. Si j’étais née quelques îles au sud, à Trinidad, par exemple, je serais de langue anglaise. Les hasards des razzias, des rapts et de la traite ont voulu que mes ancêtres, abrutis de désespoir, titubant au sortir du négrier, aient foulé la mangrove d’une petite île, possession du Roi de France.”



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Sharing similar views on the politics of languages, Condé and Glissant never heeded the exhortations of créolistes like Chamoiseau and Confiant to get closer to their local audiences, or to be better novelists, by actually publishing in Creole (see Gyssels 2003b), even though they campaigned for a “world literature in Creole”. Perhaps they were struck by the example of Derrida who, though starting out as a philosophical renegade, subsequently achieved celebrity status in the French and American academies, becoming somewhat less of a renegade, somewhat more representative of hegemony. But be that as it may, according to Glissant multilingualism was not a question of quantity – of how many languages one spoke – but rather a matter of speaking a foreign language while “haunted” by the presence of other languages. Chamoiseau and Confiant borrowed this idea, claiming that créolité is all about understanding a mosaic of multiple identities. In the manifesto In Praise of Creoleness (Bernabé et al. 1990), the Martinicans repeatedly stressed that there was a plurality of creoleness (Taylor 1997: 142) and that they valued this. Yet they did miss some of the hauntings to which multilingualism can extend, because they were not pluralistic enough. In particular, they took no account of the Caribbean basin’s Dutch-Creolophone minorities: Creoleness sketches the hope for the first possible grouping within the Caribbean Archipelago: that of the Creolophone peoples of Haiti, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Guyana, a grouping which is only the prelude of a larger union of our Anglophone and Hispanophone neighbors. This is to say that, for us, the acquisition of an eventual mono-insulary sovereignty will be but a stage (a very brief one, we hope) in the process toward a Caribbean federation or confederation, the only way to stand up efficiently to the different hegemonic blocks that share the planet among them. In this perspective, we maintain our opposition to the present process of integration without popular consultation of the people of the so-called “départements français d’Amérique” to the European community. Our solidarity is first with our brothers of the neighboring islands and secondly with the nations of South America. (Bernabé et al. 1990: 904)

In an interview with Lucien Taylor (1997: 160), Chamoiseau echoed almost verbatim what had so many times been said by Glissant, namely that any language is capable of expressing the totalité-monde, but that he felt closer to any (white) Caribbean author (Perse, Carpentier, Márquez) than to African writers from the continent. Even though Glissant’s antillanité (1989: 221–227) and créolisation ought to have subverted universal notions of pure and impure by positing the West as a field of ceaseless transformation, in the works of both Glissant himself and his followers the cross-cultural processes taking place in Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and Surinam received not a single mention. The idea that a writer could win over a local readership by writing in a local language was in any case mistaken, as even Chamoiseau and Confiant (initially its

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most energetic proponent) came to recognize. French literature from Martinique or Guadeloupe or French Guyana does not become “authentic” simply by incorporating foreign words and expressions. Such exoticism is positively counterproductive because, as Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo (1996) has argued, even in Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco, winner of the 1992 Prix Goncourt, the over-creolization results in a mode of representation that is stilted and precious. What N’Zengou-Tayo calls Chamoiseau’s chamoisification of the French language amounts to a language that is apparently not a spoken language at all but a totally new language, baffling to the ordinary local inhabitants, and artificial in its incorporation of elements from Creole at a time when that language was already dying out. Recognizing the unnaturalness of such experiments, both Confiant and Chamoiseau gradually came to do less writing in Creole or creolized French. In the long run, the use of Creole in published writing simply failed to encourage the French Caribbean community towards a strong sense of togetherness or nationhood. In reality, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyana remain very much dependent on the metropolitan centre, and any literary subversion of the so-called colonial language comes down to a sprinkling of Creole expressions, idiomatic sentences and words mostly listed in glossaries and footnotes. In the case of Glissant, despite all his endeavours to “write in the presence of all the languages of the world” (2008), he inevitably estranged himself from both his local and (inter-)national readership. His campaign for Creole having become futile, Glissant dreamed up a vast utopia consisting of the whole world, in which communication would, he hoped, transcend both linguistic and any other kind of boundary (Prahbu 2005; Bongie 2008; Hallward 2001 and 2004). This shift was just one of many conspicuous selfcontradictions to arise as he moved from the local to the global. Aware of this huge change in his own thinking, Glissant still tried to stay optimistic about the future of both Creole and French and their respective speech communities in the Caribbean basin, and also about the future of the endangered volcanic island itself, even though at the beginning of La Cohée du Lamentin (2005) he spoke of Martinique’s final disappearance. Martinique belongs to a region of the “Black Atlantic” where such dramatic events are certainly possible, and Glissant referred to the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) in his attempts to activate the consciousness of a transplanted African diaspora. As things have turned out, the rhizomorphic structure of Caribbean art and the large numbers of emigrants from the islands to the former metropolises certainly have ensured the black diaspora’s survival, but the kind of function which Glissant’s Le discours antillais (1981) foresaw for language has in fact been carried out by music – hiphop and blues especially (Gyssels 2012b), as Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic amply shows.



Chapter 7.  Critical glissantism

When, in the late 1990s, Glissant turned to the utopian dream of a Tout-monde, of a borderless world in which all cultures interact and all communities are tolerant of each other’s specificities, he implied that all these different people would be able to understand each other, and would either speak the same language or communicate through translation. He said things like, for instance, “Language is a journey and see that it is endless” (“Le langage est un voyage et voyez qu’il n’a pas de fin” (Glissant 1993: 316)), his basic argument being that we cannot trace the origin of a given language, and that it is merely syntacical ruptures (like “voyez que”) that attract attention. The grand scale of his vision is unmistakable: “For the first time, cultures put in contact and in reactive effervescence with each other” (Glissant 1997b: 23).6 But so far, only two of his novels and two of his essays, Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation, have been translated, and both of the essays reduce Caribbean literatures to those produced in English, Spanish, or French (Glissant 1997a: 71 resp. 96)). In a preface to her translation of Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing (translator of Le Quatrième siècle as well) notes the manifold challenges for a translator of Glissant. While translation is indispensable to bridge the gap between the dominant languages, this in itself is not enough, as Glissant himself stresses several times in the Eurozine interview; he realizes that, ever since its inception, Caribbean literature in English has automatically reached a fast-growing number of readers. Perhaps he would have taken comfort from the words of Walter Benjamin: “The important works of World Literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin” (1999 [1923]: 71). Yet he himself was the first to mock his own writing for being less dialogical than dialectic, and he described his own ruminative circularities and complexities as wanderings or ramblings (“divagations”). What was really at issue here was, I believe, a desire on Glissant’s part to evade the French hegemony by advocating some kind of borderless world of non-native French speakers, of Francophones beyond ethnicities and nationalities, an idea closely corresponding to Homi Bhabha’s notion (1990: 315) of the Heimatsprache of wandering peoples not wishing to be confined within the Heim of the national culture and its unison discourse. Coming to focus more and more on this community of Francophone speakers at large, in his essay Traité du Tout-monde (1997) Glissant enthused over the Internet, a global and linguistic phenomenon which had always had a place in his thoughts, though sometimes more ambivalently (Gyssels 2003a). Similarly, in his travelogue Tout-monde (1993) he valorized the rhizomatic nature of his own identity and condition, and of non-native speakers

6. “Pour la première fois, les cultures mises en contact et en effervescence de réaction les unes avec les autres.”

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of major languages more generally. An important example of their attitude and vision is the encounter during his Grand Tour with a young woman to whom he introduces us, through his narrator, as a highly impressive polyglot. In Italy, Glissant’s alter ego Matthieu meets a Gypsy who converses with him in French with no trace of an Italian accent. Her Italian, on the other hand, though she was Italian, had a certain strangeness: Amina, for instance, who was Italian, had a strange way of starting her sentences, as though the use of the Italian language was difficult for her, so much so that one wonders whether she had not grown up in the echoes of another language, which for now lay sleeping, in some imaginary spot from where she would never be capable of letting it flow again. (Glissant 1993: 44)7

At this point, one could notice the strangeness of Glissant’s own written French. His syntax is awkward, since the normal structure would be something like “Par exemple, italienne, Amina avait une façon étrange de …”. Instead, Glissant opts for “Amina  … qui était italienne avait une manière étonnée de commencer ses phrases,” which any French-speaking subject would change to either “étonnante” or “bizarre.” And through his fictional double, Glissant expressed his fascination with a number of people similarly marked by dissemination, dislocation and “third space” (Bhabha 1990). Here, though, his selection of examples, though by no means random, does not really fulfil his ideological goal in the way he would have liked. To continue with the case of Amina the Gypsy, for instance, Matthieu guesses that, because she is a Gypsy, she is capable of speaking several (world) languages remarkably well. But to this assumption that she is multilingual just because she belongs to a nomadic people we can reasonably object that her multilingualism, also obviously venerated by Glissant, is not enviable in the least. Compared with the harmonizing Tout-monde multiculturalism (creolization) he champions in his theoretical works, the daily experience of Amina might very well be dreadful. As recent conflicts in France have made all too clear, the Roma are doomed to remain “the Other,” the non-assimilable that society does not want to integrate into European metropolises. Another object of Matthieu’s admiration is a second polyglot, the Egyptian guide Mahmoud:

7. “Amina par exemple, qui était bien italienne avait une manière étonnée de commencer ses phrases, comme si l’usage de cette langue italienne lui était difficile, en sorte qu’on pouvait se demander si elle n’avait pas grandi dans les échos d’une autre langue qui pour l’instant dormait ailleurs, dans un lieu imaginaire d’où elle ne pourrait jamais la faire rejaillir.”



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Mahmoud, who is 11 years old, has almost perfectly mastered four tourist languages. He learnt them by talking to the passing tourists, for whom he has acted as a guide for a long time. He speaks in gasps and shouts, not needing a consistent syntax. (Glissant 1993: 532, his italics)8

By using the boy’s first name, Glissant might be alluding to a literary affiliation he had mentioned in several of his earlier writings. While regretting that he could not fully understand the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich because Arabic was a mystery to him, he saluted him as a solitary example of “forced poetics” (Glissant 1989: 120), a person who had escaped oppression and colonialism through poetry. Out of gratitude for Darwich’s work, Glissant inserted a “Récitation pour Mahmoud Darwich” (Glissant 2009: 153) and listed Darwich’s “Psaume CLI” in his Anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde (2010: 53–54). Darwich’s voice clearly stands for all the Palestinians oppressed by Israel, so connoting Glissant’s solidarity with the victims in the Middle East who were suffering discrimination at the hands of another “people of the road.” In point of fact, however, in juxtaposing two native speakers who were forced by the accidents of history to master several languages, and in emphasizing their wanderings, Glissant assigns that third grouping of nomadic subjects to silence, viz. the community epitomized as the Wandering Jew, who had come to use so many languages throughout the centuries of Diaspora and Displacement. This, then, is another Glissant’s blind-spots. Although he defended the rhizomatic literature of the whole world, including excerpts from postcolonial areas which have been deterritorialized, he overlooked major voices of that reversible, Jewish “Other” – Kafka, Derrida, or even Celan, for instance, who all knew what it was to be forced to write in a language not their own, the language of the enemy. For the French Antilles, there could have been Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, for instance, or for the Americas the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud or I. B. Singer. Are such omissions merely accidental? One omitted Jew seems especially relevant here. In 1996, the same year that Glissant published Faulkner, Mississippi, Jacques Derrida wrote Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre, with its famous aphorism “I have only one language and it is not mine” (“Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne”). What Derrida meant was that his French was the colonial, imperial French he had inherited because of his family’s history, as Sephardic Jews who had migrated to the North of Africa after the Alhambra Decree expelled Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492. Because of historical accidents, all of us are hostages of this or that minor or major 8. “Mahmoud, qui a onze ans, parle à peu près bien quatre langues à touristes. Il a appris auprès des gens de passage qu’il pilote depuis bien longtemps. Il parle par halètements et cris, n’ayant pas besoin d’une syntaxe suivie.”

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language. None of us has deliberately chosen to be born into a language, any more than into a particular phenotype, nation and gender. As a generous participant in the debate, Derrida actually thanks Glissant in the first chapter of his book for having introduced him to the concept of creolization, which Derrida can understand on the basis of his own personal history: though brought up in the so-called superior language, French, he was naturally influenced by the many languages he heard around him – Arabic, Berber, and Kabyle, but also Ladino, a Moroccan-Spanish dialect that, like Hakitia, is a kind of creolized vernacular that has existed for a long time without having a printed grammar (Sabba-Guimarães 2010). Glissant and Derrida, together with the Tunisian poet and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb, defender of relations between Jews and Arabs, were on one occasion keynote speakers at a conference in Baton Rouge. But after this encounter, Glissant never commented on Derrida, even though Derrida’s early work was so obviously written in the shadow of decolonization. Derrida’s rich insights into language(s), his account of (phallo)logocentrism, and his refusal of violent hierarchies and binary oppositions must surely have caught Glissant’s attention. And so must Derrida’s undecidable meanings – so like Glissant’s self-styled divagations – and generally difficult textualities. So why, then, was Derrida, author of that famous essay on the choice of a major language for an Algerian Jew, overlooked in Glissant’s own essays? In theorizing the issue of grammar in a colonial and postcolonial context, in discussing sombre themes such as responsibility for the Other, mourning and memory, globalization and hospitality, and a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians, Glissant could often have turned to, or related to Derrida. Here it seems natural to mention an essay which was always at the back of Glissant’s own mind: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1986), which argued that some of the best (if not the best) literature of Europe was written by authors brought up in a minor language but forced to publish in a major language. Kafka (1883–1924) himself wrote the well-known “Speech on Yiddish” (quoted in Liska 2009: 27–29), in which Yiddish is described as the youngest of the European languages, a melting pot of German, French, Latin and even “Hollandaise,” which can surely remind us of Creole, the youngest of Romance languages, a mixture of African languages with Portuguese and French dialects. And in 2007 it was certainly Deleuze and Guattari’s book that inspired Michel LeBris and Jean Rouaud to invite Glissant and 43 other French-speaking authors from various countries to petition for une Littérature-monde (2007),9 so lodging a protest against what in their view was a patriarchal view of Francophone authors, and staking a claim to greater visibility in the “Republic of Letters” both in and outside France. In fact, however, Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, in which he 9. “For a World Literature”.



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imagined and recommended some kind of fusion of countless different speech communities, had its curious blind spots. Not least, there was that striking disregard of some minor Caribbean literatures: those produced in Dutch or any DutchCreolophone language – Papiamento and the twenty-five indigenous languages in Surinam. And there was that similar disregard for the lingua franca of that other wandering, borderless “tribe” – the Jews. Nor did the Martinicans’ central pronouncements on diversity and hybridity recognize other créolités in their own backyard: the Dutch and Brazilian variants of créolité, engendered precisely by the process of métissage in slave societies. To return to Amina, we could well ask why, given all the nomadic minority identities Glissant could have assigned to her, he settled on describing her as simply a Gypsy. He made no distinction here between: the Gitans, who come from Spain, Portugal and the South of France and who also speak at least two languages; the Sinti, who speak Bengali, Hindu and other Indian languages; and the Roma or Manouch, who come from Eastern European countries. So while Glissant claimed that the echoes of another language lay sleeping in some imaginary spot from where Amina would never be capable of letting it flow again, he did not really substantiate this. On the contrary, Amina mainly comes across as a person who is marooned amid “master languages,” and who fluidly adapts to idioms other than her own mother tongue. However imperfect her mastery of the foreign language may be, the young Gypsy woman displays the modesty that often characterizes multilingual speakers in a context of displacement and dislocation (Bhabha 1996). Although Glissant praised the vernacular and the multilingual as belonging to individuals who “relate” to the whole world, he perhaps had no detailed sense of just how little there could sometimes be for them to enjoy in life – certainly a lot less, at any rate, than a postcolonial traveller like Glissant himself could enjoy on his European Grand Tour – though it made him start to realize just how many languages are spoken in the European Union. As an insight into this kind of pigeonholing and exclusion that can arise for nomadic individuals and peoples, we can note a posthumous “circonfession” by a French-Polish-Caribbean author. In Morning Star, André Schwarz-Bart laments that as he grew older and was travelling back and forth between Paris and Goyave (Guadeloupe), several European languages became confused, and he started to speak slower as his own mind was thinking in Polish, French, and Yiddish: Yiddish words came back to him, as in the past, and Hebrew words, Polish words, but they all seemed artificial to him, powerless … This is the time when the slow drawl, which annoyed his friends …, came over him, allowing him to steer himself through the lunar landscape that language had become.  (Schwarz-Bart 2009: 166)

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The wandering Jew felt for ever excluded and misunderstood, confused by too many languages colliding in his head. Among the very Martinicans who proclaim diversity and hybridity as inherent values respected by the créolistes, he remained the invisible writer in their own backyard. And in the same way, Dutch and Brazilian variants of créolité, which were engendered precisely by the process of métissage in slave societies between Sephardic Jews and Africans, have been occluded by the theorists.

The amateur linguist Another paradox is that over the years Glissant apparently came to disapprove of the discipline of linguistics. It exemplified, he complained, the single or unique thought (“pensée unique”) and was therefore prone to become totalitarian (“totalitaire”). Without contextualizing or historicizing, Glissant blames linguistics for lagging behind the evolution of dialects and vernacular expression: Linguistics, insofar as it formulates constants and rules, has already been overtaken by this vagabondism of the languages and ways of speaking that in each (collective) being manifests that being’s presence in the world. It will have to move from static analysis to dynamic profiles if it wants to encompass this condition; otherwise it will do nothing more than reinforce an anachronism and align itself with the most short-sighted kind of academic expediency. (Glissant 1969: 46)10

Unlike Celia Britton (2008: 72), for whom this is a “remarkably modern perspective,” I find it problematic. If we were to express ourselves without following grammatical and semantic norms, where would it lead? Glissant’s frustration with regulations of any kind, with conventions and rules, and even with European scholars who have suggested how a given language should function, how it should be written and spoken (Émile Benveniste or Ferdinand de Saussure, for instance), is far-reaching and irreverent. He boldly equates linguistics with political power and oppression: “Until recently every nation achieved its perfect definition in the projection, always singular and often exclusive and aggressive, of its speech.”11 And as this passage continues, note the slippage from nation to academics, from 10. “La linguistique, en tant qu’elle formule des constantes et des règles, se trouve déjà en retard sur ce vagabondage de langues et de parlers qui en chaque être (collectif) manifestera la présence de l’être au monde. Elle devra passer de l’analyse statique aux profils dynamiques, si elle veut englober cette condition ; faute de quoi elle n’ira qu’à confirmer un anachronisme et se rendre solidaire des plus aveugles accommodements académiques.” 11. “Toute nation hier encore se parfaisait dans la projection unique et souvent exclusive, agressive, de son parler.”



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language to “speech” (“parler”), which are not in fact quite the same things, after all, since academics can produce language acts, and in the private sphere can express themselves in patois/dialect/parler: “But this uniqueness is not my inheritance, and I do not even have to react against it. Academic purifications of language” – his expression here can bring to mind ethnic cleansing – “do not concern me (do not satisfy me, irritate or amuse me); on the contrary, what fascinates me is … my confrontation with its law.” (Glissant 1969 : 45).12 Resisting any normative system perceived as colonial, Glissant the Martinican proudly rejects French grammar and vocabulary, a rebellious gesture which his spiritual sons Chamoiseau and Confiant admired and copied. In their preface to their literary history Lettres créoles, they formulate the desire to get rid of a rigour they allege to be typical of Western and French academics: “Dismiss the makers of anthologies” (“Donnez congé aux faiseurs d’anthologies”) (Chamoiseau and Confiant 1991: 11). Such animus vis-à-vis those who try to regulate languages in the interests of clarity and transparency is regrettable, and on a par with Glissant’s own appeal to that “droit à l’opacité”. As a practising novelist and critic, Glissant himself claimed total freedom to break conventions, but as a result was fundamentally obscure and untranslatable, as he sometimes admitted. His anticolonial resentment at de Saussure’s account of the “langue-système” was excessive and unfair. He quite ignored de Saussure’s life-long interest in language change and development over time. He failed to recognize the closeness of de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole (the former non-existent without the latter) to his own binarism of langue, the encoded set of rules constituting a language, and “langage” or “parole individuelle.” And although de Saussure never claimed that any language was at some specific moment of its evolution “pure”, or that linguists have got to grips with French and English (the two languages with which Glissant was obsessively preoccupied) because they were “creolized” and in need of rectification, Glissant gives him no credit for this.

The defence and illustration of a world poetry: Damas and Glissant compared Towards the end of his life, Glissant said he wanted to promote a pan-Caribbean perspective through translations, so as to bring an end to Caribbean fragmentation and Balkanisation. The launch of his 2010 anthology La terre, le feu, l’eau et 12. “[M]ais je n’hérite pas de cette unicité, n’ayant même pas à réagir contre elle. Les épurations académiques de la langue ne me concernent pas (ne me satisfont, ne m’indignent ni ne me font sourire); me passionne par contre… mon affrontement à sa loi.”

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les vents: Une anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde (“Earth, fire, water, winds: An anthology of Whole World poetry”) at least showed that literature from the French Caribbean had become highly commercialized, and it included poets publishing in Creole, French, English and Spanish. In compiling it Glissant claimed to be broadening readers’ minds on the question of language, but although this was obviously a noble enough ambition, the anthology is lamentably restricted in coverage, and chaotic in organization. It not only mixes verse (Pound, Baudelaire, Mallarmé) with prose (excerpts from novels by Faulkner, Woolf, Borges), but also has no coherent arrangement in terms of history and geography. Glissant was evidently copying the projects of his forgotten “fathers” of sixty years earlier, albeit not very successfully. In particular Damas (whom Glissant did not mention now) had attempted to bring together all of the New World’s Caribbean and African diasporas in the anthology Latitudes: Poètes d’expression française (1900–1945) (1947), which included poetry of widely varied origin, including Vietnamese, African, French-Caribbean, Haitian, and Mascareignes (Réunion). Damas turned the colonizer’s weakness, the dissemination of the French language across remote and disconnected areas, into a strength. He showed that a language could transcend the different postcolonial nations, and that a language imposed by colonization is not only a burden but can also trigger a rejuvenation of style, semantics and grammar. Damas’ ultimate goal was to overturn the inferiority complex generated by the cult of French as a “langue de culture” (“language of culture”). Not going as far as his colleague Léopold Sédar Senghor in praising francité, Damas sought to dismantle the French colonial empire, not only through publishing a book like Latitudes, but by publishing it in the very heart of the French Republic through one of the most prestigious publishers. Not sharing Senghor’s idolâtrie of Frenchness as revealed in essays such as “La Négritude et Civilisation de l’Universel” (1977; “Negritude and Universal Civilization”), Damas nevertheless realized that Senghor’s kind of writing was paving the way for black, French-speaking poets and writers to break their silence and win themselves a public in the métropole.13 When the poet, novelist and playwright Glissant finally turned to anthologymaking, he did so in his own distinctive way. Whereas the point of the anthologies edited by Senghor and Damas, the “third man of négritude,” had been to showcase a wide range of work by their colleagues so as to encourage the French and Francophone public to start reading Caribbean and African poetry, Glissant merely reprinted some of his own favourite authors. The innovative and seminal anthologies of his predecessors – Senghor’s collection of 1948 with the preface by Sartre, or 13. It is also thanks to this that Senghor had the honour of becoming the first black member of the prestigious Académie Française.



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Damas’ anthologies of 1947 and (an even better one) 1966, the latter including 106 poets from the African Diaspora in five languages – pass without remark. After the publication of his first anthology in 1947, and ten years after the first Conférence des Ecrivains et des Artistes noirs at the Sorbonne, Damas had undertaken his much more ambitious second anthology as a special issue of the journal Présence Africaine. The year 1966 was a turbulent year in the history of decolonization, with several African countries gaining their independence from England, France, and Portugal, while the Black artistic scene was becoming ever more visible and celebrated through major events such as the Festival des Arts in Dakar. The Civil Rights Movement was championing African Americans against their oppressors in the United States and, in the Caribbean, Guyana gained its autonomy from Britain. Against this background, Damas’ second anthology had taken on enormous symbolic significance. In its selection of authors from different colonial backgrounds, it had expanded its scope way beyond geographical, national, linguistic and ethnic lines of division, so offering a reliable picture of world literature of African descent. In addition, not only did Damas include Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and African American poets; even if the anthology’s cover gave its title in only French, English, Portuguese and Spanish, Dumas had also taken what in my own view was an absolutely crucial step by including Dutchspeaking authors of the African Diaspora. Space was given to Dutch authors from Surinam, and the ABC islands were also represented, as were South African poets publishing in English and Afrikaans. In retrospect, such an endeavour was only possible thanks to the good contacts between Damas and a lot of emerging authors, and equally catalytic were his collaboration with Langston Hughes and his involvement with the “Drum Generation” (see Graham and Walters 2006). Compared with Damas’ truly broad and influential anthology of 1966, Glissant’s chaotically disorganized anthology was narrowly individualistic in its choices, and was addressed to a far smaller readership. In a work by the champion of Relation and World Literature, this was as idiosyncratic as his characteristic neglect of significant predecessors. And whereas Dumas’ anthologies had shown such a gift for talent-spotting, had offered critical introductions to each region of the “black Atlantic,” and had spanned both continents and islands, the North and the South, and the Americas, including Dutch-speaking regions, there was none of this openness and helpfulness in Glissant’s own “Sentimenthèque” (to use Chamoiseau’s neologism for coups de coeur). It merely set out a list of books belonging to his own private study, without relaying anything of intelligible interest to the anthology’s readers, and with none of Senghor and Damas’ genuine educational aims. Glissant’s anthology actually places obstacles between its compiler and its readership, as he partly recognizes in its introduction, and instead of presenting genuinely new or hitherto marginalized writing further cemented an

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already fixed canon. The “Antillais d’adoption,” for instance, are conspicuously absent (Gyssels 2013b). Hoping to acquire more prestige than his literary fathers  – Césaire from Martinique, but most of all Senghor, who had launched the second anthology of new poetry from Madagascar and the Americas – Glissant wanted La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents to consolidate his own position as an important agent in the promotion of writing in any (European) language. He made excuses for being too selective, and for inclusions which readers would find questionable. But he was very confident about including prose fiction from Faulkner and excerpts from Malcolm X, and had no qualms about ignoring either Damas and his two anthologies or Caribbean writing in Dutch, even though this second limitation was a lost opportunity of considerable consequence in the arena of postcolonial literature. It was doubtless Glissant’s enormous fame that persuaded the French publisher Galaade to take on the project, despite all its obvious weaknesses. Damas’ anthology had been much more deserving, and much more thoughtful. For one thing, Damas had anticipated by nearly half a century the questions Glissant now raised as to the viability of a common transnational Caribbean culture transcending its so-called Balkanization. Perhaps the single most important element in the Balkanization of the Caribbean is language. In his 1966 anthology, Damas had not excluded literary texts on the basis of language and had not translated the fragments he published by Kwame Dandilo (Surinam), José Craveirinha (Mozambique), Alda do Espirito Santo (São Tomé e Príncipe), Guillermo Cuevas Carrion (Cuba), or Trefossa (Paramaribo). To Glissant, the European languages spoken in the Caribbean were inevitably languages of compromise, each a lingua franca that only reinforced colonial boundaries and worked against the full realization of a common Caribbeanness. By not translating particularly the Dutch authors from Curaçao and Surinam into, say French or English, Damas was showing readers what was going on despite, or around the peripheries of, the cultural hegemonies of the major European colonizing nations. By not translating the different authors he included, he was taking a firm stand and drawing attention to the lines which separate Africa’s many children in both the Americas and on the continent of Africa itself. Among other things, then, that special issue in Présence Africaine had amounted to a kind of Black Babel, where texts were not immediately translated into the French language as a privileged intermediary between languages and cultures. Whereas Damas’ pan-African, Caribbean, trans-Atlantic enterprise established poetry as one of the many terrains where the anti-colonialist battle manifested itself, the fact that Glissant’s defence of multilingualism never stretched to acknowledging a Caribbean literature in Dutch, Papiamentu, or any of the



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twenty-five languages in Surinam brings to mind the deeply problematic conclusion drawn by V. S. Naipaul in Middle Passage (1966): that to be colonized by the British was far better than to be colonized by the Dutch, since Dutch colonization resulted in bastardized Dutch, whereas Anglophone residents of the Caribbean respected and maintained Standard British English (Gyssels 2010). Although Glissant was not a trained linguist, he unhesitatingly ventured upon just this kind of misleading generalization about languages in contact with each other, and about literatures in a context of colonization and decolonization. His deafness to literature from the Dutch-Caribbean even extended to authors based in Aruba, Bonaire, or Curaçao who wrote in English. Créolistes, in their vibrant call for total freedom for authors, left out the Dutch perspective, as well as that of the continental French Guyana, which is partly why Richard and Sally Price (1997: 27 note 15) conclude that the continuing hegemony of the French and Francophone perspective lingers over Glissant’s endeavours and influence. To conclude then, Édouard Glissant and his tribe of academic followers, though theorizing the marginal position of Caribbean literatures in a Eurocentric world, fell prey to the dichotomy between major and minor languages. Counterbalancing the prestige surrounding French and “French civilization,” his efforts during his final years deviated ever more markedly from the question of what a World Literature in a world language would be. On the contrary, the anthology he put together at the end of his life had no single structuring principle (whether of genre or chronology, or of original language vs. translation) apart from his own taste for voices already belonging to the canonical choir. Reluctant to entrust himself to “local” editors and presses, moreover, opting instead for prestigious houses firmly nestled in the “Nombril du Monde”, he reinforced Paris as the metropolitan centre for a literature whose moorings he was professing to loosen.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1923]. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, Harry Zohn (trans.), 69–82. London: Pimlico. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1990. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar (trans.). Callaloo 13: 886–909. DOI: 10.2307/2931390 Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha, 291–322. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” In Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, ed. by Peter Pfeiffer and Laura Garcia-Moreno, 191–207. Columbia: Camden House. Bongie, Chris. 2008. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. DOI: 10.5949/UPO9781846315299

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Britton, Celia. 2008. “Transnational Languages in Glissant’s Tout-monde.” In World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Globalization, ed. by Mary Gallagher, 62–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. 1991. Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature (1635–1975). Paris: Hatier. Condé, Maryse. 1985. “Au-delà des langues et des couleurs.” Magazine littéraire 436: 36. Damas, Léon-Gontran. 1947. Latitudes: Poètes d’expression française d’Afrique noire, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochine, Guyane, 1900–1945. Paris: Seuil. Damas, Léon-Gontran. 1966. Nueva Soma de poesia negra. Paris: Présence Africaine. Damas, Léon-Gontran. 1972 [1937]. Pigments: Névralgies. Paris: Présence Africaine. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Dana Polan (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée. DuBois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co. Electronic Library Virginia University. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DubSoul. sgmandimages=images/modenganddata=/texts/english/modeng/parsedandtag=publican dpart=front Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blanc. Paris: Editions de Seuil. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Glissant, Édouard. 1969. L’intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. Glissant, Édouard. 1997[1981]. Le discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 1993. Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 1996. Faulkner, Mississippi. Paris: Stock. Glissant, Édouard. 1997a. Poetics of Relation. Betsy Wing (trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997b. Traité du Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 2002. “Préface.” In La culture française vue d’ici et d’ailleurs, treize auteurs témoignent, ed. by Thomas Spear, 8–9. Paris: Karthala. Glissant, Édouard. 2005. La Cohée du Lamentin. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 2006. Une nouvelle région du monde. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 2009. Philosophie de la Relation: Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, Édouard. 2010. La Terre, le feu, l’air et le vent: Une Anthologie de la poésie du Toutmonde. Paris: Galaade. Graham, Shane, and John Walters (eds). 2006. Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation. New York: Palgrave. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2000. “La migration des mots et le néerlandais comme ‘langue mineure’ dans la mosaïque linguistique caribéenne.” Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 13: 179–201. DOI: 10.7202/037416ar Gyssels, Kathleen. 2003a. “Du ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire’ aux auteurs virtuels: libertés et limites de l’internet pour les auteurs antillais.” Africultures 54: 117–127. DOI: 10.3917/afcul.054.0117 Gyssels, Kathleen. 2003b. “Maryse Condé on Créolité.” In A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. by Gordon Collier and Ulrich Fleischmann, 301–320. Amsterdam: Rodopi.



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Gyssels, Kathleen. 2008. “Scarlet Ibises and the Poetics of Relation: Perse, Walcott and Glissant.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31: 103–116. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2010. “V. S. Naipaul dans l’archipel caribéen: Confiant, Condé, Glissant, ­Walcott, Phillips, McLeod, Ramdas.” In V. S. Naipaul: écriture de l’altérité, altérité de l’écriture, ed. by Florence Labaune-Demeule, 153–176. Paris: Houdiard. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2012a. “Littérature-monde: une vignette pour ‘défranciser’ la littérature du XXIième siècle.” In Going Caribbean: New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art, ed. by Kristian Van Haesendonck, 113–135. Lisbon: Humus. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2012b. “The ‘barque ouverte’ (Glissant) or The Black Atlantic (Gilroy): Erasure and Errantry.” In New Perspectives on The Black Atlantic: Definitions, Readings, Practices, Dialogues, ed. by Bénédicte Ledent and Pilar Cuder, 59–82. New York: Peter Lang. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2013a. “Poloniser ou polliniser? L’oeuvre schwarz-bartienne comme Fremd­ körper dans le canon antillais.” In Nouvelles perspectives dans les études francophones, ed. by Daniel Lançon and Claude Coste, 199–215. Paris: Champion. Gyssels, Kathleen. 2013b. “Un long compagnonnage? Schwarz-Bart et Glissant face aux diasporas.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 309: 73–94. Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hallward, Peter. 2004. “Option Zero in Haiti.” New Left Review 27: http://newleftreview.org/ II/27/peter-hallward-option-zero-in-haiti. Helman, Albert. 1994. Adyosi, Afscheid. Nijmegen: Stichting ter Bevordering van de Surinami­stiek. Joubert, Jean-Louis. 2006. Les voleurs de langue: Traversée de la francophonie littéraire. Paris: P. Rey. LeBris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud (eds). 2007. Pour une littérature-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Liska, Vivian. 2009. When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mouralis, Bernard. 1975. Les contre-littératures. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. 1996. “Littérature et diglossie: Créer une langue métisse ou la ‘chamoisification’ du français dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau.” Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 9: 155–176. DOI: 10.7202/037243ar Prahbu, Anjali. 2005. “Interrogating Hybridity: Subaltern Agency and Totality in Postcolonial Theory.” Diacritics 29: 76–92. Price, Richard, and Sally Price. 1997. “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove.” Cultural Anthropology 12: 3–36. DOI: 10.1525/can.1997.12.1.3 Redfield, Marc. 2010. “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning.” Diacritics 29: 58–83. DOI: 10.1353/dia.1999.0033 Rivarol, Antoine. 1991 [1783]. De l’universalité de la langue française. Paris: Editions Arléa. Sabba-Guimarães, Newton. 2010. “Le hakitia: ou judéo-espagnol du Maghreb, classification, situation et futur.” MicRomania 4 (10): 3–9. Schwarz-Bart, André. 2009. The Morning Star. Julie Rose (trans.). London and New York: Overlook Duckworth. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1948 [2011]. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris: Prsees Universitaires de France. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1977. Liberté 3: Négritude et Civilisation de l’Universel. Paris: Seuil. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1983. Liberté V: Socialisme et planification. Paris: Seuil.

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Taylor, Lucien. 1997. “Créolité Bites: A Conversation with Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé.” Transition 74: 124–164. Wargny, Claude. 2004. Haïti n’existe pas (1804–2004). Paris: Autrement. Wright, Richard. 1995 [1957]. “The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People.” In his White Man, Listen! Lectures in Europe, 1950–1956, 39–71. New York: Harper Collins.

chapter 8

Decolonizing world literature Magdi Youssef Literature and the world market In modern times conservative Western notions of world literary standards have not so far met with much real challenge. Their spread in the consciousness of the world population has been via mass media, school books and even literary research. We need only look at the ubiquitous theory of a so-called “European Literature” (in the singular!) which has confronted students at both Western and non-Western universities ever since World War II, or at the widespread propagation of Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), both of which I have elsewhere sought to demystify (Youssef 1996; 1998a; 2000; 2003). Needless to say, the standards of World Literature formulated in the West chime with those underlying the dominant and generally recognized European–US literary canon. Those same standards also apply, I shall be arguing, in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even though the origin of the notion of World Literature, purportedly attributable to Goethe, has been questioned by Ruprecht (1971; see also Retamar 1975: 44), who showed that the concept already appeared in the Mexican review El-Iris in 1826, i.e. one year before Goethe was supposed to have coined it, a majority of scholars worldwide, including some of the contributors to this present volume, still connect World Literature primarily with the German Dichter. Even more to the point, this is also the case when the origins of the modern notion of Weltliteratur are traced in the media, schoolbooks and textbooks. Although Goethe’s own sense of Weltliteratur was intimately bound up with the conflicting European nationalisms of his own era, René Étiemble (1974: 15) has pointed out that some still regard it as a kind of “Germano-centrism”. Yet when we take into consideration the context in which the concept of World Literature was coined in Mexico soon after the achievement of independence from Spain in 1821, the question of precedence hardly seems quite so crucial after all. As Ruprecht demonstrates, Mexican critics and writers of that period saw the idea of World Literature as a tool to help decolonize their literary practice, by

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emancipating them from Spanish models as they turned instead towards English, French and German literary inventions which had borne no part in Mexico’s colonial legacy. In speaking of “World Literature”, intellectuals in the newly independent Mexico were valorizing models of literary production which, even if they were “European”, were unmistakably non-Spanish (Ruprecht 1971: 318).1 Analogous to this was the strong interest shown in the epic theatre of Brecht by Tunisian literary critics and stage directors during the period following Tunisia’s political independence from France in the 1950s, and again during the 1970s and 1980s. For them, to turn to Brecht was a means of self-decolonization from the culture and literary standards of France, which had hitherto been so dominant in their society. Despite some differences, in both the Mexican and the Tunisian cases the main new orientation was still towards European literatures, even though European literatures were at times mistakenly considered a single, rather than a plural entity. The most pressing concern was to reject the recent past and its particular colonial legacy. To escape that “Western” trend, some Tunisian theatre directors, especially in the 1990s, even turned to Far Eastern Kabuki dramaturgy and quoted it in their performances. The methodology of my own study of the reception of Brecht’s theatre in Egypt during the 1960s and early 1970s (Youssef 1976, published in German) was thoroughly decolonizing. Brecht’s theatre was discussed only in the last chapter, after a statistical comparison of his reception in Egypt with that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Ionesco, and Pirandello, among a host of other world-famous dramatists who matter in the theatre life of contemporary Egypt. In the same spirit, the book’s bibliography began with literature reflecting the reception of Brecht’s theatre in each of the relevant Egyptian socio-cultural contexts.2 And in the first chapter I referred to Fairman’s edition of The Triumph

1. Others have put forward reservations regarding the amalgamation of a so-called “European Literature” with World Literature (Retamar 1975), and also regarding its ideological implications (Youssef 2000). 2. As a salient and representative example of the reception of Brecht’s theatre in Egypt, my book mentioned the total transformation of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Mister Puntilla and His Man Matti) by the Egyptian playwright Yusri El-Gindi (1971), who succeeded in critically unveiling the hypocrisy of the “Socialist Union” of the time. This he achieved by staging the play in Domyat (Damiette), a small city of artisans situated in the northern part of the Nile Delta, close to the Mediterranean. ElGindi’s new play script, which was dialectically inspired by Brecht’s play, reflected in the first place Damiette’s specific socio-cultural context at the time, and was entitled Baghl el-Baladiyya (The Mule of the County Council) in allusion to the traditional Egyptian saying: “The person who has to leave the civil service rolls around in its dust [like a stubborn mule]”. See also Youssef 1994.



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of Horus, a revolutionary new reading published in 1974, because I wanted to help emancipate Egyptians from an “ambiguity” then prevalent in their writings and cultural life. This was the ambiguity of their own identity in relation to the Aristotelian view they had adopted of the true nature of theatre. In the 1970s a large majority of Egyptians still believed that theatre was of exclusively Western – in fact of European, or more specifically of ancient Greek – origin, and that it had no real roots in the cultural legacy of Egypt. Persuaded by the theories of wellknown Egyptologists such as Kurt Heinrich Sethe (1928) and Étienne Drioton (1942), modern theatre-focused intellectuals in Egypt had been distracted by notions of rather secluded mysteries performed in ancient Egyptian temples.3 To the school which propagated postcolonial discourse, my study of Brecht’s reception in Egypt was of no apparent interest.4 The neglect of the book’s critical, methodologically decolonizing approach by that Western Anglophone scholarly community was nothing short of astonishing, not least in view of the fact that Brecht in Ägypten was published two years before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978; see also Said 1988). Of course, Orientalism had a much more “comprehensive” theme than my study on Brecht. But what is at issue here is not the theme as such, but the method. If more thinkers had taken note of my own work, it would have been seen as a methodological precursor of Said’s critique of orientalism, and as itself the opening salvo of postcolonial discourse. Although the decolonizing bent in my critical approach to Euro–Western literary and cultural theory was neglected by English-speaking editors and publishers, in other quarters it attracted considerable attention. It strongly inspired the Italian Decolonizazzione studies which during the last few decades have flourished around the eminent scholar Armando Gnisci (Gnisci 2001: 18; Sinopoli 1999 and 2003). Is it the fate of minor European languages like Italian that their speakers become more sensitive towards pertinent research in less globalized languages? Or is it rather the supercilious, self-sufficient stance of the speakers of a world language such as English vis à vis other, less widely read languages that is responsible for these very different modes of reception? Or is it six of one and half a dozen of the other?

3. The late Egyptian writer Lewis ’Awad (1915–90) was one of the major proponents of such notions. See ’Awad 1961. 4. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft et al. 1995), for instance, the editors claim that the collection “makes accessible the full range [sic] of post-colonial theory.” However, they have clearly not considered theoretical writings published in languages other than English. One might see in this yet another example of an Anglo-American ethnocentric stance, and thus a subtly persisting colonial one with regard to issues of post-colonialism.

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Other questions suggest themselves as well here. Why did the concept of World Literature appear not only in the Mexican debate but also, as a consequence of Goethe’s interest in it, in a European context in the 1820s? In this latter case, was not World Literature a rather poetic, “sublimating” reaction to the disputes among the various nations and princes of Europe, quarrelling as they were over the delineation of their borders in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and the failure of Metternich’s “Dancing Congress” in the Vienna of 1814–1815 to bring them to a consensus? Was not World Literature also a reflection of Goethe’s (not exclusively) literary opposition to the emergence of mankind’s violent domination of nature, a phenomenon already announced by Descartes’ notorious phrase maîtriser la nature? If Descartes heralded what was to come, and if Bacon may be regarded as in a certain sense the theorist of this emerging mode of production in England, did not Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) challenge the Baconian logic at precisely the point when the phenomenon was beginning to assert itself on a world-wide scale? World Literature, I submit, was closely interrelated with that mode of production which had been gradually developing, albeit along rather different paths in different European countries, ever since the fifteenth century, moving from a mercantile to an industrial capitalist stage, till it was to reach, in our own times, the phase of financial capitalist production.5 The concept of World Literature continued to spread worldwide, while the concomitant mode of production was being spurred on by its main drive, viz. the maximization of profit, often by way of military invasion, colonization, and the societal and cultural devastation of nonEuropean and European societies.6 All the time, the development was heading towards the formation of a truly World Market, which has been – and continues to be – instrumental in perpetuating the same dominant mode of production, now with all the socio-cultural effects associated with its present phase of financial capitalism. Yet despite the universalization of financial capitalism, the contours of World Literature have not been fully coextensive with it. In a notorious and harshly Eurocentric or, in fact, Western-centric pronouncement of 1981, Horst Rüdiger explicitly excluded non-Western literatures from the haven of World Literature:

5. See Rudolf Hilferding’s definition of financial capital: “Industrial capital is the God-Father detached from the Son-Father, as represented in commercial and banking capital, whereas the Holy Spirit is money capital, and all three of them are incorporated in ONE that is financial capital.” (Hilferding 1910: 277.) 6. For instance the colonization of both Ireland (by England) and Poland (by Germany during the Second World War), to name but two examples in Europe.



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World literature is not a General Assembly of the UN where the vote of a previous colony that has been recently given its independence, being itself void of any intellectual or economic resources, would be counted as equal to that of a super power, or of a population boasting a cultural legacy of thousands of years.  (Rüdiger 1981: 39)7

In this chapter I attempt to deliver an alternative to current ideas about world literary standards and canons. In particular, I would like to suggest a more scientifically rational and less mystifying methodological stance vis à vis all those literatures and cultures worldwide which have so far usually been marginalized. My aim is not only to shed light on ignored literary and cultural inventions that occurred within the sphere of English, a language which still dominates on a worldwide scale, but also to rescue the hitherto one-sided, Euro- and Western-centric literary and cultural standards from stagnating in their own colonizing, rationally unjustifiable self-image (see also Youssef 1993, 1996, 1998b, 2000, and 2001).

The Nobel Prize in literature and the perpetuation of conservative hypocrisy As I said at the outset here, it is important to distinguish between the conservative European and contemporary Western systems of values and mechanisms on the one hand, and on the other hand those of ordinary people in Europe and the rest of the world, including the Western World, a populace which covers the protesters who demonstrate in European and American cities against Wall Street. It is not surprising that the protesting masses in Greece, Spain and elsewhere, who in a way at present represent the real interests of the majority of the populations in Western countries, have drawn inspiration for their continued battle against the economic policies of their governments from the example set by the original Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011. Those Egyptian protesters have won the sympathy of their own compatriots in the West, and have not come in for criticism (let alone for denunciation as obvious targets for Western prejudice and cultural stereotypes), mainly, no doubt, because the recent worldwide economic depression has made for a powerfully socio-psychological feeling of closeness, if not solidarity, between Western populations and their peacefully militant Middle Eastern peers of Tahrir Square. Today, the revolutionaries of early 7. “Weltliteratur ist keine Vollversammlung der Vereinigten Nationen, in der die Stimme einer soeben in die Selbstständigkeit entlassenen früheren Kolonie, ohne jegliche wirtschaftlichen und geistigen Ressourcen, mit derjenigen einer Großmacht oder eines Volkes, das auf eine mehrtausendjährige Kultur zurückblicken kann, gleichzusetzen ist.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.

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2011 are still opposing so-called Islamist trends which tend to obscure the fundamental facts of social division. In a way which ordinary people all over the world can readily understand, they are maintaining the human right to a secure and dignified future, and thus to a life that is free from exploitation and marginalization, a marginalization which nowadays would be largely due to exclusion from the labour market. To repeat, these genuinely egalitarian ideals are something which “everyone” can understand and embrace. But are they understood by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature? A study by Kjell Espmark (1986; English version 1991), itself commissioned by the Academy, of which Espmark himself was (and still is) a member, is quite revealing in this regard. It presents itself as an account of the criteria for selecting authors and literary works worthy of the Prize. According to the declared will of Alfred Nobel, the Prize may go only to authors of literary works that are instilled with “a lofty and sound idealism” (Espmark 1991: 9). In interpreting this wish, Academicians have to bear in mind the two different contexts within which Nobel stated his wish and they themselves are seeking to apply it. “What does the phrase ‘sound and lofty idealism’ imply?” Espmark (1991: 12) asks, and then offers an answer: Of primary importance was an idealistic view of the nature of reality, particularly the Christian conception of reality. … Time and space are forms of finite life, but true reality is of a spiritual kind and elevated above space and time. … No empiricism, no realism can reach the foundations of existence.

Then he continues, quite openly: A critical or negative attitude in a candidate toward Christianity was a disqualification. … An agnostic outlook could also cause difficulties. That is clear from the 1902 evaluation of Herbert Spencer, who has unjustly been called a materialist – which alone could have disqualified him. … The deepest needs of the human spirit are satisfied less by his agnostic philosophy than by that of the great idealists, whether they are pantheists like Hegel or theists like Bostroem.

And finally, in full view, comes the real criterion: “The academy’s conception of the nature of reality has its philosophical basis in Kant’s idealism.” Now let us make a random choice of the Nobel laureates in literature since the setting up of the Prize in 1895: 1. Sully Prudhomme, 1901, “in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect.” 2. Rudyard Kipling, 1907, “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.”



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3. Rabindranath Tagore, 1913, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” 4. Anatole France, 1921, “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament.” 5. William Butler Yeats, 1923, “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” 6. Thomas Mann, 1929, “principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature.”8 7. Luigi Pirandello, 1934, “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art.” 8. Hermann Hesse, 1946, “for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style.” 9. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1958, “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.” 10. Samuel Beckett, 1969, “for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – acquires its elevation in the destitution of modern man.” 11. Claude Simon, 1985, “who in his novel combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.” 12. Naguib Mahfouz, 1988, “who, through works rich in nuance – now clearsightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.” 13. Seamus Heaney, 1995, “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” 14. Tomas Tranströmer, 2011, “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” Is it far-fetched to conclude that the Academicians’ focus is on authors’ “intrinsic psychic orientation” or perhaps, in cases such as Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda, on their revolt against, and condemnation of, the objective world out there? An author like Bertolt Brecht – to name but one significant figure, a 8. See my critique (Youssef 1985) of Mann’s Buddenbrooks in relation to Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy, the prime generational novel in modern Arabic literature.

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man who said “Change the World! It needs it.” – was unlikely to get the Prize, even if, as is no less unlikely, he would have been willing to accept it. Brecht’s objective, socio-scientific, exteriorizing orientation, which is unspiritual throughout, went against the Prize’s entire ethos, which is hardly very different from the subjective idealism of Amnesty International, an organization funded by precisely those banks that expel unemployed lodgers from their homes in the US when they become insolvent. Despite its high spiritual claims, then, the Nobel Prize in Literature is surely geared towards globalizing a culture of adaptation to the hegemony of the World Market, with all its violations of the human rights of most people in most populations worldwide. The Prize achieves this hypocrisy precisely by emphasizing intrinsic, idealistic human values. What it refuses to endorse is any collective recognition of the kind of socially devastating reality that has finally been brought into focus by the events of the Arab Spring, events which, in synergy with the global protests against financial capital, have now once and for all demystified the conservative notion of a “First” and a “Third” World that are locked in economic and literary conflict with each other (Riesz 1983; Schmeling 1995: 155; Youssef 2009).

Gutenberg and world literature The invention of movable type, traditionally attributed to Johannes Gutenberg, who began to employ this technique in 1450, undoubtedly made possible a wide dissemination of all kinds of knowledge and literature on a worldwide scale. We are bound to note, however, that the German claim to this innovation is yet another example of a seemingly all-pervasive Eurocentrism. It is quite on a par with crediting Goethe as the first person to think about World Literature, since almost the same metallic printing types had been invented well before Gutenberg, around 1230, in Korea. If we are to understand developments such as the rise and role of printing or the coining of the term Weltliteratur, then we have to find some way of dealing with this question of “Who came first?” To my mind, it is not the inventions per se that are important, no matter how impressive they may be. Far more crucial, I think, is that, in a given context and period, the new ideas will relate to, and fulfil, a specific societal need, which will be decisive in materializing their detailed implementation, often for the benefit of some particular social class. The invention of the moving types was needed in Korea during the early thirteenth century so that standardized copies of the Tripitaka (the Buddhist canon) could be spread all over the country, after the reigning dynasty had declared Buddhism the official state religion. Similarly, moving metal type was originally



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used by Gutenberg in the Mainz of 1540 in order to mass-produce the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church as a remittance of purgatorial punishments for sins committed during buyers’ lives on earth. And indulgences, we should note, were a product aimed at those who could afford them. When Gutenberg later confirmed the efficacy of his movable type by printing Bibles, that production process certainly saved the twenty years of scribal labour that could go into a manuscript Bible, but the price of a printed copy was still three times a clergyman’s annual salary. Later still, Gutenberg’s invention helped to consolidate the rising middle class, with its mercantile capitalist mode of production in many parts of Europe, at first especially in Italy. Granted, even before Gutenberg’s invention there had been diplomatic relations between French rulers and the Moghuls of East Asia; the two dynasties had had a common interest in combating the Mamluk Sultans in what is now known as the Middle East. Here, in other words, was a channel by which the Korean printing technology could have been transmitted to Gutenberg in Germany. But even so, the main drive behind the German invention and its ever widening use was this objective need for it on the part of the up-and-coming mercantile class in both Germany and Europe at large. Starting with the printing of Bibles, movable type went on to play its major role in the international dissemination of literature, and in consolidating the business and cultural interests of the mercantile middle class. It significantly accelerated the rise of the bourgeoisie as an early modern social force in certain European countries. Illuminatingly similar dynamics were at work in the translation of huge numbers of Arab and Islamic philosophical, scientific, and literary scripts into Latin in mid-tenth century Catalonia. The translations were needed in order to support the urban mercantile class in its revolutionary transformation of a stagnating mediaeval Europe. Needless to say, this process, too, happened in accordance with the specific requirements of the social class which was the main beneficiary, and which modified its older objectives so as to conform to its new trajectory. To take another example of inventiveness answering to a social need, there is the case of Émile Durkheim working out his “règles de la méthode sociologique” during the early decades of the twentieth century. Some commentators have argued that he was somehow or other inspired by Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, a major inter- and multi-disciplinary theoretical work which appeared in 1377. But what really prompted researchers like Durkheim were the sheer needs of industrial capitalism, and thus of that industrial bourgeoisie which constituted the dominant social class in France at the turn of the century. This was a power grouping more than prepared to welcome and exploit the kind of sociological tools that Durkheim came up with. His methodological developments were within a discipline that was to be independent of – emancipated from – philosophy, and which would therefore help, on the one hand, to rationalize social control over the working class and,

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on the other hand, to buttress the evolutionary social ideology of the dominant class, with its concern for progressive governance as the raison d’être of modern Western societies in the phase of their imperial expansion overseas (in Durkheim’s case, expansion to the Outre-mer colonies of France). And to take one last parallel, the same is basically true of what happened with the “mission” of Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (“Père Enfantin”) and the French Saint-Simonians in early nineteenth-century Egypt. Originally, the mission was to oversee the digging of a canal which would link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Instead, they ended up being asked by Mohamed Ali to introduce modern industrial technology so as to improve the regulation of the River Nile’s hydraulic irrigation. This Egyptian application of their technology took place in accordance with the social policy and project of the state as ruled by Mohamed Ali, an innovator who eventually became such a threat to the interests of European industrial capitalist powers that the latter had to unite with the Sublime Porte in Istanbul in order to undermine the Egyptian state and its expansion in Asia and Africa, and ultimately to thwart, in 1840, the ascending project of a serious Middle Eastern rival (Gran 1979). All these examples elucidate the dynamics of cultural reception processes, which apply not only to literature, philosophy and the social sciences, but quite generally to socio-cultural exchange and socio-cultural innovation in the broadest (material) sense. To spell it out, the objective conditions of reception processes are the needs historically experienced by usually dominant, though sometimes rising social forces seeking to achieve their own consolidation or emancipation. And it is those needs which determine what is received, and how it is received and applied. So the receiving socio-economic and cultural context – and thus the receiving society, with its given constellation of social forces – is crucial in the process of either receiving (and therefore, adapting or re-inventing) alien techniques, or inventing its own solutions. My approach to literary and cultural phenomena and their transformations can be described, then, as socio-historic and politico-economic. The difference between this and other approaches will be clear enough. My approach is not to be confused with that of the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics founded by Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, for instance, since the Constance approach springs from an idealistic, hermeneutic theory that underlines the role of an abstract reader, so that the reader’s reception process is described in a way that is thoroughly ahistorical. By the same token, my epistemology is very different from that of the American New Criticism inspired by the late Neo-Kantian René Wellek, which evades historic or social causalities in a quest for the holy grail of literary aesthetics. No less obviously, whereas I stress the importance of the context into which an innovation or borrowing needs to be received, the traditional French



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School of Comparative Literature puts the emphasis on the source of literary and cultural emission, and sees the same changes resulting in many socioeconomically divergent cultural contexts. And anthropological approaches to literature are, if anything, even more unhistorical, in that they elaborate, if not perpetuate, themes and motifs said to have been always and universally constant in any kind of human creativity at all.9 My remarks on the close relation between literature and society may seem arbitrary and superficial. I will perhaps be accused of reducing literary phenomena to sociopolitical and economic factors and thereby losing the very essence of literature. Such a charge, however, would be undeserved. The disciplines that help us appreciate the sociopolitical and economic factors are to be drawn on only in order to help demystify literary phenomena. The plain facts are that specific literary genres are indeed related to specific contexts, but that the artistic stance of a literary work responds above all to the techniques and invented solutions of its specific legacies, which must in turn be understood as either satisfying or not satisfying objective vital needs in the given society. Take, for instance, the rise of Surrealism in the early twentieth century in France. Surrealism was a literary and artistic movement that functioned as a socially motivated critique of the reigning bourgeoisie. That it deformed the harmonious aesthetic values of that class is clear from the responses provoked by the revolutionary socio-artistic work of Max Ernst, or even by the much less genuine and more showy stylization of Salvador Dalí. Yet when the discourse of Surrealism eventually became international, it took on sundry forms, and gave birth to a variety of developments, in accordance with the different requirements of each of the receiving socio-cultural contexts. The case of Shakespeare is not different. The reception of his plays around the world has varied in accordance with the variety of the receiving socio-cultures. All such international processes of transmission do indeed enrich world culture. But to study them properly, we would need research instruments of considerable delicacy. In particular, we would have to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, reception processes where the recipients are more or less subconsciously 9. This trend was especially hailed by the “philosophical circle” at Bonn University in Germany before World War II. Among its most salient members, this circle counted the late Ernst Robert Curtius, Professor of Romance Studies, as well as Erich Rothacker, Professor of Anthropological Philosophy. In his theory of topoi (also named thematology), which he applied to what he called “European literature” (in the singular), Curtius was particularly influenced by Carl Gustav Jung (Curtius 1948; see Youssef 1998a and 2000 for a critique). There are still traces of Curtius’s literary theory in academia, especially in the works of some German and German-speaking scholars like François Jost, who emigrated to the United States after World War II and taught the theory of Stoffgeschichte at North American universities (Jost 1974).

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influenced, or even vaguely infatuated, by the Other and, on the other hand, processes where the recipients are well aware of the objective difference of their own societal position and specific needs. In this second kind of case, recipients may be able to invent ways of rationally remoulding what they receive from alien contexts, so as to meet the socio-cultural requirements of their own distinctive positionality (see Youssef 1976, 7–9). Here it will not be the incoming cultural element that gives the lead, no matter what that element may be, but the receiving context. As a result, the domination of one culture by another will be avoided. On the contrary, cultural variety will be positively enhanced. Obviously, though, the dominant world literary canon today, as consolidated by the system of internationally recognized prizes, and especially by the Nobel Prize in Literature, is quite openly geared to perpetuate and spread the so-called liberal, though in fact conservative vision of the West – of North America and Europe. Every time the Nobel Prize is awarded, the new laureate’s literary works are translated into scores of languages and circulated all over the world. In one sense, the body of literature advanced in this way by the institutions of dominant Western culture(s) simply is the World Literature of today. But opposed to it is a wealth of other literatures, which under Western eyes are uninteresting, too narrowly focused on the reality of the common people, or even subversive in their attentive representation of specific socio-cultures. This is the other, forgotten half of World Literature in the truer sense, and of real world culture. It is not usually promoted by Western publishers, and it does not catch the limelight of the “global factory of public opinion,” to use José Saramago’s telling phrase,10 whereas the zeal for translating texts of the Western World Literature is entirely of a piece with global fashions set by the textile industry. That is why we have to scrutinize both the criteria applied in the award of literary prizes and the actual output of renowned or not so renowned literary publishers worldwide.

Concluding methodological propositions My critique of Eurocentrism, and of that specific centrism or centring focused on, and subjected to the values of the dominant social forces in the West which I choose to call Euro-Western centrism, is not, of course, an isolated intervention. 10. It is true that even the forgotten half has occasionaly received attention, e.g. in the work of Thomas Metscher (2001). But even though Metscher draws upon such “black” authors as the Afro-Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, and the Kenian Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, to name but a few examples of African literary production, he still perpetuates the notion of a so-called “European Literature” (in the singular) as a decisive point of reference!



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Over the past few decades many other voices have been raised, especially in the postcolonial wake of Said’s Orientalism (1978) and its sequel Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said’s critique of Eurocentrism was marred, however, by his adoption of those Eurocentric theoretical approaches which, particularly since World War II, have sought to lend credence to Curtius and Auerbach’s notion of a “European Literature” in the singular. Not only did Said’s discourse suffer from this fundamental self-contradiction. Both of his seminal works, and the postcolonial studies movement to which they gave rise, failed to recognize that Euro-Western-centrism in literary and cultural theory results from that objective politico-economic process which produced the mechanisms and laws of the world market. How can a phenomenon like Euro-Western-centrism be dealt with critically, unless by tracing its very origin in the socio-economic developments of the modern era?11 What this means is that the politico-economic study of such a cultural (i.e. ideological) phenomenon cannot be merely an interesting complement to, say, a philological approach, but is positively mandatory. Without a solid grasp of the laws and mechanisms of the world market, we cannot understand World Literature either. Nowadays, books, newspapers and the latest electronic media are first and foremost market commodities, and this represents a significant difference from previous stages of human history. The published word is no longer mainly geared to ideas or to cultural and literary missions, but is governed by the prevailing laws of the marketplace, especially the Law of Value (Youssef 2009: 19). As a way to elucidate this development, the kind of sociological interest in the production, circulation and consumption of literature and its sponsoring institutions that was pioneered by Roger Escarpit (1958) represented a valuable first step. Escarpit’s critique of the idealistic view of literature so deeply rooted in French culture was long overdue. But we need to go further. What we need now, I am arguing, is a critical, politico-economic approach to World Literature, an approach that is the rational outcome of the discipline of social science. Such an approach will not reduce socio-cultural processes to socio-economic processes. On the contrary, these are two distinct kinds of processes, distinct not only in terms of their mechanisms but also with regard to the speed with which they react and reach out to each other. But to ignore such a substantial causal interaction would be to mystify literary inventions, no matter how sophisticated the specific mechanisms of cultural processes appeared to be in 11. This is also a point of contradiction in René Étiemble (1979), since he recommends that strictly ahistorical aesthetic criteria be applied to literature at large, while at the same time taking issue with Eurocentrism in literary theory and practice, which he sees as reinforcing a certain historic phase of Western hegemony.

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their own right. The approach I am advocating is applicable, moreover, not only to the general frameworks within which literary or cultural modes and trends arise and develop, but also to the intrinsic structures and mechanisms of a literary work itself, which is often – via a specific mode of expression – a mediated reality of inter-human relations in some specific socio-cultural context. To reserve an independent discourse for the study of such literary phenomena in no way contradicts my insistence on investigating their socio-economic roots. In this regard, literary studies have a common basis with all other disciplines, starting with the natural sciences and encompassing even the fine arts. Most unfortunately, the study of political economy, which could do so much to clarify the historical market-related and socio-cultural specificities of, say, medicine, pharmacology, architecture and, of course, literature, still has no place in the introductory methodological curricula of most schools and universities worldwide. This educational deficiency can only lead to a mystification of the various specializations, whereas politico-economical insights would render them more lucid by explaining the objective conditions and contexts of their sociohistorical rise and synchronic development. To ground scholarly disciplines in their politicoeconomical context, while also taking into consideration all the required specificities of each area of study, is the only way we can prevent ourselves from indulging in a self-deceptive practice of purely specialized discourses. Seen in the perspective I am proposing, World Literature would not be based on the uniformity of a conservative Western canon, but would involve an endless variety of literary and cultural inventions, all of them springing from the objective difference between each of the socio-cultures in their reciprocal openness towards each other. Borrowing models from the Other would not be as creative as finding innovative solutions in one’s own socio-culture, except when there is a clear awareness of the objective difference of the Self (though not as a self-image!) from the Other. There would be no drive towards either identification with the Other or rejection of the Other. The sense of being different, if coupled with self-confident openness towards the Other, would make for a truly sound and rewarding cultural encounter worldwide, which would be greatly preferable to the present way of making literature internationally acceptable by dressing it up in a certain ideological uniform. Self-reliant innovations by ordinary people, innovations which, whether written or oral, could today be easily transmitted world-wide via the modern mass-media – and this, free from the intellectual property imperatives of the World Market – would lead to the endless creativity of a far more healthy, alternative World Literature and Culture.



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References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds). 1995. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Auerbach, Erich. 1946. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: Francke. ’Awad, Lewis. 1961. “Almasrah almisri: Ma’sat al-Insan bayna al-Fan wa’l-Din” (“The Tragedy of Man between Art and Religion in the (ancient) Egyptian Theatre”). In Dirasat fi adabina al-Hadith (Studies in modern Arabic Literature), 11–71. Cairo: Dar al-Maarifa. Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1948. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: Francke. Drioton, Étienne. 1942. Le théâtre egyptien. Paris: Editions de la Revue du Caire. El-Gindi, Yusri. 1971. Baghl el-Baladiyya (The Mule of the County Council). Manuscript. In private ownership. Escarpit, Roger. 1958. Sociologie de la littérature. Paris: PUF. Espmark, Kjell. 1986. Det litterära Nobelpriset: Principer och värderingar bakom besluten. Stockholm: Norstedt. Espmark, Kjell. 1991. The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria behind the Choices. Boston: G. K. Hall. Étiemble, René. 1974. Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale. Paris: Gallimard. Étiemble, René. 1979. Innovation? Feu l’eurocentrisme; ou feu sur l’eurocentrisme? Paris: Gallimard. Fairman, H. W (ed.). 1974. The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gnisci, Armando. 2001. Una Storia Diversa. Rome: Meltemi Editore. Gnisci, Armando. 2003. “Letteratura globale e letteratura dei mondi.” In La letteratura europea vista dagli altri, ed. by Franca Sinopoli, 107–123. Rome: Meltemi Editore. Gran, Peter. 1979. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt: 1760–1840. Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press. Hilferding, Rudolf. 1910. Das Finanzkapital: Eine Studie über die jüngste Entwicklung des Kapitalismus. Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung. Jost, François. 1974. Introduction to Comparative Literature. Indianapolis and New York: Pegasus/Bobbs-Merril. Metscher, Thomas. 2001. Moderne Weltliteratur und die Stimme Schwarzafrikas. Essen: Neue Impulse Verlag. Retamar, Roberto Fernandez. 1975. “Para una theoría de la literatura hispanoamericana.” In Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana e otras aproximaciones, 41–52. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Riesz, Janos. 1983. “‘Weltliteratur’ zwischen ‘Erster’ und ‘Dritter’ Welt: Die Verantwortung der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (Komparatistik) heute.” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 33: 140–148. Rüdiger, Horst. 1981. “Europäische Literatur–Weltliteratur: Goethes Konzeption und die Forderungen unserer Epoche.” In Komparatistik: Theoretische Überlegungen und südosteuropäische Wechselseitigkeit, ed. by Fridrun Rinner and Klaus Zerinschek, 27–42. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Ruprecht, Hans-George. 1971. “Weltliteratur vue du Mexique en 1826.” Bulletin hispanique 73: 307–318. DOI: 10.3406/hispa.1971.4049

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Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, Edward W. 1988. “Yeats and Decolonization.” In Nationalism, Colonialism And Literature, ed. by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, 69–98. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: A. Knopf. Schmeling, Manfred. 1995. Weltliteratur heute: Konzepte und Perspektiven. Würzburg: Königs­ hausen and Neumann. Sethe, Kurt Heinrich (ed.). 1928. Dramatische Texte zu altägyptischen Mysterienspielen. Leipzig: Hinrichs. Sinopoli, Franca (ed.). 1999. Il mito della letteratura europea. Rome: Meltemi Editore. Sinopoli, Franca (ed.). 2003. La letteratura europea vista dagli altri. Rome: Meltemi Editore. Youssef, Magdi. 1976. Brecht in Ägypten: Versuch einer literatursoziologischen Deutung. Bochum: Brockmeyer Universitätsverlag. Youssef, Magdi. 1985. “Literary and Social Transformations: The Case of Modern European and Arabic Literatures.” In Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. by Anna Balakian, James J. Wilhelm, and Douwe W. Fokkema, et al., 51–57. New York: Garland. Youssef, Magdi. 1993. al-Tadakhul al-Hadari wa‘l Istiqlal al-Fikri [Socio-Cultural Interference and Intellectual Independence]. Cairo. [In Arabic.] Youssef, Magdi. 1994. “Brecht’s Theatre and Social Change in Egypt (1954–71).” Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts 63: 59–73. Cairo: Cairo University Press. Youssef, Magdi. 1996. “Towards a Multi-Centric Literary Canon: The Arab Contribution in Language and Literature Today.” In Proceedings of the 19th Triennial Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures, 496–498. [Abstract.] Youssef, Magdi. 1998a. The Myth of European Literature. Aachen and Rotterdam: Symposium. Youssef, Magdi. 1998b. “Towards a Real Decentralization of the Literary Canon: The Arab Contribution.” In Humanism and the Good Life: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Congress of the World Federation of Humanists, ed. by Peter Horwath, William L. Hendrickson, L. Teresa Valdivieso, and Eric P. Thor, 381–389. New York: Peter Lang. Youssef, Magdi. 2000. “The Problem of the Model in Contemporary Theatre.” Art in Society 0. http://www.art-in-society.de/AS0/MythLit.html. Youssef, Magdi. 2001. Min al-Tadakhul ila at-Tafa’ul al-Hadari [From Socio-Cultural Interference to Cross-Cultural Interaction]. Cairo: Kitab al-Hilal’s popular book Series. [In Arabic.] Youssef, Magdi. 2003. “Il mito della letteratura europea.” In letteratura europea vista dagli altri, ed. by Franca Sinopoli, 65–105. Rome: Meltemi Editore. Youssef, Magdi. 2009. “From a Philological to a Social Scientific Approach with Regard to Comparative Literary Research.” In Beyond Binarisms: Crossings and Contaminations, ed. by Eduardo F. Coutinho and Pina Coco, 14–19. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano.

chapter 9

Minor and major readings across cultures Lotta Strandberg Reading positions Literatures and writers can be classified as either major or minor on the basis of various criteria, from the more commonsensical to the more elaborate and complicated. But major-ness and minor-ness alike raise questions of both quality and power. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1975) point out, the commonsense view is that a minor writer and a minor literature have little or no literary value and no ability to change and reshape the world. Deleuze and Guattari themselves admit that it can be difficult to find somebody to represent or stand up for a minor literature, and difficult to describe it as well. But their main argument is nevertheless that a minor writer and a minor literature most certainly can have both literary merit and real-world impact. The example they discuss in detail is Kafka, whom they describe as having written minor literature. When they explain why his literary writing is minor, they unfortunately refer to his sociocultural markers of minority (language, religion, ethnicity). Since they clearly take minor-ness to involve literary and aesthetic factors as well, their conceptualization is actually confused and confusing here. So much for literatures and writers. But what about readers? Does it make sense to apply the major-minor binarism to readings of literature as well? And if so, are similar tensions and disagreements likely to arise about the meaning of the two terms? The very idea of major and minor readings may sound undemocratic. By what right should some readers’ readings be considered more important than those of other readers? Yet the mere fact that we operate with literary canons is evidence enough that, when it comes to assessing literary texts’ inventiveness and overall quality, some readings certainly do carry more clout than others, often openly laying claim to an authority which allegedly entitles them to act as the canon’s gatekeepers. Other readings seem, by comparison, quite obviously minor, with little or no power to influence the way texts are categorized and interpreted. By extension, this difference, once readers in general begin to grasp it, can give them ideas about how to read texts, what to look for, and what questions to ask. In other doi 10.1075/fillm.1.09str © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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words, it becomes possible to speak of an influential or dominant style, fashion or mode of reading. Even within one and the same culture, certain dominant strategies of interpretation are always decisive for a text’s canonization. But when a text written within one culture is read within some other culture, major reading trends can become even more conspicuous and effective. A text may invite a manner of reading which is particularly prominent among its first readership, but which within another culture has little or no grounding. In what follows, I shall try to outline my own reading position for Indian literature in English, taking into account the facts of major and minor readings, and of what they can mean in practice. As an example I discuss a reading of the Indian English writer Githa Hariharan’s first novel The Thousand Faces of Night (1992). Beginning with considerations raised by Fredric Jameson’s seminal article “Third World Literature in the Era of Multicultural Capitalism” (1986), I then move on to my own unique and singular reading of Hariharan’s novel, which I shall compare and contrast with some of the readings of readers who do not share my reading position.

Texts across cultures Twenty-five years after it was first published, Jameson’s article itself has something approaching canonical status, and so has Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of it (1987). Granted, in many ways Jameson’s argument now seems dated, since feminist, cultural, diasporic, racial, and queer studies have all subsequently helped to expand readers’ horizons – or what Jameson referred to as “conventional Western habits of reading.” And as for his essay’s central claim that all third-world texts must be read as national allegories, this was deeply problematic from the start, as Ahmad amply showed. Jameson’s division of the world into first, second and third world made third-world literature, by default, a radical alterity to first-world literature, with no recognizable tradition of its own. In fact the most decisive parameter became world capitalism, with literary manifestations seen as differing from each other only in relation to differing degrees of access to capital. This, as Ahmad argued, homogenized both the third and the first world, failing to account for the true complexity of either, or for the global omnipresence of capital (cf. Appadurai et al. 1993). Yet all this notwithstanding, Jameson raised questions which are of lasting validity and, for my present purpose, centrally relevant. Situating himself squarely within Western academia, he asked how we in the West should read “alien” texts, and how they can fit into the canon. So his very point of departure was the canon and the reader, both of them Western.

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Jameson argued: Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of reading? (Jameson 1986: 69)

An encounter with otherness prompted Jameson to misleading comparisons with the familiar, in particular to a comparison of the national allegories of the third world to national allegories of the first world. Although he warned against reductionism, he still concluded that the radical alterity of third-world allegories lay in an overt and conscious integration of the private and the political, a kind of integration which in first-world allegories, by contrast, was unconscious, thus requiring interpretations in order to bring out a text’s social and/or historical critique (Jameson 1986: 79–80). One of the points he overlooked here was that overt and consciously construed national allegories are a common feature in many nonthird-world literatures as well. In Finnish literature, for instance, Väinö Linna’s Tuntematon sotilas from 1954 (The Unknown Soldier, 1957), set in the trenches of the Second World War, features the soldier Antero Rokka as a way of allegorizing the self-image of the heroic Finnish war effort. Later on, in Kjell Westö’s novel Där vi en gång gått from 2006 (Where We Used to Wander, 2006), each character impersonates a different political attitude to the 1918 civil war in Finland, making this novel an allegory par excellence of the birth of Finland as a nation. From a north-European perspective, which is obviously somewhat different from Jameson’s own, it is easy enough to see crossfertilizations here between Finnish and Finland-Swedish literatures and the modernisms of northern Europe. More generally, we can assume that, in countries where independence is not self-evident, or where national identities are recently moulded or called into question, national literatures certainly will involve allegories of national history as its narrative continues to be contested and reformulated. But although Finland is not a third-world country, from the reader position adopted by Jameson the two Finnish literatures are simply lumped together with third-world literatures and defined as commonsensically minor, just because they hardly ever enter the hemisphere associated with the Western canon.

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Readers across cultures The negotiation of the canon, i.e. the negotiation as to what belongs and does not belong, ultimately depends on reading positions, and Jameson could hardly have been more clear about the basis of his own readings: As western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share. The fear and the resistance I’m evoking has to do, then, with the sense of our own non-coincidence with that Other reader, so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in any adequate way with that Other “ideal reader” – that is to say, to read this text adequately – we would have to give up a great deal that is individually precious to us and acknowledge an existence and a situation unfamiliar and therefore frightening – one that we do not know and prefer not to know.  (Jameson 1986: 66)

Jameson did not conclude that third-world literature necessarily lacks inventiveness. He merely noted that it came across to him or “us” as “conventional” or “naïve”, and as minor in the commonsensical meaning of minor – definitely not minor in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka as minor. In point of fact, the process of alienation which Jameson outlines in crosscultural reading experiences is not limited to first-world readers of third-world fiction. It occurs every single time a reader is unconnected with the position of a text’s “ideal reader” or what James Phelan (2005: 213, 217) calls the authorial audience. Jameson insisted that a Western reader feels excluded from the authorial audience of a third-world text and is required to “give up a great deal” in order to become integretated within it, a predicament which can result in “fear” or “resistance.” This claim poses two big problems. First, it defines readers as consumers, who are not to be challenged, but satisfied. Secondly, it posits that, unless readers feel that they do belong to a text’s targeted authorial audience, it will have “a social interest” that they simply do not share. Jameson was, and remains by no means unique in this manner of reading. So it is hardly surprising that Indian critics and scholars complain that Western readers are only interested in the experience of diasporic Indians, and in Indian encounters with the West, whereas India itself and Indian identities in India do not appeal to them (Gandhi 1997; Chaudhuri 2001: xix). Readers’ horizons of expectation are obviously situated in time and space. The more readers feel that they miss out on in a novel, or the more incapable they feel of identifying with its characters, the less likely the novel is to be within their horizon of expectations, and the more difficult they will find it to digest.



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But was there, then, some homogeneous reader position underlying the “we” in Jameson’s argument? Was it the position of a Western, white, male, middle-class, leftist, and heterosexual person, for instance? Or was it something else? Whatever it was, Wayne C. Booth found that he was unable to talk about the reliability or unreliabity of narrators in literature without also talking about the values of readers. “I have called a narrator reliable,” he explained, “when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work … [,] unreliable when he does not”; and readers can spot “morally and intellectually deficient narrators” on the basis of their own “mature moral judgment” (Booth 1983: 158–159, 7, 307). This implies that to determine a narrator’s reliability or unreliability both the internal logic of the text and readers’ own “mature moral judgment” come into play. And what prompted Jameson’s fear and resistance were texts which seemed to deny his right and ability to pass such moral judgement. The position he was outlining and adopting was actually that of an extremely conservative reader. His reading experiences were shaped by certain deeply traditional conventions, which in encounters with third-world fiction caused him to characterize third-world fiction as naively conventional! Yet we cannot simply dismiss either Jameson’s fear and resistance or his assessment of third-world literature. His kind of emotional reaction remains a permanent psychological possibility. It indicates that the Other, or the habit of Othering, is located within the reader position. In fact radical alterity, as Jameson terms it, cannot be situated outside the reading experience. This point is well made by Derek Attridge in his The Singularity of Literature (2004: 22–24), which argues for a notion of the Other that is relational and based on true encounters. In other words, the Other is perceived as the Other only in relation to some particular “I”. So when the Other was defined in its relation to the reader Jameson, the more rigid and inflexible the Jamesonian “I”, the more fully articulated was Jameson’s perception of radical alterity. To adjust his response so as to accommodate the views, interests and concerns of the Other was quite beyond him, and it was this which led him to think of third-world literature as naïve and, hence, minor. Given Jameson’s position within Western academia, he was hardly a minor reader. The authority with which he spoke and passed judgement on allegedly minor literature had consequences far beyond his article, and consolidated what was in fact, and still remains, a major reading position for third-world literature. My point here is not, of course, that national allegories do not exist in Indian English literature, but that such literature also includes fiction that cannot be analysed along that line. Jameson’s reading of third-world fiction is so major that it has helped to ensure that, when it comes to interpreting Indian English literature, the detection of national allegories is a dominant strategy (Rege 2004; Petersson 2008; Gopal 2009). In postcolonial critique, Jameson has been routinely invoked

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in attempts to focus on nation as a prime theoretical and analytical category for the discussion of colonizer versus colonized. Indeed, and as Rosemary Marangoly George (1996: 108) has noted, thirdworld fiction not living up to the first-world expectation of national allegory runs the risk of being unpublished, unread, unresearched. And Indian literary texts which do fit Jameson’s requirement are in practice often, if not always, written from within the first world. Explorations into Indianness, Indian history, nationhood, and identity can then be easily explained as a typically diasporic phenomenon rather than a third-world one. Conversely, the predisposition to read Indian-origin English novels as national allegories can totally overlook the features in a novel that are most fundamentally interesting, or can pigeon-hole novelists obviously not preoccupied with national history, and particulary a number of women writers such as Githa Hariharan, as weird exceptions calling for apologies and mitigation. Even Geetanjali Singh Chanda, in her otherwise brilliant reading of Hariharan’s novel, lapses into trying to see it as something it patently is not: a form of “nation writing” which “forces … a reading of the mother as a mother country because of the political and largely Hindu-Indian framework” (Chanda 2008: 130). The imposition of national allegory as a major interpretative strategy on literature which does not allegorize the nation or deal with nationalism or national identity can indeed be glaring enough. But the gender implications of this procedure are even more questionable. Women writers, especially those, like Hariharan, based in India, are often overlooked both by ordinary readers and by the scholars who define the Indian English canon (Chakladar 2006; Strandberg 2006). Joel Kuortti, from his own survey of Indian English women’s literature, concludes that very few of the writers he studies have an “overwhelming presence” in scholarly and critical engagements (Kuortti 2002: xi–xiii). In histories of Indian English literature, the names of the few female writers he does note as being singled out recur again and again, to the total exclusion of other women writers. For as noted by David Damrosch (2006), interest and critical work always centres on just a few writers, who over time remain basically the same, even though theoretical approaches may radically change. Nor can a literature, a writer or an individual work ever achieve major status except by way of the specific selections of major readings. In the case of The Thousand Faces of Night, Hariharan’s frequent use of myth and folklore inevitably places Indian and non-Indian readers in two different positions. For her authorial audience, the mythological terrain in which she moves will be familiar, activating extratextual associations with which non-Indian readers will be unfamiliar. What for a non-Indian reader might seem just a curious oneliner can, for an Indian reader, be a statement heavily loaded with cultural and political significance. Readers’ differences of backgrounds do result in different



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readings. Materials familiar to Indian readers can entice them into seeing the novel within larger mythological, historical and cultural contexts. A non-Indian, by contrast, will be unable to do this and can miss the way the novel works, usually through interpeting it too much in terms of an “intrinsic Indianness.” Instead of recognizing that its use of materials may be deployed in order to provoke sociocultural change, non-Indian readers often conclude the opposite, viz. that the Indian imaginary is totally static (cf. Strandberg 2011). So how do such differences of reading style relate to notions of major and minor? Well, there is certainly no mistaking the distinction between the authorial audience’s reading and the Jamesonian kind of devalorization of the IndianEnglish text. But in the last analysis this difference actually tends to undermine the major-minor distinction, by suggesting that any and every writer and any and every reader is singular and situated in their own particular ways. When Jameson behaved as if he and his fellows alone were the truly adequate recipients of literary writings, he was bound to end up rejecting many texts. The Indian context in which Hariharan moves is a political and social setting which gives rise to interests and problems with which readers positioned and behaving like Jameson will be unfamiliar and therefore unconcerned. In contrast to such Jamesonian, narcissistically uninterested readers, what needs to be fostered and encouraged is a reader position which, without denying its own historicity and value system, is an engaged, responsible and committed encounter with otherness. Given the continuing prominence of the Jamesonian reading-style, the need for these other types of reading position is especially urgent in cross-cultural reading. But they are actually a desideratum for any kind of reading at all, as is now increasingly recognized. Of the several theoretical foundations on which an Other-sensitive reading-position can now ground itself, I would perhaps single out: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics (1989); Roger D. Sell’s account of literature as genuinely communicational dialogue between real writers and real readers (2000, 2011); the critique of postcolonialism offered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999); and the philosophical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy as applied to literature by Derek Attridge (2004). For my own thinking, the work of Spivak and Attridge has been particularly suggestive. For both Spivak and Attridge the resources and context of the reader are of central importance. Spivak’s persistent argument for a responsible and ethical engagement with the Other is most forcefully expressed in The Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), where she revises and expands her earlier work. She campaigns for a responsible renegotiation of disciplinary practices, and for the inclusion of literatures and languages stemming from Otherness. More precisely, she envisages cross-cultural reading as a contextualizing close reading which is constantly aware that both reader and text are situated.

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Here we stand outside, but not as anthropologist; we stand rather as reader with imagination ready for the effort of othering, however imperfectly, as an end in itself. … This is preparation for a patient and provisional, and forever deferred arrival into the performative of the other, in order not to transcode but to draw a response. (Spivak 2003: 13)

The mode of reading that Spivak advocates demands a clear recognition of both the writer’s and the reader’s situatedness and value systems. Her vision is of an openendedness in which readers dialogically engage with texts in their contexts, a stance which she sees as especially relevant to any study of gender negotiations. Although such interactions are, as Spivak argues, always imperfect, the only way we can draw a response and enter into dialogue is by aspiring to the kind of responsible openness she advocates, fully aware that we may be misguided and in the wrong. As for Attridge, when he argues for a reader position which places demands on readers, he presupposes that they will labour to acquire the contextual knowledge necessary to an even-handed response. Readers need to make “an effort to do justice to the singularity of the other and to suspend habitual modes of thinking and feeling” (Attridge 2004: 83). Not least, they must allow themselves to be surprised. Otherwise they will not experience a text’s full singularity and inventiveness. Spivak and Attridge differ substantially from Jameson. For Jameson, responsibility lies with the text, such that the text needs to fit in with the reader’s horizon of expectations. Both Spivak and Attridge, on the other hand, call for a reader who both recognizes the existence of a heterogeneous authorial audience and is committed to a responsible, attentive reading. This difference of basic reading position is what I now hope to illustrate through an analysis of Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) and some major readings of it. My main point will be that an understanding of this novel and its inventiveness is actually to be had from a minor reading. The minor reading I have in mind is my own reading, which I describe as minor because, while I hope I am fully capable of identifying literary qualities in literature, I am still conducting a cross-cultural reading here, which can never be as assertive as a reading carried out within the cultural context I call my own, or as self-confident as Jameson’s major reading of third-world literature.

Politics across cultures On the face of it, Hariharan’s novel has a traditional marriage plot. The protagonist, Devi, is a well-educated, upper-class South Indian who completes her education with a Master of Arts degree at an American university. It is clear that the goal of Devi’s education is her personal development, but also, perhaps, the



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enhancement of her chances in the marriage market of affluent, liberal middleand upper-class professionals, rather than the improvement of her standing in the labour market. She returns home to Madras, where her widowed mother Sita has been waiting for her. After a period during which Sita and Devi make up for lost time, Devi marries Mahesh and moves to his parental home, a common enough practice in an Indian context. Her husband is mostly away on business, and Devi is emotionally confused, bored and unhappy. The couple try to have a baby, but unsuccessfully. Eventually, the marriage fails and Devi elopes with a musician named Gopal. But the novel ends with Devi’s return to her mother’s house when the relationship with Gopal fails as well. Most critics adopting a major reading-position never question Devi’s return to her mother (Rege 2004; Sunder Rajan 2004; Chanda 2008). Comparing the novel to Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1988), they interpret Devi’s choice here as showing at least a bit more agency than Deshpande’s female protagonist, Jaya, who opts for marriage and takes her husband back. But although Devi’s return to the mother is, of course, an alternative to staying with her husband, none of her actions is as such very “revolutionary”, which often leads critics to conclude that the book belongs with other bourgeois novels about unhappy women and their lack of real possibilities for choice (Indira 1995; Nityanandam 1995; Rao 1995; Khair 2001; Navarro Tejero 2001; Yellaiah and Pratima 2003; Sunder Rajan 2004; Navarro Tejero 2005; Chanda 2008). If we follow such readings, neither Devi nor her mother sees a life outside the family as a real alternative, which means that, in line with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993), we will unduly emphasize what we might call the “dollhouse” problem, i.e. an interpretation which centralizes marriage and heterosexual relations as the main site of oppression for middle-class women, an interpretation still applicable to Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) of 1879. In the feminist literary critique which dominates readings of Third-World women’s writing, this type of interpretation is both traditional and conventional. Their focus on the dollhouse problem leads feminist scholars to voice a disappointment that characters like Devi and Sita do not act out a full feminist agenda. The implications of this are just as serious as Jameson’s assumption regarding national allegories. The predefined major reading strategy of feminist critique, with its emphasis on heterosexual marriage and its valorization of female agency, tends to homogenize both literary texts and readings of them, as when Josna Rege argues that “women’s resistance can never be unambiguous within the Indian patriarchal framework, and … the transformation of victim into agent takes place at great personal cost” (Rege 2004: 145). Personally, I am not sure that becoming an agent takes a greater personal toll than being a victim. But what Rege is obviously suggesting is that, since in India the family is the realm for both identity

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formation and oppression, it is also a sphere of tensions and sacrifices. At all events, the transformation of female victims into agents is certainly the outcome most highly prized in feminist criticism and, as such, I have no quarrel with this. On the contrary, I can quite see that women’s problems and feminist solutions to them have a universal bearing. My only reservation is that the universal dimension should not blind us to the specificities of particular sociocultural contexts. To recognise the universality of the politics of oppression and resistance does not entail an assumption that the politics of oppression and resistance will always and everywhere take exactly the same form. In contrast to the “dollhouse” readings which critique marriage and the male characters, I would contend that in Hariharan’s novel the roles of marriage and men, though obvious enough, are actually of very limited significance to the development of Devi as a character. Rather than writing off the institution of family altogether, Hariharan sets out to reshape the way kinswomen interact with each other. She makes, as I see it, an important and inventive contribution to feminist agendas, but one which is entirely a matter of renegotiating these female kinship relationships. What articulates it is precisely the return of the daughter to the mother. As Radhika Mohanram (1996) observes, the mother-daughter relationship is a fairly uncommon theme in Indian English fiction. The relative neglect of this relationship may partly have obvious roots in the Indian family structure, which means that fictional mothers “naturally” fade into the background when fictional young couples marry. But partly, too, the explanation must be that, in this particular culture, mother-daughter relationships are fraught with particular and complex tensions. One novel where this does receive attention is Krishna Sobti’s Hindilanguage ऐ लड़की from 1991, the title often transliterated Ai Ladki and translated into English as Listen Girl! (2002). This actually reads less like a novel than a very dramatic play. Lacking internal focalization and authorial interventions (apart from a few “stage directions”), it concentrates on the intense dialogue between the mother and the daughter, demonstrating a tension between love and affection on the one hand and hostility and resentment on the other. When this novel was translated into Swedish in 2001, its difficult title was rendered Lyssna min dotter (“Listen, My Daughter”), and both its Swedish and English titles, though each with their own connotations, successfully convey Sobti’s emphasis on the motherdaughter relationship. An equally interesting Hindi novel is Geetanjali Shree’s मां from 1997 (in English, Mai (2000)), which problematizes the mother-daughter relationship from the daughter’s perspective. Shree’s protagonist is a successful and independent woman who tries to come to terms with her own sentiments vis à vis her submissive and altruistic mother, who, the daughter feels, never stands up for herself. Then again, there are also works of scholarship which deal with



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mother-daughter relations head-on: Sudhir Kakar’s The Inner World: A PsychoAnalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (2002 [1978]), for instance, and Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1990 (1993). Kakar (2002: 57, 60) characterizes the relationship as one of warmth, intimacy, and relaxed affection, and continues: “in the earliest period of emotional development, Indian girls are assured of their worth by whom it really matters: by their mothers”. Kumar, by contrast, suggests the difficulties that can arise: The pain and helplessness of being born a girl; the shock of puberty and the associated development of sexual fear; the terrible rejection of being “sent away” at marriage; loneliness and loss of the self after marriage; and a repetition of the entire cycle of pain, fear and rejection through the birth of another daughter.  (Kumar 1993: 2)

All these accounts, fictional and non-fictional, suggest how very highly charged the mother-daughter relationship can be in Indian contexts, how full of deep emotions, tensions and conflict. It is precisely this, I suspect, which, in tandem with a bourgeois ambition to keep up appearances, explains why the relationship is so seldom displayed in fiction and, in interpretations of novels along the line of the feminist major reading, is not even recognised. In Hariharan’s story of Sita and Devi the tension between mother and daughter is very much a factor, and the relationship between them has to undergo dramatic alterations in order to facilitate the daughter’s return to the mother’s home and thus maintain the novel’s overall coherence. As the novel’s first-person narrator, Devi, who recalls her grandmother very lovingly, does not waste much empathy on her own mother. Instead, she is rather condescending. The mother, though her name, Sita, carries positive enough overtones from the Ramayana, is portrayed as cynical and conniving. Her letters to Devi in America are premeditated in both tone and length. And everything she does is designed to get Devi married and “disposed of ”: “like a veteran chess-player she made her moves”; she “played her next card” (Hariharan 1992: 14, 16). Sita is even described as positively evil. When Devi recalls how her mother sent away the orphaned female cousin Annapurna, she can see an explanation for this in her own friendship with Annapurna: Sita did not want her to have friends. That there were obvious erotic and flirtatious underpinnings to the relationship between Annapurna and Devi’s father, which could place Sita’s actions in an entirely different light, is something Devi does not even think about. Instead, Sita’s behaviour is always interpreted in the most negative way possible, and described with a total lack of sympathy. So much so, that it is actually hard to believe that Devi would ever want to go back to her. After her marriage, Devi gives no thought to her relationship to her mother, who enters

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her self-obsessed ruminations only once (1992: 83). Sita has simply vanished, as it were, and it is only Devi’s husband Mahesh who mentions her from time to time. Precisely because Devi’s return to her mother is not explained, lacking as it does all foundation in her internal focalization, it comes across as abrupt and unexpected. The internal logic of the novel – the way the characters are construed, the values vested in them – points to the sheer impossibility of her returning home. Yet return home she does. Not the least of the questions this raises is that, if Devi pictures her mother as the perfect Indian wife incarnate, how can she assume that Sita will want to take her renegade daughter back? Would it not be more plausible for her to reject Devi? The plain fact is that both Devi and Sita have to undergo substantial change before Devi’s return can become a viable solution. And herein lies, I would suggest, Hariharan’s greatest contribution to feminist thinking. What she shows is a significant reformulation of social roles, which does then enable the two women to relate to each other. This has nothing at all to do with heterosocial patterns but belongs entirely to the sphere of female kinship relations. Hariharan is far from denying that the family is a depot for both affirmation and oppression. But her renegotiation of family life implicitly suggests that women also participate in the oppression of other women. What then becomes necessary is a change in in homosocial kinship relations, so that oppression will not be replicated and passed on. Most readings of this novel have not drawn attention to the discrepancy between Devi’s actions and the depiction of the mother. Nor have they questioned Devi’s return to her mother. Interpretations which, seeing a dollhouse situation, assume that the novel is mainly about the problems of heterosexual marriage are the result, I am suggesting, of the major reading strategy of feminist criticism, and are blind to Hariharan’s true inventiveness. The only caveat I would make is that Indian readers of the novel may be more inclined to take Devi’s narration as somewhat unreliable, perhaps assuming that her ironic and condescending descriptions of family members confirm that kinship relations in an Indian context simply do not encourage women to achieve individual agency (Roland 1988: 8–9). Yet the possibility of this further kind of reading merely goes to show just how complex cross-cultural reading can be when there are substantial differences of reading position. My definition of major and minor reading positions has considered their relative sociopolitical and cultural power and their ability to indentify a text’s literary quality and inventiveness. The challenge in cross-cultural readings lies in the potentialities of different reading positions which can seem to come into confrontation with each other, as their power bases and value systems result in different interpretations. Sometimes the challenge can feel rather daunting, which could be



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the reason why Attridge restricts his own work to Western literature. In fact the insecurities of operating within, and of trying to empathize with, an alien sociocultural and political context can result in Jamesonian fear and resistance, or in a constant worry, as in my own reading of The Thousand Faces of Night, that the parameters, emphases and focus of the attempted interpretation are somehow offbeat, somehow still wide of the mark. Such insecurities and doubts are one of the marks of a minor reading position. But unlike Jameson, I believe that this should never discourage us from cross-cultural readings, nor deter us from critique. On the contrary, there is no other way to initiate and sustain the kind of genuine dialogue that is needed if we are to open our eyes to the quiddity and inventiveness of literature from cultures not our own.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 2001 [1987]. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’.” In his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 95–122. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun, Lauren Berlant, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dilip Gaonkar (eds). 1993. “Controversies: Debating in Theory.” Public Culture 6 (1): 3–192. http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/6/1.toc. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-6-1-vii Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge. Booth, Wayne C. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chakladar, Arnab. 2006. “Of Houses and Canons: Reading the Novels of Shashi Deshpande.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37: 81–97. Chanda, Geetanjali Singh. 2008. Indian Women in the House of Fiction. New Delhi: Zubaan Books. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2001. “Modernity and the Vernacular.” In The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. by Amit Chaudhuri, xvii–xxxiv. London: Picador India. Damrosch, David. 2006. “World Literature in a Postcolonial Hypercanonical Age.” In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. by Haun Saussy, 43–53. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2003[1975]. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Dana Polan (trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Deshpande, Shashi. 1988. That Long Silence. New Delhi: Penguin India. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press. Gandhi, Leela. 1997. “Indo-Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the ‘Stephanian’ Novel.” Australian Humanistic Review 8. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-1997/gandhi.html. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 1996. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gopal, Priyamavada. 2009. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. London: Oxford University Press. Hariharan, Githa. 1992. The Thousand Faces of Night. New Delhi: Penguin India.

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Ibsen, Henrik. 2009 [1879]. Et dukkehjem. Oslo: Gyldendal. Indira, S. 1995. “Walking the Tight Rope: A Reading of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night.” In Indian Women Novelists, ed. by R. K. Dhawan, set III vol. 14, 177–182. New Delhi: Prestige Books. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multicultural Capitalism.” Social Text 15: 65–88. DOI: 10.2307/466493 Kakar, Sudhir. 2002 [1978]. The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Khair, Tabish. 2001. Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kumar, Radha. 1993. The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1990. London: Verso. Kuortti, Joel. 2002. Indian Women’s Writing in English: A Bibliography. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Linna, Väinö. 1954. Tuntematon Sotilas. Helsinki: Otava. Mohanram, Radhika. 1996. “The Problem of Reading: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Indian Postcoloniality.” In Women of Color: Mother Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 20–37. Austin: University of Texas Press. Navarro Tejero, Antonia. 2001. Matrimonio y Patriarcado en autoras de la díaspora hindú. Huelva: U de Huelva, Servicio de Publicaciones. Navarro Tejero, Antonia. 2005. Gender and Caste in the Anglophone-Indian Novels of Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan: Feminist Issues in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Nityanandam, Indiera. 1995. “Search for Identity: Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night.” In Indian Women Novelists, ed. by R. K. Dhawan, set III vol. 14, 183–192. New Delhi: Prestige Books. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. ­London: Cornell University Press. Petersson, Margareta. 2008. Globaliseringens Ansikten: Den Indoengelska Romanen. Stockholm: Carlsson bokförlag. Rao, K. Damodar. 1995. “Penance and Multiple Response in Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night.” In Indian Women Novelists, ed. by R. K. Dhawan, set III vol. 14, 159–169. New Delhi: Prestige Books. Rege, Josna E. 2004. Colonial Karma: Self, Action, and Nation in the Indian English Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roland, Alan. 1988. In Search of Self in India and Japan: Towards a Cross-Cultural Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sell, Roger D. 2000. Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.78 Sell, Roger D. 2011. Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/ds.11 Shree, Geetanjali. 2000 [1997]. Mai: A Novel. Nita Kumar (trans.). New Delhi: Kali for Women. Sobti, Krishna. 2001. Lyssna min dotter. Annika Persson (trans.). Stockholm: Bokförlaget Tranan. Sobti, Krishna. 2002. Listen Girl!. Shiva Nath (trans.). New Delhi: Katha. Sobti, Krishna. 2008 [1991]. ऐ लड़की (Ai Laḍki). New Delhi: Rajkamal Publications.



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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. The Death of a Discipline. New York: Colombia University Press. Strandberg, Lotta. 2006. “At the Gates of St Stephens.” Muse India 7. http://www.museindia.com/ viewarticle.asp?myr=2006andissid=7andid=314. Strandberg, Lotta. 2011. Embedded Storytelling and Gender Negotiations in Githa Hariharan’s First Three Novels. Helsinki: Helsinki University Print. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 1993. “The Feminist Plot and the Nationalist Allegory: Home and World in Two Indian Women’s Novels in English.” Modern Fiction Studies 39: 71–92. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1045 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 2004. “The Heroine’s Progress: Feminism and the Family in the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Githa Hariharan and Manjula Padmanabhan.” In Desert in Bloom: Contemporary Indian Women’s Fiction in English, ed. by Meenakshi Bharat, 80–96. New Delhi: Pencraft International. Westö, Kjell. 2006. Där vi en gang gått. Helsingfors: Söderströms. Yellaiah, J., and G. Pratima. 2003. “‘Inside and Out There: Male Constructs and Female Choices in Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night.” Kakatiya Journal of English Studies 23: 188–195.

chapter 10

From Black Athena to Black Dionysus and beyond? African adaptations of Greek tragedy Astrid Van Weyenberg A number of recent studies explore the relationship between contemporary Africa and ancient Greece. Examples are Kevin Wetmore’s Athenian Sun in an African Sky (2002) and Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre (2003), Barbara Goff ’s Classics and Colonialism (2005), Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie’s Classics in Post-Colonial Words (2007) and Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson’s Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007). When it comes to African or African diasporic adaptations of Greek tragedy, commentators frequently analyse the engagement between contemporary and classical texts and contexts within the postcolonial perspective. Sometimes this engagement is viewed in terms of distance or even opposition, sometimes the emphasis is on correspondences. Regardless of the wide range of perspectives, in many analyses “colonialism” is given a central position, something I want to consider critically. My starting-point is that, on the one hand, I object to making African adaptations of Greek tragedy primarily about colonialism and would prefer to emphasize the relevance of Greek tragedy within African contexts today, but that, on the other hand, I do not propose to sidestep or ignore the long history of colonialism. In order to appreciate the dynamics at work in African adaptations of Greek tragedy, it is actually crucial to understand the role played by both classical materials and Classics as a discipline within Eurocentric traditions, ideologies and practices. At the same time, I have no wish to reduce the adaptations I am discussing to mere reactions to such Eurocentric traditions, ideologies and practices. The first thing to note is the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum in African schools, a curriculum in which Greek classics in general, and Greek tragedy in particular, took up an authoritative position. This has meant that for African playwrights Greek tragedy is part of their upbringing and their culture. Wole Soyinka explicitly refers to his classical education in the introduction to his adaptation doi 10.1075/fillm.1.10wey © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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of the Bacchae, where he acknowledges “a twenty year rust” with classical Greek (1973). But although Greek tragedy is therefore not “alien” to Africa, we should not forget that, during colonization, Greek and Latin classics were used to legitimize British domination. The British elite saw Classics as foundational for British literary tradition and civilization at large. As Paula Makris (2001: 2) explains, the British empire, “as the rightful inheritor of the cultural capital attached to both Homer and Shakespeare, … could claim to be the representative of the universal values that its educational system valorised in canonized literary texts”. Colonialism was not only the decisive factor in Greek tragedy’s migration to the African continent. It had also informed the society from which Greek tragedy itself had originally sprung (see Wetmore 2002: 8–10). Afrocentric approaches to antiquity tend to emphasize an analogy between Athenian imperialism and later European colonialism, viewing the Athenian empire as the first main example and starting point of a history of European exploitation. This view is indirectly expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Franz Fanon’s seminal work on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre), first published in 1961. There, Sartre aligns the Parthenon, built by Pericles in the fifth century BCE as a symbol of Athenian democracy and imperialism, with brotherhood, one of the humanist ideals used to legitimate colonial practices. So as to make the connection between contemporary colonialism and ancient Greek imperialism even clearer, Sartre (2004 [1961]: xliv) describes modern European colonial practices as a “Hellenization” which resulted in “Hellenized” Asians and “Greco-Latin blacks”. Though such parallels certainly can be drawn between Athenian imperialism and nineteenth-century European colonialism, Irad Malkin (2004: 363) rightly warns that to observe ancient Greek expansionist practices entirely through the prism of modern imperialism and colonialism is to overlook important political, religious and cultural differences. And this same problem arises with theories which place Greece at the origin of European constructions of “Otherness,” of which the most famous example is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said (2003 [1978]: 57) traces the demarcation between “West” and “Orient” back to ancient Greece, citing Aeschylus’ Persians and Euripides’ Bacchae as early examples of the way Europe articulates the Orient as defeated and distant, and as a place of dangerous excess. The classicist Edith Hall, similarly, suggests that Persians “represents the first unmistakable file in the archive of Orientalism, the discourse by which the European imagination has dominated Asia ever since by conceptualizing its inhabitants as defeated, luxurious, emotional, cruel, and always as dangerous” (quoted in Vasunia 2003: 89). Here, though, I shall not dwell on the usefulness or otherwise of tracing modern notions of, and attitudes to “Otherness” back to the ancient Greek construction of the barbarian other, since that would only lead to endless lists of historical differences and similarities.



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Instead, I am more interested in how “Greece” has been employed in contemporary constructions of Otherness. I am concerned, then, not so much with the historical reality of classical times, as with what Salvatore Settis describes as “the image of the ‘classical’”. This image is bound up with the concept of a West with clear and sealed frontiers, typified by extreme dynamism and contrasting with the eternally static East. It is not only determinedly Eurocentric; it also exactly overlaps the concept of Western civilization as superior to every other one, and therefore legitimizes colonialism’s expansionist or hegemonic policies and economic and cultural subjugation. The opposition between Greeks and barbarians is then translated into the one between the West and the others, now given new life and projected onto Asia and Africa.  (Settis 2006: 103)

Settis calls particular attention to cultural politics, not only in the image constructed of the classical and in the “concept” of a West, but also in the relationship between the two. In that relationship the discipline of Classics has played an important role, and has arguably depended on it for its own existence and survival. Phiroze Vasunia explains how in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “European Philhellenism” perpetuated the East-West distinction investigated by Said. That distinction led to the “aggressive promotion of Altertumswissenschaft in Germany and Classics in England,” branches of learning within which Greece was conceptualized as a pure ideal “uncorrupted by foreign traits” and, “despite all the evidence to the contrary”, quite detached from the Orient (Said 2003 [1978]: 90). The word “Classics” denotes much more than just a collection of cultural objects from a distant past, and more, too, than a discipline that studies such objects. Primarily it refers to a discourse that is still ongoing. As Christopher A. Stray argues, Classics is a discourse which is complementary to orientalism and occidentalism, and which rests on a related strategy of legitimation: “Orientalism and Occidentalism describe and construct an alien Other, while classicising – as one might riskily call it – produces an account of an original Self ” (Stray 1996: 78). Classics, then, has been employed to reaffirm the distinction between a Western self and a non-Western Other, a distinction that plays a key role in different interpretations of the relationship between ancient Greek material and contemporary African cultures. In his discussion of African-American adaptations of Greek tragedy, Kevin J. Wetmore discusses three models for the analysis of this interaction, extending the focus to the African diaspora: Black Orpheus, Black Athena, and Black Dionysus. The Black Orpheus model, Wetmore explains, can be traced back to Sartre’s essay “Orphée Noir” (Black Orpheus, 1948), which was a preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of Francophone poetry by writers of African descent. Here Sartre claimed that, unlike European poets, “the blacks of Africa … are still in

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the great period of mythical fecundity” (in Wetmore 2003: 16). Of course, this romantic celebration fixes Africa in an idealized past, so that Sartre’s admiration of African poetry is ultimately patronizing. As Wetmore states, Black Orpheus was a way of explaining African poetry to a European audience by using a European myth (of Orpheus and Eurydice) with which that audience was familiar.1 In this Afro-Greek connection, the African is explained through the Greek. This Eurocentric model is counteracted by the Black Athena model, which derives from Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, published in 1987. Bernal conceives of Greece as African in origin, arguing that Greek culture was shaped by African influences. He contends that this African connection has been denied by European scholars, who for racist reasons have rewritten classical history and replaced it by an “Aryan model” in order to “keep black Africans as far as possible from European civilization” (Bernal 1987: 30). Bernal sets out to re-establish the “Ancient Model” and return Greek culture to authentic Afroasiatic origins. Bernal’s Black Athena has far-reaching implications, because it implies that Western civilization is partly African in origin. For Bernal, this is a step forward: I think it is an important … [step] for blacks, who have been told, “There are no – and never have been – black civilizations.” The implication is that there never can be: “You blacks are inherently uncivilized, and if you want any civilization you must become like us whites.” I think recognition of Egypt as an African civilization with a central role in the formation of Greece – the critical culture in the making of European civilization – changes black self-perception. To put it another way, I hope to oppose this view to negritude – Leopold Senghor’s notion that black Africa is feeling and Greece is intellect.  (In Cohen 1993: 7)

The full title of Bernal’s work, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, itself preserves some of the problematic signifiers that his theory aims to challenge (“roots,” “Classical,” “Civilization”). Looking back, Bernal has admitted that he is now ashamed about this shortcoming in both the title and the book itself: I should never have left Classical unmarked; and Civilization implied both Eurocentrism and progressivism – the implication that Afroasiatic “cultures” had only the teleological function of leading to European civilization.  (In Cohen 1993: 21)

1. Black Orpheus was also the title of a journal edited by Uli Beier (a German living in Nigeria who founded the journal in 1957) and the 1959 film Orfeu Negro, directed by Marcel Camus and set in Brazil during carnival – see Wetmore (2003) for further information on these, and for a discussion of other Eurocentric models that set out to explain African culture through the metaphor of Greek culture, such as Black Odysseus, Black Ulysses, Black Venus, or Black Apollo.



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Bernal’s theory has come in for much discussion. Most famously, Mary Lefkowitz (1997; see also Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996) complains about his preoccupation with race, insisting that between ancient Athenian and contemporary perceptions of race, ethnicity and skin colour there are important distinctions to be made (see Wetmore 2002: 17). Wetmore, too, dismisses Bernal’s theory, using the deprecating phrases “circumstantial evidence,” “conspiracy theories,” “faulty logic” and “fuzzy thinking,” and arguing that Bernal “would have Greece seen as the stepchild of African parents whom later (European) historians claimed was self-generating, born fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, and not of African origin” (2003: 16–17). By tracing Western civilization back to (black) Africa, Bernal indeed reverses the genealogical logic constructed and promoted by Eurocentrism. However, I think that this is precisely why Black Athena deserves more credit than Wetmore allows. Viewed in relation to the Eurocentrism it is intended to challenge, Bernal’s reverse genealogy could be seen as a useful strategy to reveal such Eurocentrism as an ideological construct; hence Bernal’s declaration that “my enemy is not Europe; it’s purity” (Cohen 1993: 23). Seen this way, Bernal’s strategy is comparable to that of Wole Soyinka in his theory of Yoruba tragedy (1976). Soyinka’s concern is with tragedy as a form and sensibility among the Yoruba, and he combines Yoruba cosmology and ritual with Western theories of tragedy. In his essay “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” (Soyinka 1976: 140–160), he explains that the role of the Yoruba god Ogun in the birth of Yoruba tragedy in many ways parallels the role of Dionysus in the ritual origin of Greek tragedy. By introducing Ogun as “the elder brother” of Dionysus, Soyinka uses a simple phrase to play politics of an ambiguous kind. Not only does he establish a relation of brotherhood between the two gods, emphasizing their connection and familiarity, but he also undermines the traditional Eurocentric view, in which the relation always prioritizes Europe as the “elder” and “wiser” brother. Like Bernal, Soyinka reverses – and thus inevitably adheres to – a genealogical model, which can be a useful political strategy in trying to counter the dominant model. As Olankule George puts it, Soyinka is writing back to Europe by seizing a discursive form and filling it with a different content …. [I]n so doing, he acts out a basic self-refutation that centralists of the canon act out all the time: he plays politics, so to speak, by insisting that we take our minds out of the gutter of politics.  (George 2003: 169)

Without recounting the “Black Athena debate” in full, suffice to say here that despite its flaws, Bernal’s alternative theory about ancient Greece has successfully challenged Eurocentric classicism, forcing scholars to rethink what has long been

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conveniently taken for granted. By highlighting African and Asian influences on Greek culture, Bernal points out, for example, that the direct link which in the “Classical Tradition” is established between ancient Greece and the contemporary Western world, and use of this link to draw a contrast with non-Western cultures, quite overlook the fact that the development of Greek civilization depended on an expanded trading network across the Mediterranean, resulting in significant cultural exchanges between Greece, Asia Minor and North Africa from as early as the eighth century BCE (Wetmore 2002: 7). More generally, Bernal’s demonstration that classical scholarship has harnessed racist and anti-Semitic attitudes gives a “salutary reminder about the socio-political conditions in which knowledge is produced” (Vasunia 2003: 92). Here, too, it is important to extend the analytical focus beyond the historical accuracy of Bernal’s theory and turn to the cultural politics that this theory performs, which also means acknowledging that the theory does not necessarily depend on the politics. At first sight, it might seem that African adaptations of Greek tragedy are indeed understandable as artistic expressions of the central claim Bernal makes in Black Athena. This would mean that to write “Africanized” versions of Greek tragedies is a strategy by which African playwrights seek, not so much to take over colonialist impositions and make them their own, as rather to reclaim what was rightfully “theirs” from the start. Yet to view ancient Greece as exclusively African would ignore the hybrid nature of (classical) culture, a hybridity which Bernal takes great care to emphasize, even if those who criticize him as “Afrocentric” seldom mention this.2 African adaptations of Greek tragedy are typically a mix of different theatrical, mythological and cultural traditions, through which they effectively challenge the essentialism of both Eurocentric and Afrocentric positions. They move beyond oppositional politics and, as cross-cultural texts, can remind us that in classical times, too, African, Asian and European cultures intermixed with each other. They can actually serve as a corrective to a widespread blind spot – for as Wetmore remarks, “much of the cultural continuum of the classical world has been appropriation and representation without true knowledge of the actual, original cultures” (Wetmore 2002: 19).3 2. Bernal does not conceive of himself as an Afrocentrist, but admits that he has a number of points of agreement with them and that, with respect to Afrocentrists’ appropriation of the name “Black Athena,” he is in some ways “very pleased to provide ammunition for them” (Cohen 1993: 7). 3. With regard to Wetmore’s use of the words “continuum,” “true,” “actual,” and “original” in the above citation, it is important to acknowledge that any “true” knowledge of antiquity is unattainable to begin with. Knowledge of the classical world, like all knowledge, is inevitably mediated and informed by the multiple presents that superseded it.



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As an addition to Black Orpheus and Black Athena, Wetmore offers Black Dionysus as the third, and his own preferred model for the analysis of “the AfroGreek connection” (2003: 13). He describes this model as a post-Afrocentric formulation of drama that is counter-hegemonic, self-aware, refuses to enforce dominant notions of ethnicity and culture, and uses ancient Greek material to inscribe a new discourse that empowers and critiques all cultures, even as it identifies the colonizer’s power and the colonized’s powerlessness.  (Wetmore 2003: 44)

Wetmore further explains that in the Black Dionysus model the foreign (whether cultural or historical) is not a mirror for the reflection of the Self or an object for Othering. Rather, it is recognized and valued in and of itself. Familiarity is celebrated, but not to erase difference. Greek tragedy becomes a means by which diverse communities might be encountered in public space and the historical forces that have shaped them might be exposed. (Wetmore 2003: 45)

In contrast to Black Athena, Wetmore’s Black Dionysus model seems a more appropriate model to analyse African (or African-American, Wetmore’s focus at this particular point) adaptations of Greek tragedy. It depends less on opposition, while still acknowledging the history of colonialism. Moreover, it does more justice to the complex dynamics of cross-cultural adaptations, with their double emphasis on familiarity and difference. With regard to Wetmore’s term “counter-hegemonic” in the above citation, however, it would be very important to specify which hegemony or, more accurately, which hegemonies (plural) we have in mind. All too often, analyses of African adaptations of Greek tragedy suggest that the texts are first and foremost about colonialism, as when, à propos Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973), Gilbert and Tomkins say that since it stages so convincingly the destruction of a tyrant by supernatural forces, Euripides’ Bacchae is an ideal text for appropriation by marginalised groups: Pentheus is easily refigured as an agent of colonialism.  (Gilbert and Tomkins 1996: 39)

Soyinka’s Pentheus is more than “an agent of colonialism”, since he also refers to the many dictators that have held Africa in their grip, and indeed to tyrannical leaders in all parts of the world. In other words, the hegemony against which Soyinka directs his text is by no means as singular as Gilbert and Tompkins suggest, and his play is about much more than colonialism. That is why Fémi Òsófisan, a fellow-Nigerian playwright, has objected to the words “counter-discursive” and “post-colonial” as descriptions of Nigerian playwrights’ work. Òsófisan argues that such a reading reduces their plays to mere “strategies to deconstruct the presence

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of colonization”, so ignoring the fact that “the Empire,” though still an important concern, is no longer a current one: postcolonialism is a return to the past, to the trenches of Negritude, whereas our Identity crisis in Africa is of a different order entirely, relating to two urgent problems – first, the dilemma of creating a national identity of our disparate ethnic communities; and secondly, that of creating committed, responsible, patriotic, and compassionate individuals out of our civil populations. (Òsófisan 1999: 3–6)

Though Òsófisan’s claim that “the Empire” is not a “current” concern is open to question, he makes the important point that diverse hegemonies are in place, and that colonialism is one of them. This brings me to the more general point, also touched on by Òsófisan, that to analyse African adaptations of Greek tragedy mainly in terms of “resistance” tends to make the history of colonialism their defining force and the “West” their sole term of comparison. Such a perspective ultimately reduces African literatures to mere addenda to European culture. In practice, African playwrights do not engage with Greek tragedy as foreign texts or as the cultural property of the West. On the contrary, Greek tragedy is part of hybrid African cultural traditions already in existence. To claim that Greek tragedy is alien to Africa would be to deny the colonialist history that brought these texts to the African contexts of which they are now an integral part. It would suggest an attempt either to return Africa to a pre-colonial “authentic” state, or to freeze it in a set of colonial power relations which allow Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, the English language and other aspects of African cultures deriving from colonial, neo-colonial and global cultural exchanges to be located as Western outposts in Africa, but not to be regarded as anything other than the property of Western hegemony. Since Greek tragedy is indeed part of African cultures, the familiarity of African playwrights with Greek tragedies, and the way they draw on these plays, cannot be analysed simply along the lines of similar or dissimilar religious and mythological systems or cultural and theatrical traditions. But comparisons certainly can be drawn, of course, and most of the playwrights exploring relationships between classical Greece and contemporary (postcolonial) Africa themselves lay stress on correspondences between the two contexts. Wole Soyinka is (again) a clear example, since he so repeatedly insists on the similarities between the Greek and African mythological and religious systems. In the preface to his adaptation of the Bacchae (Soyinka 1973: vii), he compares the socio-political changes Africa underwent after colonialism with those that Greece underwent as it developed into an imperial society. Unlike Afrocentric classicists, he does not align Greek imperialism with European colonialism, or the colonies of Greece with African colonies. Instead, the analogy he sees is between imperial Greece and (post)colonial Africa.



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In their understanding of similarities between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa, the playwrights see “the Greeks” less as the products of British imperialism than as a resource they themselves can put to use. As Wetmore argues, Greek tragedy … appealed to African playwrights and could be utilized without the taint of imperialist Europe and the national literatures of colonial powers. Thus, ironically, Greek tragedy, possibly a means of colonial domination and false representation of Africans, possibly the product of the first European imperial power, was and is considered by African theatre artists to be free from colonial stigma and therefore was and is acceptable material for adaptation and performance. (Wetmore 2002: 21)

When European culture came to be rejected under the influence of post-independence movements, African theatre companies stopped performing plays by playwrights considered part of the colonizing European culture  – Molière or Shakespeare, for instance – but continued to stage Greeks tragedies, which were considered as not belonging to it (Wetmore 2002: 21).4 “The Greeks”, then, have not been understood, like Shakespeare, as representing British imperialism. And the “Western canon,” to which both Greek tragedy and Shakespeare are taken to belong, is not as unified as has often been assumed. Wetmore refers to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who speaks of the “unEnglishness” of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristotle. According to Wetmore, wa Thiong’o regards the ancient Greek dramatists as quite distinctive, “their humanism distinguishing them from the imperialist literatures of Europe” (Wetmore 2002: 32). The context in which wa Thiong’o’s expression “unEnglishness” occurs, however, is as follows: In drama Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristotle or Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg and Synge, though quaint and strange in their very unEnglishness … even at its most human and universal, necessarily reflected the European experience of history.  (Thiong’o 1986: 93)

Although wa Thiong’o does set Greek tragedians apart from the British literary tradition, the point he makes is that they too reflected Eurocentrist thought. Even if playwrights identify a difference between plays that came to Africa as the products and messengers of British imperialist culture, like Shakespeare’s, and those that have been introduced through this tradition but actually “precede” it, like Greek tragedies, I believe that what applies to African adaptations of Greek tragedy applies to African adaptations of Shakespeare as well. They, too, should be

4. See Gilbert and Tompkins for a discussion of the “ideological weight of Shakespeare’s legacy” (2006: 19) and of postcolonial reworkings of Shakespeare.

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defined, not primarily in relation to colonialism, but as an integral part of contemporary African cultures. But to return to Wetmore’s Black Dionysus model, although I think it succeeds fairly well in preserving the complexity of the “Afro-Greek connection,” I question the label itself, even if he introduces it rather tentatively (“let us term it ‘Black Dionysus’” (Wetmore 2003: 44)). My hesitation has to do, first, with the adjective “Black.” Although this word might usefully acknowledge and incorporate the history of its use in Black Athena and Black Orpheus, it could also risk perpetuating those two models’ preoccupation with race as a primary signifier in cross-cultural adaptation. Especially since Wetmore elsewhere demonstrates his awareness that the cultural politics performed by the play adaptations go well beyond race, this privileging of race in the name of his chosen model is surprising. And as in the phrases “Black Orpheus” or “Black Athena,” so in “Black Dionysus,” the “African” for which “Black” seems to function as a substitute is explained in terms of the Greek, i.e. the European. Wetmore himself notes that “Black_____” is a metaphor explaining the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and he is well aware that it always reflects power relations: “The unstated assumption in that statement is for whom are these elements familiar and unfamiliar? The answer is, of course, the Eurocentric west” (Wetmore 2003: 15). In the light of this admission, it is strange that Wetmore does not focus more on the sheer impossibility of describing the complexity of the relationship between African and Greek in a two-word phrase like “Black Dionysus” – especially a phrase which so blatantly privileges race as a primary signifier and maintains a Eurocentrist perspective. At the same time, despite my objections, I appreciate Wetmore’s choice of Dionysus as a name for a model that seeks to depend less on opposition and difference. Dionysus, who is Greek by birth but came from the East, is ideally placed to disturb the logic of Greek versus Barbarian, and by extension any other kind of “othering” discourse as well. Dionysus problematizes and dissolves difference in his very being. Yet Wetmore’s way of explaining why he chose Dionysus is as follows: Like its namesake, “Black Dionysus” drama is a force that threatens to overwhelm the very things that created it. As Dionysus first seemingly submits to Pentheus, only to rise up and destroy him, Greek adaptations after this paradigm use the Greek culture to threaten the cultural forces that privilege Greek tragedy.  (Wetmore 2003: 45)

The comparison of the relationship between Dionysus and Pentheus and that between adaptation and pre-text seems forced. Still more to the point, Wetmore’s choice of the word “created” is, again, in danger of reaffirming origin and authority. It seems to suggest that African (diasporic) adaptations of Greek tragedy had



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their original moment of “creation” in the culture which, through the adaptation, they aim to “rise up” against and “destroy”. These last two expressions, more­ over, do clearly suggest a model for adaptation based on opposition, even though Wetmore elsewhere demonstrates that the dynamics at work in African adaptations of Greek tragedy is always more complex than that. As I say, it is reductive and harmful to view adaptations first and foremost in terms of counter-discourse. It places Western pre-texts and traditions, rather than the adaptations themselves, at the origin and centre of analysis. It is not the case that African adapters of Greek tragedy simply ignore or deny the Eurocentric tradition that has embedded Greek tragedy for so long. They may not overtly address Greek tragedies as texts of a colonizing culture or as European. Yet this is precisely how they are playing politics. By forging a connection between Greek and African that, as it were, circumvents “Europe,” the playwrights disconnect “Greece” from the British culture that has used that concept to reinforce its own superiority. Instead, they (re)connect it to the very cultures to which Britain (and Europe) felt superior. Within the Caribbean context, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott plays a similar kind of politics in Omeros, a book-length poem that takes the Homeric epic as its model. Walcott merges the Caribbean’s European cultural inheritance with African and Native American narratives, and mixes English with Creole languages (Makris 2001: 9). In an interview he has explained that what he wants to convey in Omeros is that “the Greeks were the niggers of the Mediterranean”: If we looked at them now, we would say that the Greeks had Puerto Rican tastes. Right? Because the stones were painted brightly. They were not these bleached stones. As time went by, and they sort of whitened and weathered, the classics began to be thought of as something bleached-out and rain-spotted, distant.  (Walcott 1990, quoted in Makris 2001: 10)

The metaphor of brightly-painted stones that have lost their colour and come to be seen as “bleached-out” and “distant” demonstrates the cultural politics of African (diaspora) adaptation of Greek tragedy. Walcott emphasizes the affinity between Greek and Caribbean culture, simultaneously differentiating both cultures from Eurocentric views of, and claims to these cultures, Greek as well as Caribbean. Through the emphasis on Greek tragedy’s socio-political relevance in contemporary African contexts, playwrights not only present Greek tragedy as “theirs” but enact a cultural politics directed at the West that has appropriated “Greece” as its legitimization. The African adaptations of Greek tragedy rely on familiarity, but per definition on difference or foreignness as well. This is beautifully illustrated by the title of Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. The main title emphasizes

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the pre-text, while the subtitle points to Soyinka’s modification of this text to a different cultural context. All the African adaptations express this kind of difference, in part through a combination of different theatrical and cultural traditions. It is not enough to see them as romantic celebrations of cross-cultural hybridity, for that would be to sidestep the actual history of colonialism embedded in this cross-cultural exchange. Nor should they be analysed solely in terms of colonialism and counter-discourse. My argument is that, by establishing an ambiguous and “double” relationship with their pre-texts, African adaptations of Greek tragedy refuse both these kinds of reductive analyses. In varying ways and to varying degrees, playwrights establish a two-directional dynamic – between adaptation and pre-text, between present and past, and between familiarity and difference – which opens up a space for politics.

References Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cohen, Walter. 1993. “An Interview with Martin Bernal.” Social Text 35: 1–24. DOI: 10.2307/466441 George, Olankule. 2003. Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. 1996. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203421062 Goff, Barbara. 2005. Classics and Colonialism. London: Duckworth. Goff, Barbara, and Michael Simpson. 2007. Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217182.001.0001 Hardwick, Lorna, and Carol Gillespie. 2007. Classics in Post-Colonial Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296101.001.0001 Lefkowitz, Mary. 1997. Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: Basic Books. Lefkowitz, Mary, and Guy Maclean Rogers. 1996. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Malkin, Irad. 2004. “Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization.” Modern Language Quarterly 65: 341–364. DOI: 10.1215/00267929-65-3-341 Makris, Paula. 2001. “Beyond the Classics: Legacies of Colonial Education in C. L. R. James and Derek Walcott.” Revista/Review Interamericana 31: 1–4. Òsófisan, Fémi. 1999. “Theatre and the Rites of ‘Post-Negritude’ Remembering.” Research in African Literatures 30: 1–11. Said, Edward. 2003 [1978]. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 [1967]. “Preface.” In The Wretched of the Earth, ed. by Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox (trans.), xliii–lxii. New York: Grove Press.



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Settis, Salvatore. 2006. The Future of the “Classical”. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1973. The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. London: Methuen. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stray, Christopher A. 1996. “Culture and Discipline: Classics and Society in Victorian England.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3: 77–85. DOI: 10.1007/BF02676905 Vasunia, Phiroze. 2003. “Hellenism and Empire: Reading Edward Said.” Parallax 9: 88–97. DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000142390 Walcott, Derek. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Wetmore Jr., Kevin J. 2002. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company. Wetmore Jr, Kevin J. 2003. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. ­Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company.

chapter 11

From minor genre towards major genre Crime fiction and autofiction* Karen Ferreira-Meyers The legitimation process Every time a “new” genre comes on the literary scene, it has to struggle, as it were, to be accepted. For a long time a “new” genre is seen as “minor” literature, before it can be accepted and valued as “major.” So since the nineteenth century, crime fiction has had to go through various stages of recognition and acceptance, both in Western (European and American) and African environments, and for most of its history has actually been seen as a paraliterature. It is only recently that some forms of crime fiction have become accepted as fully-fledged literary genres. Then there is so-called autofiction, a genre identified by the author and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977. Doubrovsky had in mind the newest form of autobiography, in which fact is strongly intertwined with fiction. Like crime fiction, autofiction has met with different stages of response: denial, denigration, denunciation, depreciation, dismissal, demystification, and demythification. Those who defend or attack new genres can be writers, critics or readers. And in what follows here I shall partly be referring to Lusophone and Anglophone crime fiction in Africa, and to Francophone European and African autofiction. Both these genres have gradually started to win acceptance in accordance with what I see as one and the same basic pattern. The legitimacy or legitimation of a genre partly depends on the criteria used by different actors in the literary field in forming and justifying their judgements and opinions. These criteria can fluctuate, but they do affect and/or reflect ideas about literature in society as a whole. Of key importance here are the norms and values which are applied in recognizing a work or an entire genre as “literary”. Depending on which particular aesthetic canon or formal requirements are

* I would like to thank FEDER and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for their support of my research (FFI-2009-10786). doi 10.1075/fillm.1.11fer © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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invoked, one and the same text can be evaluated in different ways. Sometimes ethical aspects are taken into consideration. Sometimes ideology plays a role. Factors such as an author’s previous reputation or a book’s relevance to topical concerns can smooth the path to acceptance. And all the different considerations can vary over time or from one judge or seat of judgement – from one critic, journal, institution, or network – to another. What counts, of course, is the result of the legitimation process. Yet the process is actually reversible and can lead to outcomes more complicated than just literary success or failure. Some of the possibilities are suggested by a number of religious metaphors that, in many languages, tend to colour discussion here: canonization, hell, purgatory, cult book, consecration (of the writer), damned poets, and Pantheon. And precisely because legitimation is so unstraightforward, it is important to analyse the fate of works or genres not only synchronically but also diachronically. In the twentieth century, as in prior eras, there were works which at first achieved some success only to fall into subsequent oblivion, and other works which won recognition even though they clearly broke with the time’s canonical norms and expectations. Crime fiction and autofiction both follow the historical development of the novel in general. To concentrate mainly on the crime novel for a moment, this genre emerged as “literature” during the second half of the nineteenth century and, like the novel before it, had to struggle for legitimacy. It was also from that time onwards that the oppositions between research literature, avant-garde and mass literature developed, together with a more precise division of genres (e.g. exotic adventures, espionage, sentimental fiction, detective novels and crime fiction, children’s literature, etc.). Having started more or less as pulp fiction, crime fiction still has an intermediate position today, but is certainly more highly valued than some other genres. This may be because it appears to be more “masculine” and serious (Reuter 1997: 97), or because it parodies the novel in general, or perhaps even because it both maintains and challenges traditional literary categories such as the hero, the intrigue, realism, the end of the story. The detective story is in fact one of the most diverse of current genres. We can list: the serial killer thriller; the hard- and soft boiled private eye; the noir; the caper novel; the scientific detective; the medical detective; the historical detective; the psychological thriller; the techno thriller; the legal thriller; the classic whodunit; the police procedural; the courtroom drama; women in peril; and so on. The process of legitimation started early but has taken a long time. Even today, not all forms of crime fiction have been fully accepted. In France, its legitimation was coupled with that of a number of other genres since the end of the Second World War, for reasons illuminated by sociological research on the rise of the



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cartoon genre (Boltanski 1975). Authors gradually became less tied by economic restraints imposed by publishers and were culturally empowered to pride themselves of their creativity. They left behind their earlier anonymity and started to claim their artistic property rights. Their remuneration became more diversified, evolving beyond a simple wage packet or standard copyright agreements. And their literary expertise was theorized, becoming a topic of study in books or at universities. As profits rose with the publication of more and more books in the genre, publishers and authors also begin to reap the benefits of the books’ aesthetic value. Products were stored or republished, indicating a growing interest – an awareness of their importance and potential. At each stage in the production process (from author to editor and beyond), there was an increased emphasis on a book’s uniqueness and originality. Catalogues, specialized bibliographies and reviews began to appear, and in 1984 a French Crime Fiction Library was founded. Such developments were possible, of course, only as long as the readership for the genre continued to grow and diversify, so increasing the range of openings for authors and publishers alike. Several mainstream authors started to publish crime novels under pseudonyms, like Julian Barnes in Britain, for instance, who wrote crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. The establishment of paraliteratures coincided with the immense spread of literacy. In other words, the genesis of science fiction, historical fiction and the detective novel in relatively recent times was linked to the extension of compulsory education, which gave rise to new readers from social groupings which had hitherto been excluded from literary culture. Poorer and culturally less confident readers tended to buy books that were less “difficult” – less marked by a set of conventions. And this was the point at which collections and series grew up, accompanied by scholarly debates on the style and form of the various emerging genres. Authors, too, were changing and diversifying. In the beginning, they often positioned themselves as part of a literary avant-garde, bringing new life to literature. They criticized each other’s work, wrote literary columns about each other, and collaborated on various literary projects. In the case of autofiction, a good example here is Philippe Vilain, one of the major critics interested in the genre, author of several books and articles on the subject, and a writer of autofiction himself. The final stage in the legitimation of a genre is when it has what we can call its own specific instances of consecration. Consecration comes in various forms, all of them affirming the autonomy of the particular genre’s literary field – “crime fiction” or “autofiction”, for instance – and the specificity of its values. This comes at roughly the same stage as the setting up of specialized libraries and publishing houses, when various specialized journals, awards, conferences and conventions are also inaugurated.

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African crime fiction: History of a genre What has been happening so far, then, in the field of African crime fiction? Without duplicating the findings of Boileau-Narcejac (1988), Couagnas (1992), Vanoncini (1993), Lits (1993), Frigerio (1995), Reuter (1997), Vareille (1986), Bourdier (1996), Fondanèche (2002), Aziza (2003), and Collovald and Neveu (2004), I can offer a few pointers. As factors contributing to the emergence of the detective fiction genre, critics often mention certain political, social and ideological forces unique to the nineteenth century (Vanoncini 1993). With the advent of bourgeois societies, criminals, who in autocratic societies had sometimes enjoyed a popular reputation as heroic rebels, came to be seen as a menace by a social class interested in safeguarding its property. At the same time, the police, regarded in the eighteenth century as an organization dedicated to protecting autocrats, rose in popular esteem. Previously maligned as the agents of corrupt kings, the police were now valued for the protection they provided. So much so, that the figure of the law enforcement officer became an acceptable protagonist in literature. In intellectual circles, meanwhile, the ongoing consequences of the Enlightenment included a profound respect for the power of reasoning, and a belief that science could solve social problems. This, too, paved the way for a new literary hero: the detectivecum-scientist. These protagonists, who were often gentlemen possessed of scientific knowledge and superior intellect, aroused considerable enthusiasm among nineteenth-century readers. African written literature is a relatively recent phenomenon, and African crime fiction is even newer still. Africa’s first Anglophone and Francophone detective novels were published in the 1970s, while Lusophone readers had to wait till the start of third millennium. Despite central elements of puzzle and investigation in the plots of some African classics (for instance in Gérard Félix “U Tam’si” Tchicaya’s Les Méduses (1982) and Ces Fruits si doux de l’arbre à pain (1987)), in Africa the crime novel had long had a negative connotation. As in France, it was considered a sub-literature and, like any other kind of novel, could also come under fire as bourgeois entertainment for an African intelligentsia (Brasleret 2007: 10). As for the Francophone thriller, although Lilyan Kesteloot (2001: 280) sets the beginning of the African genre in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that authors such as Mobilo Sounkalo Keita and Asse Gueye (Senegal), JeanPierre Dikolo and Simon Njami (Cameroon), and Jean-Pierre Makouta Mboukou and Achille F. Ngoye (DR Congo) came to the fore. Nowadays, Francophone thrillers are increasingly being published in Togo, Congo, Mali, Gabon, Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.



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So why, from the mid-1980s onwards, have a growing number of sub-Saharan Francophone writers chosen to write crime novels? The crime novel and the Francophone African novel share a number of preoccupations. These include: a concern with modernity and urbanization; a focus – whether overt or covert – on questions of class and ethnicity; a sense of the arbitrariness of the law; and a growing interest in representations of the vernacular. These shared themes alone suggest that the move towards the new genre has been relatively natural for a young generation of African writers. But over and above this, in Africa the crime novel has always had an interestingly ambiguous position with respect to the literary canon. From the beginning, as a popular form it had to struggle for recognition – just as Francophone African novels in general had fought for recognition as something other than “minor” or “regional” literature. Rather than being a weakness, this marginality has made the crime novel attractive to African writers dissatisfied with traditional literary models inherited from the French colonial experience. Their new works simultaneously refuse the colonial legacy and ignore a literary-critical establishment that in any case disparages African literatures. The advent of the Francophone African crime novel is a symptom of, and a reaction to, this growing dissatisfaction with a particular literary tradition and its association with a repressive past. So in Africa, as in other places, writing crime fiction is an ideologically motivated choice. As for the Anglophone crime novel in Africa, Cheryl M. L. Dash (1977) has traced its origins back to the Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso’s detective novel Fella’s Choice of 1974, which recounts the tribulations of a chameleonic hero somewhat reminiscent of James Bond. In the Lusophone literary world, Pepetela’s fictional detective Jaime Bunda, whose surname means “back, buttocks” in Portuguese but, in conjunction with his first name, also brings to mind the iconic James Bond, is one of the most original characters. His first appearance in the novel Jaime Bunda, agente secreto in 2001 marked the beginning of the detective fiction genre in Angola.

Autofiction: History of a genre The attribution of the coinage “autofiction” to Serge Doubrovsky is now widely accepted. Philippe Gasparini, autofiction’s “storyteller-archivist” (Burgelin 2010: 21), has disproved the attribution to Jerzy Kosinski, concluding that the first occurrence of the term is in the draft of Doubrovsky’s novel Fils, entitled Le Monstre. Isabelle Grell (2007: 46), a French autofiction expert, notes that the term occurs on sheet 1637 in a dream analysis included as part of the novel’s text. I repeat the quotation in full so as to show both the play on words and the apparent

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“innocence” of the concept’s invention. The narrator, Serge Doubrovsky himself, is in his car here after a session with Akeret, his psychoanalyst. It occurs to him that the dreams he writes in his little notebook could become the subject of a fictional book, a fiction that he would write at the wheel of his car: I write a TEXT as a MIRROR a REFLECTIVE TEXT if I write the scene that I saw that I see it’s there it’s solid seated there literally that is true it is literally true it is copied live recta I write it falls straight the scene seems to be repeating the same scene directly experienced as REAL not a doubt it has to deliver I am sitting there on the seat back of the hand on the wheel it is enough that I put the beige book between my fingers book of the dream built as a dream I fly I am there it is real if I write in my car my autobiography will be my AUTO-FICTION.  (folio 1637, quoted in Grell 2007: 46)1

The shift from autobiography to autofiction was made without the narrator Doubrovsky realizing its possible consequences. In addition, Doubrovsky actually omitted this passage from Fils when it was published in 1977, even if the word “autofiction” (one word, no hyphen, in italics) occurred on the back cover. Doubrovksy was to remember the word later on, when he was trying to define a blank space in the spectrum of genres that was noted by Philippe Lejeune in 1975. (Of which, more below.) From 1977 onwards, the term was introduced and accepted in several different areas of artistic production. Indeed, it was overused, both in the field of literature and elsewhere, and has ended up being applied to all kinds of confessions and autobiographical texts – even though Doubrovsky originally meant it to refer to texts whose material is the experience of the author, more or less transposed, but whose form and function are specifically novelistic and fictional. In literature, for example, Joël Jegouzo describes even Lydie Salvayre’s novel BW (2009) as autofiction. In the theatre, too, the term is used in a paradoxical way, to say the least. As Vincent Colonna (1989: 209) points out, there can be no dramatic self-writing, because of the impossibility of expressing a subjective truth in dramatic speech. Barbara Hernnstein Smith (1978) and Rainer Warning (1979), both cited by Colonna, see theatre as “the prime example of a situation where the relationship 1. “j’écris un TEXTE EN MIROIR un TEXTE EN REFLETS si j’écris la scène que je vis que je vois c’est là c’est solide assis là sur littéral c’est vrai c’est littéralement vrai c’est recopié en direct j’écris recta ça tombe pile la scène paraît être la répétition de la même scène directement vécue comme RÉELLE pas un doute ça fait pas un pli suis assis là sur la banquette dos de la main sur le volant suffit que je mette le carnet beige entre les doigts livre du rêve construit en rêve me volatilise j’y suis c’est réel si j’écris In ma voiture mon autobiographie sera mon AUTO-FICTION.” All translations are my own.



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of language to the world is short-circuited, where the act of referring to events, people, places or things is a simulated act” (Colonna 1989: 209). According to Colonna, the dialogic form of the interchange between characters on stage would imply fictionality in and of itself, and for two reasons: a historical reason, in that Plato criticized the dramatic mode in The Republic as retailing false representations and illusion, a judgement which has had immense literary-historical consequences; and a functional reason, in that, as compared with narrative modes, theatre’s limited linguistic resources make it “ill-suited to the representation of human experience in all its complexity” (ibid.). In anticipation of the reader or viewer, a simple scenic representation of people or a state of affairs suggests in practice that it is all fictional – that it is not directly expressive of the dramatist’s inner life. For a writer interested in autofictional effects, this at least means that there is no need to affirm or underline the fictionality of what is going on. But conversely, it raises the problem of how, if at all, to give the drama a personal vibration. Colonna stresses autofiction’s diversity of situations and modes of enunciation. “[I]f the mixed narrative mode clearly seems dominant, there are autofictions in the theatre, as shown by Céline’s L’église (1933) or Anouilh’s La Grotte ([1961]1970), and in poetry, as illustrated by the Roman erotic elegy” (Colonna 1989: 31),2 as well as Gombrowicz’ Histoire ([1943]1982). Among the few theatrical examples identified as autofiction are Giraudoux’ Sodome et Gomorrhe (1977) and Pirandello’s Six personnages en quête d’auteur ([1921]1977). Since theatrical autofiction is rarely a fiction of the Self – the authorial figure is, at most, a character in a play – some authors have followed Roland Barthes (1984) in ascribing the term an inter-arts dimension and speaking of visual autofiction. Note should certainly be taken here of Hervé Guibert, a novelist-cum-photographer who in most of his literary works told his own story through both the written word and the image. So everything happened as if the term autofiction arrived just in time to reflect and crystallize many of the twentieth century doubts about notions of subject, identity, truth, sincerity, and writing the Self. The next question is whether the new concept, in addition to filling an empty space in the autobiographical pact, also entailed the end of autobiography as the telling of a true story. Has autofiction relegated autobiography to the past?

2. “Si le mode narratif mixte semble nettement dominant, on trouve des autofictions au théâtre comme le montrent L’église de Céline ou La Grotte d’Anouilh; des autofictions dans la poésie comme l’illustre l’élégie érotique romaine.”

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The concept of autofiction: A historical overview Having examined the structure of novels and autobiographies, Philippe Lejeune (1975: 31) famously wrote about the “blank” I mentioned earlier. He had not yet seen, he explained, any case in which the hero of a novel had the same name as the author. He thought that such a work would be perfectly possible, and might entail some interesting effects. In response to Lejeune’s observations, Doubrovsky was not the only literary intellectual who tried to identify examples that might fill the “empty space.” In his own literary career Doubrovsky, credited, as we have seen, with coining the term “autofiction,” came to focus on that genre because his more “straightforwardly” autobiographical project failed. For him, autofiction “authorizes the construction of the personal myth: many exist at several levels in dream and reality” (Grell 2007: 45). Doubrovsky defined the newly invented term as follows: a dream instead I put WHAT a book of course a substitute it’s not the original product it’s not true it’s ersatz … but a book is never REAL it is like a dream to inscribe myself in a book is to FALSILY inscribe myself even if it’s true what I tell life it remains a fiction … ONE BELIEVES IT it rings TRUE but as IN A FABLE.   (Doubrovsky 1977: folio 1645)3

For Doubrovsky, autofiction is a story whose subject matter is strictly autobiographical, as evidenced in theory by the nominal identity between author, narrator, and character, but whose narrative organization and style are novelistic in nature. While the traditional autobiography described a living person in the most realistic and effective manner possible, autofiction fictionalizes a character with real life experience. This is what autofiction does according to Doubrovsky in 1977, and it might seem incorrect to speak of autofiction as existing earlier than that date. Certainly both Magazine Littéraire and Jean-Maurice de Montremy take this line: it therefore seems wiser to stick to the theory that autofiction exists from 1977 onwards. This does not mean that literature waited for this date to start thinking about these issues. The question of the subject and the question of the narrative did not begin in 1977. (Montremy 2002: 63)4 3. “un rêve à la place je mets QUOI a book bien sûr substitut c’est pas le produit d’origine c’est pas du vrai c’est de l’ersatz … mais un livre c’est jamais RÉEL c’est comme un rêve m’inscrire en livre c’est m’inscrire EN FAUX même si c’est vrai vie qu’on raconte c’est qu’une fiction … ON Y CROIT ça dit VRAI mais EN FABLE.” 4. “[i]l semble donc plus sage de s’en tenir à l’histoire et faire exister l’autofiction à partir de 1977. Cela ne signifie pas que la littérature ait attendu cette date pour s’interroger.La question du sujet et la question de la narration ne datent pas de 1977.”



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But be that as it may, Doubrovsky had already noted what are in effect autofictional complexities and richnesses in his meta-discourse on Proust in 1974: the ‘‘author of the book’’ (whose name is printed in full on the cover: Marcel Proust) cannot in principle be the ‘‘narrator,’’ because the one has a real reference, while the other only has a symbolic reference. At most, they may be homonyms (one can also call a cat or a bird Marcel), but they cannot be identical, therefore identifiable in their being. This explains, moreover, that the ‘‘author’’ may be ‘‘writer’’ of the ‘‘written’’ book, as well as the ‘‘narrator’’ of the book ‘‘to be written’’; the separation of these instances allow for a temporal disjunction. (Like their “authors,” the two “books” can be counterparts: they cannot be similar.)  (Doubrovsky 2000 [1974]: 35)5

Gradual recognition of autofiction by other critics and literary theorists began a few years later, for instance with the concept’s inclusion in La littérature en France depuis 1968 (Lecarme 1982) and the enclopaedia Universalis in 1984. But the genre was still poorly understood, and was still interpreted entirely along the lines suggested by Doubrovsky. The first major deviation from the Doubrovskyan account did not come until Colonna discussed autofiction in his doctoral thesis, published in 2004. According to Colonna, the term “autofiction” encompasses all processes by which the Self is fictionalized when authors fantasize their own existence, projecting themselves into imaginary characters who are more or less extensions of themselves. For Colonna, the value of autofiction lies in the possibilities it opens up for the literary imagination, and a key condition is that writers should indeed make themselves very recognizably a character in the story, whether by using the first person singular or even by using their own names. Stéphanie Michineau’s doctoral thesis of 2007 is to the same effect: Ultimately, one could say, if one wanted to map the situation, Gasparini and the PhD student Colonna placed the autobiographical novel between autofiction and autobiography following the gradation ‘‘novel, self-fiction, autobiographic novel, autobiography.’’ In his latest book, Colonna the novelist made the leap, since a certain type of autofictions are placed among nominal autobiographical novels, biographical autofictions. Unlike them, Doubrovsky and Darrieussecq

5. “l’ ‘auteur du livre’ (dont le nom est imprimé en toutes lettres sur la couverture : Marcel Proust) ne peut pas, par principe, être le ‘narrateur’ puisque l’un a un référent réel, l’autre n’a de référence que symbolique. A la rigueur, ils peuvent être homonymes (on peut aussi appeler un chat ou un oiseau : Marcel), ils ne sauraient être identiques, donc identifiables, dans leur être. Ce qui explique, d’ailleurs, que ‘l’auteur’ puisse être ‘l’écrivain’ du livre ‘écrit’, le ‘narrateur’, celui de livre ‘à écrire’, la séparation des instances permettant cette disjonction temporelle. (Comme leurs ‘auteurs’, les deux ‘livres’ peuvent être homologues : ils ne peuvent pas être analogues).”

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place autofiction closer to autobiography and the autobiographical novel in the vicinity of the novel according to the following ranking: “novel, autobiographic novel, autofiction, autobiography.” (Michineau 2008: 22)6

Colonna’s definition, like Doubrovsky’s, also enabled Laurent Jenny (2003) to distinguish two variants of autofiction, viz. a stylistic and a referential autofiction, a contrast reminiscent of Gérard Genette (2004 [1991]) and Jacques Lecarme’s (1993) distinction between constitutional literariness and conditional literariness. Stylistic autofiction is a strict account of actual events in which the fictional element is not a matter of the memory-content evoked but of the actual process of enunciation and narrative development. In referential autofiction, by contrast, real life experience and imagination intermingle. In 1991, Genette (2004 [1991]: 30) defined autofiction as fictional narrative involving what he called the protocol of triple identity; that is to say, the author is also both the narrator and the main protagonist. As Arnaud Schmitt (2010: 426) paraphrases, autofiction has the form of a novel which comes close to actual autobiography “without spoiling itself.” Or as Genette himself summarized the protocol: “I, the author, I’ll tell you a story of which I am the hero but which never happened to me” (Genette 2004 [1991]: 161).7 This definition then leads to the distinction between true autofictions – texts that are “authentically fictional” – and false autofictions or shameful fictions (Genette 2004 [1991]: 87) – texts based on real events. Many of these ideas were to be repeated and clarified at the first symposium on the concept of autofiction, organized in 1992 in Nanterre. The proceedings were edited by Doubrovsky, Lecarme and Lejeune and appeared in 1993 under the title of Autofictions and Cie, a document offering a useful overview of the earliest discussions of the topic. In 1996, following Genette’s distinction between constitutive and conditional literariness, Marie Darrieussecq attributed autofiction to the field of constitutive

6. “En définitive, l’on pourrait dire, si l’on voulait schématiser la situation, que Gasparini et Colonna thésard, placent le roman autobiographique entre l’autofiction et l’autobiographie suivant la gradation “roman, autofiction, roman autobiographique, autobiographie”. Colonna romancier, dans son dernier livre, franchit le pas puisqu’un certain type d’autofictions sont à placer au nombre des romans autobiographiques nominaux, les autofictions biographiques. Au contraire de Doubrovsky ainsi que de Darrieussecq qui placent l’autofiction plus près de l’autobiographie et le roman autobiographique à proximité du roman selon le classement suivant: ‘roman, roman autobiographique, autofiction, autobiographie’.” 7. “Moi, auteur, je vais vous raconter une histoire dont je suis le héros mais qui ne m’est jamais arrivée.”



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literary writings, because it required a double reading pact; it needed to be taken as both fact and fiction. According to her, an autofiction automatically acquires a literary value which autobiographies, being more fact than fiction, normally do not have. Darrieussecq’s essay resonated with other researchers, who extended the concept to apply to Patrick Modiano, for instance, and to make it more mainstream (Aulagne 1998; Laurent 1997). According Jacques Lecarme and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone (2004), autofictions were born of what for modern writers is a double desire: first, writers’ general drift towards the first person and autobiography; secondly, a theoretical fascination with the relationship between two previously distinct areas, fiction and autobiography. It is increasingly clear that the term autofiction is often used with little or no precisely delimited meaning. Some critics even use the concept without explicitly naming it, as when Philippe Forest published Le Roman, le je (2001) and, together with Claude Gaugain, an anthology of studies entitled Les Romans du Je (2001). In these works, to the extent that Forest did try to define autofiction, he said that it is simply autobiography subjected to suspicion. For him, every story, even the most intimate, is necessarily fictional because each lived episode is set up spontaneously under the rules of literature. So from his point of view, in the “I-novel” the Self exists only as a fiction. Somewhat similarly, and in the same year, JeanPierre Boulé’s Hervé Guibert: L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi (2001) applied the concept of the false novel to a type of novel which does not respect the fictional pact. Boulé did not actually label this as autofiction, even though for other commentators on Guibert that term has seemed fully appropriate (Sarkonak 1997, 2000; Blanckeman 2000). In 2008 Philippe Gasparini tried to disambiguate the terminology for categories of autofiction that come closest to the autobiographical novel. Autofiction, he said, is a story based on the homonymy of the author, the narrator and the hero, but with a development that projects the reader into imaginary situations, such that the imaginative component plays a bigger part than the autobiogaphical. If Gasparini had sharpened this definition somewhat, his distinction between autobiography and the more imaginatively fictional genre of autofiction could have been very useful. Jean-Louis Jeannelle (2007: 26), at any rate, concluded that the only difference between autobiography and autofiction was that in the case of autofiction identity is a clearly staged scam which remains ambiguous throughout the text. While Gasparini and Colonna are in favour of a more fictional type of autofiction, Doubrovsky and others continue to see the genre as a more referential and genuinely autobiographical narrative. In 2007 Doubrovsky reaffirmed that, for him, autofiction is the postmodern form of autobiography: “We no longer feel

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life as before …. That’s why I found the word ‘autofiction’ interesting: it allows us to distinguish the modern sensibility from the classic sensibility” (Doubrovsky 2007: 64–65).8 So competing conceptualizations have now proliferated. A narrow interpretation of autofiction sees it as a simple displacement of autobiographical writing to the unconscious. A more extensive interpretation associates autofiction with the invention of a fictional existences and proxy personalities. For some commentators, autofiction is a simple modelling of the autobiographical pact (Lejeune), perhaps with a marked psychoanalytic inflection (Doubrovsky). For others, it is the most recent form of the autobiographical novel (Gasparini), continuing an inter-genre practice already well established (Lecarme). Taking the works of Lucian as his starting point, Colonna (2004: 75, 93) has distinguished several different autofictional sub-genres: fantasy autofiction which, as in Borges’ The Aleph ([1949]1970), transfigures the existence and identity of the writer “in a surreal story, indifferent to likelihood”; biographical autofiction, in which the author’s fabulous existence derives from actual data and is that much more probable, tending to suggest, as in the cases of Doubrovsky and Christine Angot, that the text is subjectively truthful; mirror autofiction, in which the work reflects the presence of the writer as in a mirror; and intrusively authorial self-fiction, where the text is written in the third person but with an author-narrator nevertheless present on the margins of the plot. But basically three main approaches can be distinguished today. First, there is Doubrovsky’s account, in which a text is autofictional when it meets three basic requirements: the correspondence of the author’s, the narrator’s and the main character’s name; the novel-like literary form; and the focus on the process of psychoanalysis. For Doubrovsky, autofiction replaces the classic autobiography, which has become inviable in face of postmodernity’s ontological instabilities. Second, there is Gasparini’s approach, similar to Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska’s (2007) account of autofictional flow, in which autofiction is “a border area where the body and writing are fantasies, illusions, aspirations, rooted cultural imaging of the writer” (Robin 1997: 47).9 In this approach, it is impossible to say whether autofiction is more fictional than autobiography or vice versa. And in order to dodge this issue and yet encompass the many highly dynamic contemporary texts that are difficult to label definitively as autobiographical, autofictional or fictional, Gasparini speaks of hybridity as a common denominator. Thirdly, there 8. “On ne sent plus sa vie comme jadis …. Voilà la raison pour laquelle le mot d’ ‘autofiction’ m’a semblé intéressant: il permet de distinguer la sensibilité moderne de la sensibilité classique.” 9. “un espace frontière, celui où prennent corps et écriture, les fantasmes, les illusions, les aspirations, les imageries culturelles enracinées de l’écrivain.”



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is Schmitt’s approach, which speaks of an openly referential frame of reading and “auto-narration” (2010: 430). All these three approaches are, I think, problematic. It seems to me that autofiction cannot exist as an independent literary category if it is of the second, hybrid kind described by Gasparini. And if I think in terms of the first and third approaches, I can see no reason why autofiction should survive. According to Doubrovsky’s approach, the text is simply an autobiographical novel, while according to Schmitt we must speak in terms of autobiography and autobiographical fiction. What, then, of all the texts by authors who have wanted to demonstrate the true complexity of daily life – unstable, unpredictable, fragmentary – and the interplay of life, memory and reconstruction? Philippe Vilain (2005) notes that if we regard authors as writing in a semi-referential way, this tends to degrade them; it seems to expect them to prove their sources and fill in referential gaps in peritextual comments; and it also suggests that they need constantly to justify themslves, edit out misinterpretations, and generally adjust the text to life. Yet although some autofictional writers may indeed see this as humiliating, most of them, it seems to me, love this kind of situation and play along with it. Gasparini (2008: 209) compiled a list of criteria used by Doubrovsky to identify texts as autofictional: (1) onomastic identity of author and hero-narrator; (2) the subtitle “novel”; (3) the primacy of the story; (4) the search for an original form; (5) “immediate debriefing”; (6) reconfiguration of linear time (by selection, scaling, layering, fragmentation, interference, etc.); (7) a “wide” use of narrative; (8) commitment to only tell “real facts and events”; (9) the urge to “prove their truth”, and (10) the use of literary strategies to capture the reader’s attention. This list does not amount to a normative definition of the genre, but is useful as checklist of similarities between different forms of autofictional writing. Yet even so, when we take into account the full range of autofictional writing now being produced, the list seems incomplete, not least because it does not take into account intertextualities and similarities of theme and style.

Comparisons in trajectory In the nineteenth century, novels and stories depicting crime and its consequences gradually came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, with specialist writers and a devoted readership. Yet huge amounts of crime fiction continued to be published that had little or no literary merit. The direly needed injection of quality did not spell the end of pulp fiction. Far from it: most crime stories and novels were still instantly forgettable, even though some of them met with commercial success. Twentieth-century readings of detective fiction, however, began to reveal

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the genre’s complexity, as critics realized that these texts contained something more than brilliant intellectual gymnastics. Freudian readings, right up to and including readings along the lines of Lacanian Neo-Freudianism, approached detective prose from a clinical point of view, as critics explicitly likened the process of criminal detection to psychoanalysis and saw the sleuth as a couterpart of the psychoanalyst. But since the dominant paradigms of twentieth-century criticism essentially dispensed with the idea of personal identity, such readings were bound to become problematic. While in Freud’s construct the ego still retained some relevance, albeit controlled by the overwhelming power of the id, in NeoFreudian thought there is only a linguistic symbolic order, into which a person is born. According to Lacan, a person’s unconscious is totally determined by that symbolic order, which is imposed on every single human individual. Such a view reflects a crisis of selfhood which also helps to explain the steps by which autofiction has been gradually struggled for recognition: that fascinating new form of autobiography, of self-writing, in which fact and fiction are mixed to the point of confusion, a confusion deliberately built into the text by its author, and willingly contemplated by its readers. And new literary genres or subgenres all go through the same stages as they move towards legitimation: (1) their authors become more independent; (2) there is a search for higher aesthetic value; (3) the audience expands and diversitifes; (4) there is a correspondingly wider range of authors; (5) and there are specific instances of the genre’s consecration – journals, awards, conferences – and critical approaches which explicitly take it into account and theorize it. This is what happened with crime fiction from the nineteenth century onwards, and more recently it has happened with autofiction. Both crime fiction and autofiction have been subjected to an institutional apparatus of legitimation and consecration traditionally applicable for “high” literature as opposed to paraliterature. Although they started their journey as “minor” literature, they are now well on the way to major status.

References Anouilh, Jean. [1961] 1970. La Grotte. In his Nouvelles pièces grinçantes. Paris: Table ronde. Aulagne, Lucie Noëlle. 1998. “Et si c’était moi? Approche de l’autofiction dans la décennie 1980.” PhD thesis, University of Nancy 2. Aziza, Claude. 2003. La littérature policière. Paris: Pocket. Barthes, Roland. 1984. “La mort de l’auteur.” In his Essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, coll. Points. Blanckeman, Bruno. 2000. Les Récits indécidables: Jean Echenoz, Hervé Guibert, Pascal Quignard. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.



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Borges, Jorge Luis. [1949] 1970. El Aleph. In his The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969. New York: Dutton. Boulé, Jean-Pierre. 2001. Hervé Guibert: L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi. Paris: L’Harmattan. Boileau-Narcejac. 1988. Le roman policier. Paris: Presses Universitaries de France. Boltanski, Luc. 1975. “La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1: 37–59. DOI: 10.3406/arss.1975.2448 Bourdier, Jean. 1996. Histoire du roman policier. Paris: De Fallois. Brasleret, Fanny. 2007. “Étude croisée de trois romans noirs francophones africains.” Francofonía 16: 9–27. Burgelin, Claude. 2010. “Pour l’autofiction.” In Autofiction(s): Colloque de Cerisy, ed. by Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell, and Roger-Yves Roche, 5–21. Lyon: Presses Universitaries de Lyon. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. 1933. L’église. Paris: Denoel and Steele. Collovald, Annie, and Erik Neveu. 2004. Lire le noir: Enquête sur les lecteurs de récits policiers. Paris: Pbi/Centre Pompidou. Colonna, Vincent. 1989. “L’Autofiction: Essai sur la fictionnalization de soi en literature.” PhD thesis, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Colonna, Vincent. 2004. Autofictions et autres mythomanies littéraires. Auch: Tristram. Couagnas, Daniel. 1992. Introduction à la paraliterature. Paris: Seuil. Darrieussecq, Marie. 1996. “L’Autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107: 369–370. Dash, Cheryl M. L. 1977. “An Introduction to the Prose Fiction of Kole Omotoso.” World Literature Written in English 16: 39–53. DOI: 10.1080/17449857708588435 Doubrovsky, Serge. 2000 [1974]. La place de la Madeleine: Écriture et fantasme chez Proust. Grenoble: Ed. Ellug. Doubrovsky, Serge. 2001 [1977]. Fils. Paris: Galilée. Doubrovsky, Serge. 2007. Parcours Critique II, ed. by Isabelle Grell. Grenoble: Ed. Ellug. Doubrovsky, Serge, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune. 1993. Autofictions and Cie. Paris: Éditions U de Paris X. Fondanèche, Daniel. 2002. Le roman policier. Paris: Ellipses. Forest, Philippe. 2001. Le roman, le je. Nantes: Edtions Pleins Feux. Forest, Philippe, and Claude Gaugain (eds). 2001. Les Romans du Je. Nantes: Editions Pleins Feux. Frigerio, Vittorio. 1995. “La paralittérature et la question des genres.” In Le Roman populaire en question(s), ed. by Jacques Migozzi, 97–114. Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges. Gasparini, Philippe. 2008. Autofiction: Une aventure du langage. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 2004 [1991]. Fiction et diction. Paris: Seuil. Giraudoux, Jean. [1943] 1982. Sodome et Gomorrhe. In his Théâtre complet. Paris: Gallimard. Gombrowicz, Witold. 1977. L’Histoire (Operette). Paris: Ed. de la différence. Grell, Isabelle. 2007. “Pourquoi Serge Doubrovsky n’a pu éviter le terme d’autofiction?” In Genèse et Autofiction, ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet. Brussels: Academia Bruylant. Jeannelle, Jean-Louis. 2007. “Où en est la réflexion sur l’autofiction?” In Genèse et autofiction, ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet, 7–37. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant. Jenny, Laurent. 2003. “L’autofiction.” Méthodes et problèmes. Genève: Département de français moderne. http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/enseignements/methodes/autofiction/afsommar.html.

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Kesteloot, Lilyan. 2001. Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine. Paris: Karthala. Laurent, Thierry. 1997. L’œuvre de Patrick Modiano: Une autofiction. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Lecarme, Jacques. 1982. “Indécidables ou autofictions.” In La Littérature en France depuis 1968, ed. by Jacques Bersani, Jacques Lecarme, and Bruno Vercier, 150–155. Paris: Bordas. Lecarme, Jacques. 1993. “L’Autofiction: Un mauvais genre.” In Autofictions and Cie. [Cahiers du Recherches interdisciplinaires des textes modernes 6.], ed. by Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune, 227–249. Paris: Éditions U de Paris X. Lecarme, Jacques, and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone. 2004. L’autobiographie. Paris: Armand Colin. Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil. Lits, Marc. 1993. Le roman policier: Introduction à la théorie et à l’histoire d’un genre littéraire. Liège: CEFAL. Michineau. Stéphanie. 2008. L’Autofìction danse l’ceuvre de Colette [doctoral thesis 2007]. Publibook coll. “EPU” [“Lettres & Langues – Lettres Modernes”]. Montremy, Jean-Maurice de. 2002. “L’Aventure de l’autofiction.” Magazine Littéraire 409: 62–64. Omotoso, Kole. 1974. Fella’s Choice. Benin City: Ethiope Publishing. Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. 2007. Autofiction et dévoilement de soi. Montréal: XYZ. Pepetela [= Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos]. 2001. Jaime Bunda, agente secreto. ­Lisboa: Dom Quichote. Pirandello, Luigi. [1921] 1977. Six personages en quête d’auteur. In his Théâtre complet, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard. Reuter, Yves. 1997. Le Roman policier. Paris: Nathan. Robin, Régine. 1997. Le Golem de l’criture: De l’Autofiction au Cybersoi. Montréal: XYZ. Salvayre, Lydie. 2009. BW. Paris: Seuil. Sarkonak, Ralph (ed.). 1997. Le corps textuel d’Hervé Guibert. Paris: Lettres Modernes. Sarkonak, Ralph. 2000. Angelic Echoes: Hervé Guibert and Company. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schmitt, Arnaud. 2010. “De l’autonarration à la fiction du réel: Les mobilités subjectives.” In Autofiction(s): Colloque de Cerisy, ed. by Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell, and Roger-Yves Roche, 417–440. Lyon: PU de Lyon. Smith, Barbara Hernnstein. 1978. On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. U Tam’si, Tchicaya. 1982. Les Méduses our les Orties de Mer. Paris: Editions Albin. Michel. U Tam’si, Tchicaya. 1987. Ces Fruits si doux de l’arbre de pain. Paris: Seghers. Vanoncini, André. 1993. Le Roman policier. Paris: PUF. Vareille, Claude. 1986. “Préhistoire du roman policier.” Romantisme 53. Paris: Armand Colin. Vilain, Philippe. 2005. Défense de Narcisse. Paris: Grasset. Warning, Rainer. 1979. Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis. Munich: Fink.

chapter 12

World literature / World culture? TV series and video games Sylvie André Technology and culture In discussing the interaction of technological and social structures, Jean-François Lyotard (1991), Bernard Stiegler (1996) and Régis Debray (2000) have all argued that technology definitely affects culture, and that content cannot remain one and the same irrespective of the particular form in which it is carried. On disk or online, they suggest, a novel will not always be a novel, and a sonata will not always be a sonata – in the words of Debray (2000: 32), “media and value change together”.1 Convinced that the current information- and communications-­ technological revolution is unprecedented and unique, at least two of these three philosophers wonder whether literature or art in general will in the long run actually survive and, if so, how. According to these thinkers, the new technologies have affected the very bases – the ethnocultures, languages, arts, and even national political institutions – upon which humanity has exercised symbolic activity in the era of the written word. So perhaps we now need to accustom ourselves to the possibility of constant recombinations of content and form, the dimensions of which we can already begin to see, but whose long-term consequences are still shrouded in mystery. More particularly, I shall here be asking whether TV series and video games have now become part of a global popular culture analagous to the West’s pre-modern oral traditions. If so, is this culture sufficiently widespread, and of sufficient quality, to be described as “world art”? And could there be significant parallels with the universal form and structures of folktales? As far as literature is concerned, many thinkers have anticipated the globalization of communication already. I am of course referring to the concept of World Literature (Weltliteratur), first formulated by Goethe, but successfully revived in recent decades. As Christopher Prendergast (2004: xiii) states, “World literature 1. “il est vrai que changent ensemble supports et valeurs.” All translations from French are my own unless otherwise stated. doi 10.1075/fillm.1.12and © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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is not an object, but a problem whose elucidation demands a shift of categories.” In fact the problem is so challenging that critics sometimes seem less sure of what World Literature is than of what it is not. It is not, they say, a global, standardized literature accessible to everyone. It is not a composite of national literatures with embarrassing ideological objectives. It is not a literature intended only for a refined cosmopolitan elite. We have now reached the stage where the globalization of communication no longer belongs to the realm of prophecy but is an established fact. If the technological revolution which has made it possible is as radical as I and many others believe, all human symbolic activity will have to be re-assessed. New technostructures will lead to new ethnostructures, which would mean that one of the things now to be thrown into question is not so much globalization as our notion of what​​ literature is, a notion of fairly recent date, after all, being firmly rooted in major trends of the nineteenth century: the secularization and democratization of writing; the establishment of a middle class society; and the formation of nation states. The time has come to understand World Literature as a common cultural heritage that is indeed morphing into a “World Culture” (Weltkultur) inseparable from new media, just as literature was linked to the world of written communication. World Culture already exists today. It is conveyed by the Internet, an established medium through which we can nowadays read, learn, make phone calls, watch movies, follow television shows, and play games online. So what are the consequences of creating cultural products specifically designed for the worldwide audience of the Internet? One consequence can of course be seen in the concessions made to market forces, and in the levelling of standards down to a lowest common denominator, processes which amount to a “culture of appeasement”. A further consequence is that the aesthetic works of tomorrow will use, not only language, but other means of communication as well. Francis Vanoye (1989: 20–21) has said of film as a medium that it “invites the spectator to employ considerable powers of perception: it makes the spectator see moving images, written language, listen to sounds, musics, words.”2 The same applies to the new private media, both digital television and the Internet. The communication system of the new media is based entirely on considerations of efficiency, calculation and utility. For Lyotard (1991: 69), capitalism is not just “an economic and social phenomenon” but is also “the shadow cast by the principle of reason on human relationships.” Albeit indirectly, capitalism sets the laws governing collective communication, with the result that a vast number of people worldwide are held in front of a screen in order to increase both advertising 2. “sollicite de la part du spectateur, un déploiement perceptif considérable: il lui fait voir des images mouvantes, du langage écrit, entendre des bruits, des musiques, des paroles.”



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revenue and the revenue generated by the use of the medium itself (via subscriptions and online purchases). The paradox is that most of the time viewers are lulled into a false sense of security and think that everything is for free. The media’s financial profits, after all, are indirect (through advertising), or make only limited demands on the individual consumer’s wallet (which, given that consumers exist in such extraordinary numbers, is nevertheless a prodigious source of income). The system operates in complete separation from traditional media institutions such as publishers, public libraries and schools, which means that individual consumers have to face the flood of content entirely on their own. Through by-passing the “political” institutions of transmission in this way, the new media might seem to be furthering the cause of democracy, by enabling everyone to access knowledge without institutional censorship. But the lack of content regulation also entails a far-reaching weakening of community ties. Because networks and content are globalized, the “symbolic goods” now available are of an unprecedented diversity and plurality. Here, symbolic activity is structured only according to the law of profit. That is why the new information and communication technologies raise questions about what Lyotard (1991: 62) calls ethnocultures, i.e. “the apparatuses for memorizing information so that peoples … [have been] able to organize their space and time.” According to Lyotard, the most notable achievements of these ethnocultures have been myths and historical narratives. Given that the new technologies operate on a worldwide scale, they tend to divorce information from the geographical and ethnographical context in which it was generated. Any symbolic activities developed in order to give significance to events and experience in some particular time and place become devalued. Rather than information on the Internet being regulated by the symbolic processes of a hic et nunc, the system’s complexity and uncontrollability result in a complete lack of organization and prioritization. The only two structuring activities are unwitting and arbitrary: the consumer’s aimless zapping and surfing the net. Lyotard (1991: 49) speaks not only of “delocalization,” but also of a “detemporalization” of those “structural laws which command the circulation … of words, goods and women.” By definition, the time to which the new technologies belong is the present of immediate pay-offs and usefulness. Although the existence of information online may imply selection, plus some periodic removal and structuring of content, what nowadays gets preserved can in fact be entirely decided by blind economic criteria without the slightest concern for either the past or the future. Any kind of filtering according to socially beneficial political, cultural and aesthetic criteria is increasingly unusual. Lyotard considers this as neither progress nor emancipation, but as an utter disorientation. The only human common denominators which emerge from the culture of the new technologies are merely the tritest of stereotypes.

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TV series In his study of TV series, Vincent Colonna (2010: 181–236) offers observations similar to those of Lyotard, but is overall less negative. His main point is that the creators of TV series use significance-structuring modes whose universality has been highlighted by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, ethology, and neuroscience. Particularly suggestive is neurobiology, which has established a connection between canonical aesthetic processes and some of the most fundamental abilities of the human brain. Above all, neurologists have demonstrated the importance of having a “goal”. If you have a goal, then you have to make plans to achieve it, which means that you get involved in the grammar of narrative. Colonna also notes that scientific theory of mirror neurons may explain how emotions are stimulated in, and by, televised fiction. Colonna shows, then, that content conveyed by the new media, though it makes ethnostructures and institutions of political control obsolescent, is nevertheless based on the fundamental dimensions of human brain activity. That is how the new cultural technology acts upon its audience and holds it captive. In the process, it even allows the creation of undefined, unsteady communities, a phenomenon which Debray (2000: 203) describes as a tribalization of individuals and values (“tribalization des sujets et des valeurs”). In many ways it also revolutionizes modes of representation within narrative fiction. Broadcast and digital television (whose programmes are sometimes also available on the Internet) allow an immediacy and interactivity which sharply distinguish their products from both films and literature. Thanks to the latest technological developments in smartphones, tablets, and netbooks, the Internet is becoming everywhere accessible, and the same is true of TV programmes, which are increasingly broadcast on demand by the same providers. And in addition to this phenomenon of immediate availability (via podcast or streaming) there is also that of instant access. Media viewing from any place at any time allows immediate satisfaction. Watching events online at the very moment they happen, regardless of where they are happening, produces a sense of simultaneity. Then again, the Internet provides interactivity between different users, by multiplying communication options and changing their character, as when, for instance, high-speed Internet access is connected with phone access and/or television services (Lancelot 2005: 53, 61). Private media networks are simply not the same as film diffusion, and have even less in common with book publishing. The effects of the television medium on the fictional works commissioned for it are pointed out by Colonna (2010: 27), who notes that TV viewers have limited powers of attention, and that script writers therefore use plenty of redundancy – sound/image redundancy, narrative redundancy in the form of flashbacks, and



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dialogue/image redundancy. It is precisely this which constitutes the “seriality” of TV series. Widely used for similar reasons are leitmotifs and gimmicks or caricature – a striking and oft-repeated feature of plot or character. “Poor content and repetition, overdeveloped oral dialogue and predictability are the fundamental features of the television series medium.”3 Not that poor content, in and of itself, is a target for criticism in Colonna’s view. He is not making value judgements, but describing facts. The extensive use of repetition and redundancy in TV series introduces a new relationship between characters and the audience. This is totally different from the way characters functioned in traditional media. Much as in real life, the fictional people in TV series pop up time and time again, sometimes unexpectedly, which in the eyes of viewers makes them seem very familiar, and can also lend a certain density to their thoughts and emotions. In the course of one or more television seasons, they seem to gain psychological depth over time. Of its nature, television does not allow sophisticated framing, complex plots, or complex psychology. Script writers must keep this in mind if they want to build up series that will hold the attention of an audience month after month. As Colonna (2010: 110) comments, the best way to do this is by using the most proven techniques of classical narrative and oral transmission. TV series are in fact strongly analogous to traditional tales. Characters and plots have to be very easy to understand, and are therefore reduced to the most basic features which TV viewers already know and expect: “classic” story structures, which are widely repeated, as was also the case with folktales. As compared with the sophisticated structures we often find in literature and film, in TV series canonical narration is almost caricatured, a simplification which doubtless takes account of the daily conditions under which such soap operas are actually watched. This is not to say that TV genres are standing still. An increasing number of series involve more complex structures. Dominique Pinsolle and Arnaud Rindel (2011) note this development in series originating from the satellite and cable network HBO. And Viviane Golasowski’s (2011) narratological analysis of the series Fringe, released in 2008 in the United States, detects some very skilful script-writing, in which closed episodes with rather conventional structures are combined with narrative arcs developed throughout the entire season, with flashbacks and foreshadowings, with symbolically laden pauses, with narrator comments, and with intertextual links to other series, pictures or novels. These TV products create social ties between viewers by offering a coherent universe which is in some ways a form of perfection. As Colonna points out, because 3. “Pauvreté et répétitions, oralité hypertrophiée et prévisibilité sont ainsi des traits essentiels du medium de la série télé.”

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of their element of repetition such products can seldom sustain negative heroes and values over any length of time (even if The Shield ran for seven seasons), and this is another respect in which TV series recall the simplicities of oral tradition as reflected in, for instance, the traditional masterpiece One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights. To start with, Arabian Nights was not part of great literature but just a tale belonging to a minor genre, first written, then oral, then written again. The text was a very long time in the making, from the ninth century to the eighteenth, with many different authors, tellers and translators all contributing their own input, yet never leaving the slightest doubt about the moral of a story, since the endings always taught practical, down-to-earth wisdom. At the same time, there was unmistakable skill in the way the many different stories were all inserted into the frame of the one ongoing “drama” (Miquel 2006). In fact this mixture of features shows how, in the plain canon of oral storytelling, “aesthetic” and “popular” qualities can sit side by side. In both Arabian Nights and TV series, the strong formal and ideological frameworks perhaps deserve to be seen, less as an unsatisfactory limitation, than as a condition for universality. After all, narrative has long been one of the basic structures for the transmission and preservation of knowledge. This is fully recognized in the current thinking about narrativization, but what is happening now is that new networks are profoundly changing the status of the individual TV-viewer, increasing leverage not only on emotions or sensations but also on more cerebral reactions as well. Viewers are even asked to create content for themselves. More generally, because private media networks are interactive and part of a globalized trade, they tend to blur the boundaries between those by whom content is created and those who are on the receiving end. In fact the audience seems to become paramount, and has to be as large as possible if the product is to be sufficiently profitable. Interactivity provides the producers with almost instant knowledge about the audience’s wishes and reactions, and TV channels have long made systematic use of opinion polls when planning new content, including content that involves narrative fiction – so as is well known, American soap operas were originally targeted at housewives who were likely to purchase cleaning product brands, which became the main advertisers in the early afternoon time slot. And as for “reality shows”, here the audience is involved in many different ways. Most obviously, they can participate in auditions for a role as hero in the “real fiction”, or can identify with actors who are not professionals. They are also actively invited to give advice, as, for instance, by the presenter of Loft Story, a Big Brother spin-off aired in France in 2001 and 2002: “It’s you who will write this story, it’s you who will change the script” (in Jost 2009: 101).4

4. “Cette histoire, c’est vous qui allez l’écrire, c’est vous qui allez changer le scénario.”



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As François Jost (2009) shows, this element of spectator involvement is highly controlled, but Colonna (2010, 38–39) points out that, not only does the public imagination guide the works produced, but the actual choice of which works will be televised is also passed on to the audience. Although producers cannot afford to cave in completely to audience demand, they are keenly aware of viewers’ thirst for novelty and surprise, and of their curiosity to find out things about themselves and their own environment. When consumers get so involved that they group together into fan clubs, this can give rise to video games created by the fans themselves, and also to fan fiction. Fan fiction consists of short fictional narratives, which fans often publish on the Internet, and which take over scripts and characters, sometimes in strict accordance with the original, sometimes for a demystifying or parodic purpose. Fan fiction is particularly widespread in Japan (dōjinshi), but also involves books such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This is where private media networks and the Internet most radically destabilize the traditional author-receiver relationship, because the writers and readers of fan fiction are a force with which commercial producers have no choice but to reckon. Consumers who are polled by the media before the shooting of a series with a purely mercantile objective may well, if their comments are not taken into account, resort to fan fiction as a way of denouncing the final product for unimaginative conventionality or decrypting some of its underlying assumptions. Fan fiction is perfectly capable of highlighting covertly homosexual relationships between characters, for instance, or suspicious psychological traits. Sometimes its use or adaptation of narrative fiction already published under an author’s name is even so robust as to risk a brush with copyright legislation. In other cases, far from passively watching TV series, viewers are invited to play an active role. Mixing thriller and science fiction techniques, the series Fringe sets up a treasure hunt, a treasure map for the viewer who sees himself take on the role of detective like the heroes he meets every week. These heroes become accomplices and even companions with whom he can identify and whom he can take as models. (Golasowski 2011: 56)5

The images offer encrypted messages such as glyphs, anagrams, recurring and offset objects or characters, so enabling viewers to anticipate the riddle’s solution, which sometimes involves scientific theories such as the Fibonacci numbers or 5. “un jeu de piste, une carte au trésor pour le spectateur qui se voit endosser le rôle de détective à la manière des héros qu’il rejoint chaque semaine. Ces héros deviennent des complices et même des compagnons auxquels il s’identifie et qu’il prend aussi pour modèle.”

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Pascal’s theorem. For the producers, this is a way to retain viewers worldwide. As Golasowski (2011: 49–50) remarks, Many viewers tried to decipher the code (contained in the glyphs) after the creators of FOX informed them on their website that a message was attached to each and every image. The audience’s investigation was in this way extended to the global sphere of the Internet. Decoding was made possible … using a Caesar cipher …, a substitution cipher in which each letter is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet.6

In accord with this intervention of receivers in creating or guiding the plot, the notion of authorship itself is obviously being revolutionized. Narrative (whatever its form) is no longer channelled by individual, original expression, but by expression that can be targeted to the largest possible audience. Under these conditions, authorship often becomes plural. Prior to the shooting of a TV series, time and money are spent on assembling a team which works on an original idea, collecting a vast amount of documentation, and offering several “bibles” before coming up with a final chart that will guide the scriptwriters. In order to provide enough episodes for a successful series, writers must work as a team, which will include a script doctor responsible for ensuring continuity and consistency. One series can develop over several seasons or years, with at least twelve episodes per season, each one lasting from 26 to 90 minutes depending on the format, the most common being that of 52 minutes. So a successful TV series is very rarely the work of a single author, even if the director retains control of the overall theme. And in addition to this strong element of collective creation, the writing is often partly determined by economic motives or concerns about the network’s image, which can often result in a demand for re-writes. Are these attempts at financial and ideological control, is this plurality of writing, compatible with genuine creativity? Is there scope for, and stimulus to, real originality? Pierre Bourdieu and others are pessimistic and speak of a cultural impoverishment (Manguel 2007). But there are also commentators who think that, even in the case of collaboration between multiple authors and millions of receivers, the finished product can be impressive not only in terms of quantity but of quality as well. The plain fact is, it seems to me, that the new technology can actually be of benefit to individual expression, precisely by deregulating access to the media. 6. “De nombreux spectateurs ont ainsi tenté de décrypter ce code (contenu dans les glyphes) après que les créateurs de la FOX les eurent informés sur leur site qu’un message se rattachait à chacune des images. L’investigation du public s’est ainsi étendue à la sphère mondiale de l’internet. Le décodage a été mis à jour … grâce à l’utilisation du chiffre de César … utilisé en cryptographie pour désigner le chiffrement par décalage.”



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A good example is the behaviour of online diarists. Philippe Lejeune (2000), who tracked and analysed individual and group sites carrying continuous, disrupted and discontinued private diaries, concludes that they harness a significant “psycho-social” change. Computers multiply the number of potential writers, and the Internet brings the promise of an audience, of a tribe of followers, with whom the connections are much more specific than with traditional readers. Lejeune argues that the process of writing a diary on a computer actually mobilizes more symbolic activity than writing it by hand on paper. And indeed, whereas a traditional manuscript diary results from spontaneous writing, the computer easily allows corrections which partly distance writers from their own text, an effect further intensified by the use of a computer screen. Using a computer, diarists are able to go back over what they have already written, improve it stylistically, spend time organizing it, and thus give it stronger symbolic meaning. Publishing on the Internet completes this process, making it possible to share the text and become part of a writer/reader community. Through the global network, diarists seek to create a community that identifies with their concerns far more wholeheartedly than can the merely potential readership of a book. This is the very essence of the “tribalization” mentioned by Debray. Even though traditional ethnocultures are falling into obsolescence, a writer can nevertheless use the new media to create something personal. Between the domination of the market on the one hand and the formidable democratization of individual symbolic creation on the other, there is still a role for an original writer/ creator. And because such original individuals continue to develop their insights, our sense of the world can be constantly reformulated. As Jacques Rancière (2007: 92) remarks, “Literature must live in the gap between … collective inertia and the action of individuals who persist in dreaming of a better world for themselves and for the community.”7 Contemporary writers can somehow find a place for themselves between, on the one hand, a total adherence to the social consensus and, on the other hand, engagement in the multitude of individual symbolic expressions posted on communication networks. Although in one important sense authors have lost their unique place in the collective symbolic system, the creator of Fringe, for instance, despite the impact of both co-writers and economic considerations, managed to keep a level of significant control over the series as a whole. As Lyotard (1991: 127) comments, it is unfortunate when writers’ response to the new technology is to create art that is merely global and eclectic: “What is called on by eclecticism are the habits of magazine readers, the needs of consumers of standard industrial images – this is the spirit of the supermarket shopper.” 7. “La littérature doit vivre de l’écart même entre … des inerties collectives et l’action des individus qui s’entêtent à rêver, pour eux et pour la collectivité un monde meilleur.”

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Contemporary French authors such as Nobel laureate Claude Simon, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, and Philippe Sollers show that they are aware of the vast possibilities of a globalized world, but seem to feel unjustified in extending the global interpretation of human life and society to be found in nineteenth-century novelists. Sollers, for instance, has created an oeuvre which, though steeped in cultural, literary and autobiographical references, seeks to encapsulate a postmodern culture in which only play and fun can keep afloat. Nowadays originality is often linked with intellectual pastiche, and with enjoyable mind games of no real substance. As a response to the current state of symbolic activity, this seems hardly adequate. We surely cannot accept that contemporary narrative fiction merely rewrites old contents. Writers need to adapt to the new media more fundamentally, and at the same time to rediscover the people they are writing for. As Lyotard remarks, the most ambitious contemporary art is too much based on the assumption of a total break between artists and their virtual public, which is taken as unable to identify with strict and high aesthetic standards. All major avant-garde movements are misunderstood at first, needless to say, and take time to win recognition. Newness involves “abandoning the already established syntheses, at whatever level: logical, rhetorical and even linguistic, and letting work in a free-floating way what passes …, however senseless it may appear” (Lyotard 1991: 56). The best new work today does not necessarily go back to a representational manner, being more concerned to testify that there are things which have not yet been represented and, above all, that there is always scope for new and humanly interesting kinds of meaning. Faced with a massive and global use of its canonical forms, narrative fiction is redefining both those forms themselves and its own function within society.

Video games Through television and the Internet an entirely new device for recreational activity has been introduced which uses more and more narrative forms every day: video games. Today, video games mimic the unfolding of a narrative, a trait they share with fictional series, while at the same time maintaining the concept of values and rewards. They also include more “free” experiences that are just for fun, e.g. exploring a city, listening to radio stations, watching movies, television programmes. They are not only games but narrative fictions, especially as they develop stories in which the player can be the hero. Players can choose how to play the game, accumulating achievements and rewards, or simply getting caught up in the story’s virtual world.



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In recent times, game challenges, techniques, stories, graphics, and sound animations have all been drastically transformed, bringing into being virtual worlds that exist worldwide, and in which real players can meet and communicate. Nowadays one can play alone, or together with, or against, somebody else, using a game console, a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, both online and offline, and one and the same game may present multiple versions that significantly differ depending on the medium. The spread of high-speed internet access, high definition flat screen technology and Dolby surround sound mean that players can get immersed in an imaginary space and time which is in many ways extremely realistic. The performance of new game consoles (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in 2005, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii in 2006) made games very attractive. The Wii allows players to perform game-moves in real time and space, regardless of whether they are online or not. These new media also encourage the growth of global player communities such as “PlayStation Home”. This is an online virtual urban space where players make real-time visits as an avatar, of which they themselves can create the physical appearance, even down to details such as hairstyle. These characters may have hobbies – watching movie trailers, bowling, chess – and can make virtual purchases – clothes, houses, furniture – that are actually charged for in brand shops possibly also existing in real life. Events are held regularly on a specific day, at a pre-arranged GMT time – a concert, for instance, or a Halloween party. And in their fictional universe players can live a parallel social life created by themselves, admittedly within limits imposed by the game producers, but with more and more personal freedom. In fact this social life is only partly virtual, since players can communicate amongst themselves and perform skilful moves reproduced on screen, such virtual existence continuing for whole days or even months of real time. Even real meetings are organized, so that players can compare notes and buy still more devices and video games. In the words of André-Claude Potvin (2002: 57), “the user does not witness the show: he creates the show, he is the show.”8 Users’ experiences and initiatives in the virtual world lead to a reinvention of both the “physical” and the “social” body (Potvin 2002: 84). When a game proves to be very successful, extra “packages” or additional episodes are sometimes produced, which may or may not directly require the original version, so that they have an open structure and a remarkably long lifespan – the original versions of a number of still current games were released over twenty years ago. Games can also re-make box-office hits or famous sporting and 8. “l’usager n’assiste pas au spectacle, il fait le spectacle, il est le spectacle.”

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historical events, which can mean that playing them develops not only dexterity and concentration but a lot of other skills as well. The environment of the characters becomes ever more complex, with characters sometimes walking freely in a city that actually exists like New York, Los Angeles or Miami, sometimes in a completely imaginary city (such as the city of Rapture in BioShock (Irrational Games, 2007)). And they can collect information, not for immediate use, but in order to enrich their understanding of the virtual environment and its denizens, thereby developing their own preparedness for action. Given the level of sophistication and complexity reached within video game worlds, it is not surprizing that the production process often requires the input of several different teams. First, there is the creator of the screenplay, then a graphic team, a design team, a programming team, a production team, a sound team, and a quality control team. In addition to IT professionals, graphic artists, musicians, writers and screenwriters, production also calls on the services on experts in artificial intelligence (AI), whose job is to equip computer systems with intellectual abilities comparable to those of human beings, by imitating not only ratiocination but also auditory or visual perception. Such deployment of AI is particularly obvious in the creation of fictional (non-player) characters which react in accordance with strategic choices made by the player. But AI also contributes to the options available to players themselves. The production of the game Heavy Rain (Quantum Dream, 2010) involved 300 people, 172 days of motion capture shooting (a technique allowing a perfect imitation of movements), and 55 sets. While in older games players were guided mostly by writing, nowadays games provide necessary information through voice or image. David Cage, the designer of Heavy Rain, wrote a 2000-page screenplay for it and explained that “it is necessary to manage numerous technical difficulties associated with variations in the branching-out” (quoted in Séguret 2010: xii–xii).9 What he is referring to is the consequence of developing structures which allow multiple choices. Currently, players meet on sites such as jeuxvidéo.com or jvn.com where they can find files, surveys, ratings or assessments of their favourite games. And here the narrativization of games is especially clear, since some of the main categories used to classify them are action games, adventure games, role-playing games, strategy games, real-time strategy games, and massive-scale multi-player online roleplay games (MMORPG), all of which use pretty enormous narrative resources and plots. In contrast, arcade games, reflection games, sports games, fighting games, air fight games, and music games develop only a minimal story, except that fighting games inevitably do have narrative elements, which enable players not only 9. “il faut gérer d’innombrables difficultés techniques, liées aux variations en arborescence.”



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to perform famous fights but also to create new virtual stories in their attempt to beat the champions. Although the evolution of games seems to be based in part on increasingly complex narrative plots, analysis reveals striking similarities to elements found in canonical narratives. The structures are in fact much more visible than in a traditional written narrative, because the players of a video game have to “nourish” its story and give it an original touch. The script-writers for video games seem perfectly aware of the narrative structures they are drawing on, and use them very self-consciously, translating the script into logical-mathematical models which multiply the number of virtual narrative structures available, which can then become the adventures performed by numerous players. Computer programming allows a wide range of options and it is up to players themselves whether or not to activate them. Players enjoy a vast, albeit controlled freedom. In BioShock, where the major goal is to take control of a city, the accompanying booklet provides a list of possible supports with cryptic names such as gene banks, plasmids, gleaner garden, distributors, vita-rooms, safety signs, nursing stations, improvement stations, and Manufact station, which enable the character to perform its tasks and eliminate its opponents. The catalogue here is partly reminiscent of the character functions of the donor and the villain as defined by Vladimir Propp (1968) in his work about Russian fairy tales. And of course, a specific episode corresponding to a structural sequence either will, or will not, enable the player to get help from the donor or to defeat the villain. The game episodes correspond to the sequences of the narrative structure traced by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1986). In the booklets which come with a game there are written introductions to the plot which set the context and explain, not only the challenges in terms of likely action, but also the game’s value system. One of the most significant developments here is that players can now choose whether they want to be a “goody” or a “baddy” – a “hero” or a “false hero” in the structuralist terminology. So the BioShock booklet (p. 3) brings in ideological and even religious overtones: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? “No!” says the man in Washington, “it belongs to the poor.” “No!” says the man in the Vatican, “it belongs to God.” “No!” says the man in Moscow, “it belongs to everyone.” I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose … Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well.

With its axiological simplification, this quotation draws a semiotic square identified by Greimas and the structuralists as a fundamental dimension of the canonical narrative. It also suggests something of the “grand narratives” discussed by

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contemporary philosophers, as is also rather bluntly apparent from the very beginning of the game itself. Similarly, World of Warcraft leads Theo Zijderveld (2008: 64) to comment that “in the Western world where the grand narrative has largely disappeared, virtual worlds can mediate the search for identity and spirituality.” Players themselves have to decode an extremely rich interculturality which is always present in games. Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2008) is based on a biblical verse: “But the earth will be desolate because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings” (Mic. 7: 13). Apart from biblical references, this game also alludes to Buddhism, Indian culture, and the pronouncements of the founding fathers of the United States (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt). Its major sources, however, are science fiction or fantasy classics (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and works by Lovecraft, Poe, Bradbury, and Orwell) and major movies (Mad Max, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, West Side Story). Fallout 3 is thus firmly rooted in American culture, both serious and more popular, which more specifically means that it is based on a broad national consensus. Like traditional realistic novels, video games allow us to accumulate information, to multiply experiences through characters, and to exercise moral judgment. Their narratives fulfil the social function of passing on an axiological consensus and building ideological adhesion. Designers increasingly divide games into chapters, acts or episodes. The episodes of Fallout 3 have a lot in common with the archetypal stages of a Bildungsroman, as they are linked to the quest for a good father “imago” (Birth, Baby Steps, Followings His Steps, Picking Up The Trail, Rescue From Paradise, Finding The Garden Of Eden, The American Dream). But players do not know this plot in advance. Instead, it is revealed on websites where the online virtual/real community start to discuss their gaming experiences and discoveries. So we end up facing a far more powerful computer equivalent of the structures governing written fairy tales as analysed by Propp. The structures available here allow real players to choose from several objectives in a given situation, thereby expanding their freedom. In so-called “first-person shooters,” often only the arm of the main character is visible in the foreground, and the screen represents his or her angle of view. Some main characters can also be played in “third person mode” – then the screen reproduces the point of view of an outsider, a substitute for an extradiegetic narrator, who controls the main character. Some games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar Games, 1997–2013), feature a choice between first person or third person acting. In the latest generation of video games, we also see the introduction of “narrative tension” (Baroni 2007). As a result, in Heavy Rain the abundance of firearms



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and spectacular racing is considerably reduced, and the designer has focused on the story’s emotional dimension. Critics have emphasized the nerve-racking, breath-taking plot. Here again, we recognize a key aspect of “classic” narrative. Video games have gone through a huge change, not only in terms of their technical sophistication but of the the changed demographics of their user base, which has shifted from teenagers to players in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Games have truly become fictional narratives, produced daily by the players themselves, and with very open plots. The producers of games use basic structures and have mastered proven narrative techniques. But when narrative is translated into digital models, this completely changes the status of the receiver vis à vis narrative writing. Players themselves consciously borrow elements from their own imaginary or real life in order to create an original narrative, and may even mobilize their most personal emotional experiences. Players differ from readers, because readers, though they certainly project their own representations and emotions on the story’s characters, do so in a passive and unconscious manner. According to Jane McGonigal (2011), games can actually improve us as individuals and change the world. A game’s “productivity”, she says, has four assessable dimensions: emotion, relationship, meaning, and the feeling of accomplishment. Many games include lexicons, codices, maps, and tutorials. Players exchange information on websites devoted to specific games and enjoy an increasingly developed freedom of action and reaction, an ever wider range of available resources, and heightened interactivity. In some games players can, as I say, shape the physical appearance of their “avatar”, choosing the gender, shape of face, eyes, complexion, hair style and colour, and even clothing. To take a case in point, Dragon Age (Electronic Arts, 2009) is inspired by printed role-play games as well as traditional hero narratives. Here, though, “depending on his or her class, race and gender, your character will have a special ‘origin.’ There are therefore six origins … that will basically change your first two hours of play” (“Dragon Age Origins” p. 54).10 Even more to the point, there is that opportunity players have to be either good or bad, and there is nothing which could immediately force them to renounce inappropriate conduct – “far from any Manichaeism, the game offers a range of nuances” (“Dragon Age Origins” p. 55).11 In role-play games (RPGs), players are endowed with qualities and skills which they can then develop. The basic skills are similar in almost all RPGs, and the level of skill varies while playing the game: strength, perception, stamina, charisma, 10. “en fonction de sa classe, de sa race et de son sexe, votre personnage va avoir une ‘origine’ particulière. Il y a ainsi six origines … qui vont essentiellement modifier vos deux premières heures de jeu.” 11. “loin de tout manichéisme, il se veut tout en nuances.”

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intelligence, agility, and luck. This is also the case with Fallout 3, except that, there, players can also develop other types of skills on a scale from 2 to 20 by accumulating experience points. So players have a vast choice regarding the qualities and skills of the character that represents them. As their skills evolve, so, too, does the game itself; it is not repetitive, and skill levels match specific adventures under specific conditions. Even when players replay a sequence which they earlier failed to complete, they will again be captivated by the game, because conditions will have randomly changed. In BioShock, for instance, players can choose between multiple objectives, just as if they had the choice between fighting a dragon, solving a puzzle, or killing a giant – to name but a few of Propp’s qualifying tasks. On the website dedicated to players’ meetings, we can find some forty different endings for Fallout 3, each of them based on players’ success or failure in achieving one of the tasks. This is an example of the many different narratives to which players can give birth within the constraints of a single game. Another example is Heavy Rain, which is expected to present 23 possible endings. The problem of this freedom’s scope, however, remains unsolved. Complex though a game may be, in the background there is always a predetermined pattern, and “video games, for the overwhelming majority, tell conformist stories in a conformist fashion” (Séguret 2010: xii–xiii).12 What about axiological freedom? Can players really choose their values when ​​ they are caught in the toils of a predetermined culture? How can they truly exert creative thinking as unique individuals? The final choices are indeed strangely limited. At the end of Fallout 3, for instance, players can choose to purify water to save the people by sacrificing themselves, or they can send someone else in their place, which is much less glorious, or they can basically do nothing. According to Potvin (2002), the iconic image of resistance to the fascination for cyber culture is that of the hacker, who breaks into systems to alter their purposes. We must recognize that creativity of this kind has more to do with a dream of being in control than with a lived reality. By working together, however, the gaming communities do gain a certain level of control over video games. Their websites not only offer solutions for the many different episodes but allow players to dissect their own cultural presuppositions. Designers sometimes rely on the suggestions and opinions of the players to further change a game. And players work on the computer programming itself, proposing mods (changes) to adapt the game to the expectations of the community. Players can actually create patches that can be downloaded in order to change the initial computer programme game. It is probably due to this community, to a kind of “archi-player/designer,” that 12. “le jeu vidéo, dans son écrasante majorité, raconte des histoires conformistes sur un mode conformiste.”



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individual players can detach themselves and step back from the “digital” creation of highly directional producers. But the archi-player also acts as a group, rather than as individuals, thereby exercising a reflective and creative activity totally different from that open to the reader of written fictional narratives. According to Philippe Quéau (1993: 81), this “désimagination” (“disimagination”) allows higher intelligibility, leading to a better control of images. And for Quéau, virtual worlds do have to be controlled by intellection and election. Contrary to the more simplistic view of video games, the gaming community is indeed able to distance itself from recreational images.

Conclusion In sum, we can conclude that the traditional functions of both individual creator and passive receiver are no longer valid. This does not mean that all narrative art is endangered, because we can now see the emergence of a new narrative that is closer to traditional oral tales than to forms inherited from the nineteenth century. So is individualism, as Jean-Paul Sartre argued in What Is Literature? (1949), a value characteristic of merely Western middle-class society? In today’s globalized world of the Internet, have the social function of the individual writer and reader become inadequate? The answers to both these questions, I have been suggesting, are not straightforwardly negative. Television series and video games may turn out to be the popular culture of tomorrow. They have a lot in common with the universal forms of folklore, i.e. the traditional “art of the people.” Just as we came to appreciate folkloric works according to their specific social and aesthetic values, fictions produced by digital technology must be deemed new forms of art that call for new criteria for analysis. These forms are more intelligent than the written narrative fictions they emerged from, and are able to incorporate a significant amount of creativity. They already exist here and now. And we would be wrong not to take an interest, since they remind us that we all belong to the same community: the community of human beings. They are a living World Culture.

References Baroni, Raphaël. 2007. La tension narrative: Suspense, curiosité, surprise. Paris: Seuil. Colonna, Vincent. 2010. L’Art des séries télé. Paris: Payot. Debray, Régis. 2000. Introduction à la médiologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. “Dragon Age Origins.” 2009. PC jeux 139 (October).

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Golasowski, Viviane. 2011. La Narration au cœur des séries télé: L’Univers de Fringe. Mémoire de master, Université de la Polynésie française. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1986. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Jost, François. 2009. Comprendre la télévision et ses programmes. Paris: Armand Colin. Lancelot, Alain. 2005. Rapport au Premier ministre, Les Problèmes de concentration dans le domaine des médias, décembre 2005, in www.ddm.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/rapport_lancelot.pdf. Lejeune, Philippe. 2000. Cher écran. Paris: Seuil. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin. Manguel, André. 2007. City of Words. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Miquel, André. 2006. Lecture on the Arabian Nights. www.college-de-france.fr/site/ conference-aubervilliers/conference_du_5_juin_2006. Pinsolle, Dominique, and Arnaud Rindel. 2011. « Séries télévisées pour public cultivé ». Le Monde diplomatique, juin 2011. Potvin, André-Claude. 2002. L’Apport des récits cyberpunk à la construction sociale des technologies du virtuel. Mémoire de maîtrise, University of Montreal. Prendergast, Christopher. 2004. Debating World Literature. London: Verso. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. [First edition trans. by Laurence Scott, this second edition revised and ed. by Louis A. Wagner.] American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series, 9. Austin: University of Texas Press. Quéau, Philippe. 1993. Le virtuel: Vertus et vertiges. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. La Politique de la littérature. Paris: Galilée. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1949. What Is Literature? Bernard Frechtman (trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Séguret, Olivier. 2010. “‘Heavy Rain.’ Immersion.” Libération, February 20, xii–xiii. http://www. liberation.fr/medias/2010/02/20/heavy-rain-immersion_611047. Stiegler, Bernard. 1996. La Technique et le temps, II. Paris: Galilée. Vanoye, Francis. 1989. Cinéma et récit, I. Paris: Nathan. Zijderveld, Theo. 2008. “Cyberpilgrims. The Construction of Spiritual Identity in Cyberspace.” MA paper in Theology, Utrecht University. http://www.theozijderveld.com/cyberpilgrims/ Cyberpilgrims_theo_zijderveld.pdf

part iii

Literatures

chapter 13

Small presses and the globalization of poetry* Manuel Brito

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines “to globalize” as “to make worldwide in scope or application” (1988: 521). The phenomenon in question is inherently suspicious, since it is becoming ever closer to a kind of transnational corporatism. That is why Masao Miyoshi says that it is not enough to recognize “the different subject-positions from different regions and diverse backgrounds” (Miyoshi 1996: 98), but that we also need to think about the economic and political reasons for such differences, and about how to erase inequalities. Fredric Jameson, too, sees the economic side of globalization as “darkening and growing opaque” (Jameson 1998: 57). When he turns to the globalization of communication, however, Jameson is more optimistic, seeing here an opening for “a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation” – a falling away of those structures that condemned whole segments of the population to silence and subalternity; a worldwide growth of popular democratization – why not? – which seems to have some relationship to the evolution of the media, but which is immediately expressed by a new richness and variety of cultures in the new world space. (Jameson 1998: 57)

And in this present chapter I shall try to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation has been set in motion by the editors of a considerable number of small presses. They brought this about by channelling innovative poetry across the national boundaries of many different first-world countries. Welcoming “making-it-new” experimentalism in matters of subjectivity, language and ideology, they accepted submissions from foreign authors, so promoting a cultural globalization of types of poetry that were once considered minor or elitist. I shall speak of “innovation” and “experimental” interchangeably, since both terms refer to a trying-out of new procedures and to making changes. The * I would like to thank FEDER and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for their support of my research (FFI-2009-10786). doi 10.1075/fillm.1.13bri © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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creativity involved has been of the kind encouraged by the American poet Charles Bernstein (2008: 42): innovation as a “constant process of invention in the face of the given”. Nor have the experimental disruptions been confined to poets and their texts. As Bernstein (2008: 43) also noted, changes can occur “not only to forms of poems but also to reading habits, audiences, and distribution systems”. In practice, the small presses’ emphasis on non-mainstream writing and approaches to literature has served to modify both the university system and the publishing market. It has also had a significant impact on the wider communities of North America, Europe and Australasia. “Community” is a more relevant term than “nation” or “country” here. Rather than claiming links to particular locations or places, the small presses’ openness to language fluctuation has tended to deterritorialize national pride into cultural pluralism. In any struggle against the conventional Anglophone hegemony, this kind of pluralism was bound to forestall neo-imperialist wishful thinking and give full scope to transnational collaboration. The small presses have showcased a widely heterogeneous family of contributors, with lots of collaborative translation and much editorial pooling of resources. A number of exemplary publishing houses in the United States, for instance, such as The Figures, Kelsey Street, Krupskaya, Litmus, Roof, and Coffee House, articulated an alternative vision of poetry which has since spread to other small presses elsewhere: in Canada, Tsunami; in England, Barque, The Many, Reality Street, and Shearsman; in Ireland, Salmon Poetry; in Australia, Salt, and 5 Islands; in New Zealand, Cold Hub and Black Doris; in France, Un bureau sur l’Atlantique and Editions de l’Attente; and in Spain, Zasterie. All these presses have had international reach and a specific interest in innovative poetic modes. Their tendency towards collaboration has been systematic and reciprocal, so helping to establish innovative poetry in small press formats as a medium and framework of transnational creativity and cultural critique. The process of unending renewal was not the carrier of some sort of imaginative narcissism, but was firmly grounded in what for poets are always urgently pressing realities. Poetry movements in the United States (Language Poetry), the United Kingdom (British Poetry Revival), Australia (Generation of ’68), New Zealand (Pasifica Poets, Printable Reality – this latter significantly described as a world-wide movement), Canada (Tish and The Kootenay School of Writing), France (Tel Quel), and Spain (Novísimos) have all focused on the potentiality of language, on new forms, and on social issues, and they have all offered their own particular examples of what we could call globalized experimentalism. Geoffrey Young’s small press The Figures, for instance, was devoted to the concept of innovation from the early Mixed Doubles: Fifteen Poems by Artie Gold and Geoff Young, which appeared in Berkeley in 1975, to the last publication, Jerry Saltz’s Seeing Out Loud, reprinted in 2007 in Great Barrington. When Young



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recalls his motives for becoming a publisher, he inevitably refers back to the literary milieu in Berkeley during the mid-1970s. His conversations with experimental poets like Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and Ron Silliman allowed him to enter into a dialogue with the theory and criticism of Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Constructivists. “[I]n short, this multifarious, polyglot new free-for-all was what I’d always wanted, a scene worthy of the name” (Young 2007). Various other activities supplemented this literary milieu, such as performances in museums, actions in lofts, meetings in living rooms, Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder’s Poet’s Theatre, plus a radio program on KPFA called “In The American Tree” and featuring interviews with a different poet every week. It was in this very creative atmosphere in Berkeley that Young started his press. And the presence of foreign authors in The Figures’ publications broke the demarcation between nations and regions, between centre and periphery. Globalization facilitated communication, and The Figures published authors of international standing: Gillian McCain (Canada); Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, and J. H. Prynne (England). There could not be much doubt that American small presses were indeed opening up to international forums. Another small press focused on poetry was Kelsey Street Press, founded in Berkeley in 1974 “to address the marginalization of women writers by small press and mainstream publishers” (Kelsey 2013). This was certainly the primary goal in the Kelsey Street publications, but two other goals are also very relevant here: (1) to publish a list that reflected the cultural variety of America, including first books by unvetted writers; and (2) to liberate poetry from the constraints that tend to narrow it down, an aim which in the 1980s led to a series of cross-genre collaborative works between poets and visual artists (Kelsey 2013). Driven by a sense of the poetry community as continually changing, poets and artists from various countries were fired by a genuine enthusiasm for experimentation on a global scale. Kelsey Street editors published American innovative poets like ­Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Norma Cole, Barbara Einzig, Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe, Erica Hunt and Rena Rosenwasser, together with foreign writers such as Cecilia Vicuña (Chile); Anne Dunn, Hazel White and Bhanu Kapil (England); Marina La Palma (Italy); Anne Portugal (France); Eléna Rivera (Mexico); and Myung Mi Kim (South Korea). Kelsey Street editors were certainly very sensitive to the transformations made possible by feminism. But in some ways their most distinctive idea turned out to be that poetry and art were continuous in many different forms all over the world. Literary creativity was not the prerogative of some single country, and Kelsey Street books encouraged “ongoing participation in a continually changing poetry community” (Kelsey 2013). A systematicity of innovation and globalized poetry has also been a feature of Krupskaya, an American small press located in San Francisco and

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dedicated to publishing experimental poetry and prose. Krupskaya is structured as a collective body comprised of writer-editors who have equal responsibility for the reading, selection, editing, and support of the books that are produced.  (Krupskaya 2013)

Much of the editorial cooperation has been structured by the three editors who worked in two-year terms from 1998, plus Kevin Killian and Jocelyn Saidenberg, who were in charge from 2005 to 2013. Krupskaya’s editors firmly state that “the collective works toward a consensus” (Krupskaya 2013). Since 1998, the company’s various editors have published a catalogue of books from many different countries, and the aesthetic outreach of its publications has been genuinely international, with authors such as: Colin Smith, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Dan Farrell (Canada); Geoffrey Dyer (England); Caroline Bergvall (of French-Norwegian nationalities); Roberto Tejada (Mexico); and Hung Q. Tu (Vietnam). So global experimentalism in poetry has been very much to the fore. The main aim of the New Yorker Litmus Press is to support “innovative, crossgenre writing” – “the press publishes the work of translators, poets, and other writers, and organizes public events in their support” (Grinnell 2013). Its cultural goals are very international, thanks in no small part to the open-mindness of its editor Tracy Grinnell, who has been keen to foster larger communities; “by actualizing the potential linguistic, cultural and political benefits of international literary exchange, … [Litmus Press] aim[s] to ensure that our poetic communities remain open-minded and vital” (Grinnell 2013). Grinnell has a clear sense that poetry has been going through a process of increasing interaction, not only between different poets but also between poets and artists. She has particularly encouraged such cross-fertilization, breaking down many obstacles to it through the pages of the magazine Aufgabe, which is part of a joint venture of Litmus Press and Ether Sea Projects. Among the international poets who have participated in Litmus are: Kiriu Minashita, Kyong-Mi Park, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Takako Arai, Ayane Kawata (Japan); Danielle Collobert, Isabelle Garron (France); Eva Sjödin (Sweden); and Xue Di (China). There are Litmus publications which do much to help us understand the current phase of globalization, by featuring the forces acting upon particular poetry communities and exemplifying related creative achievements. Litmus is a clear case of a transvaluation going on within American cultural models, involving complex and potentially far-reaching reconciliations between the Self and the “foreign” Other. Since 1976 Roof Books has published over 70 titles of contemporary poetry and criticism under the protection of the Segue Foundation in New York. Segue is an internationally renowned arts organization and hosts the experimental reading series Segue-on-the-Bowery, which sponsors art projects and poetry classes in various New York State correctional facilities, and which has renovated an abandoned



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city-owned property at 303 East 8th Street to house twelve artist live-work coops and a 1200 sq. ft. performance space. As publishers of Roof, Segue presents an antidote to literary isolation and has definitely opened its doors “to innovative, avant-garde, and experimental literature of local, national, and international scope and to arts projects of all types and mediums” (Roof 2013). This dynamic small press has as its working motto “The best in language since 1976,” which reflects the firm’s commitment to the Language Poets during the 1970s and 1980s. Exploring the potential of language has also been a preoccupation of foreign poets published by Roof, some of whom have written poems dealing with ideological concerns and historical processes of self-realization: Nicole Brossard (Canada); Olivier Cadiot (France); Miles Champion and Ken Edwards, (England); Ernesto Livon Grosman (Argentina); Yunte Huang (China); Fiona Templeton (Scotland); Chris Tysh (France); and Araki Yasusada (Japan). Allan Kornblum founded Coffee House Press in Minneapolis in 1984. Since then it has grown from a poetry magazine to a literary publisher covering the fields of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. At present, it has seventeen directors, all pursuing its distinctive mission of producing “books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience” (Coffee 2013). More than 300 books are included in Coffee House’s big catalogue, of which more than 250 are still in print, so indicating the press’s success in realizing Kornblum’s ambition to publish “enduring authors of our time” (Coffee 2013). Since Chris Fischbach succeeded Kornblum as chief editor in 2011, Coffee House has been moving steadily closer to the international poetry community. Kornblum had already edited overseas poets such as: Ed Bok Lee (South Korea); Victor Hernández Cruz (Puerto Rico); Bao Phi (Vietnam); Mark McMorris (Jamaica); and Adrian Castro (Cuba). Now Fischbach is lining up other cutting-edge international authors for the 15–20 new Coffee House titles per year. Coffee House Press belongs with the other American small presses I have mentioned in recognizing a vital coherence and progression of poetry that is not restricted to any particular nation or region, and in still continuing to work for a sharing of creative processes world-wide. Berkeley, Great Barrington, New York, Minneapolis, and San Francisco were the specific locations where these small presses emerged. But American editors of innovative poetry were not limited by divisions of either literary genre or geography. They were united in the fruitful labour of globalizing a poetry charged with multiple possibilities for action. The role played in the international poetry debate by North American small presses has long been acknowledged by scholars in the field of publishing studies. This is because they have had a significant influence on contemporary poetry through sustained high levels of activity, and through their high profile in international forums, workshops, conferences, and visits to universities. The Vancouver

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press Tsunami Editions, for instance, has resulted from activities organized by the Kootenay School of Writing, which sponsors “colloquia and critical talks on writing, visual art, and politics and […] a reading series with local, Canadian, and international writers” (Kootenay 2013). Lary Bremner founded Tsunami Editions to support poets associated with the Kootenay School, while the later editors, Deanna Ferguson and Catriona Strang, began producing “spiney trade-books.” But in contrast to other Canadian small presses such as Talonbooks, which publishes highly successful commercial titles and is clearly devoted to publishing Canadian authors, Tsunami took on the poetry of: Anne Tardos (France); Jackson Mac Low, Robert Mittenthal and Peter Ganick (United States). Tsunami and the magazine Writing, founded by Fred Wah, David McFadden and Julian Ross in 1980, were for many years Kootenay’s main channels of publication. And both of them have engaged in international communication, publishing established poets alongside younger ones, being, like most small presses, interested in Language Poets centred on innovation and experimation, and drawing particular inspiration from them. All this helps to explain how Vancouver, for such a long time a city on the cultural periphery, has become such a challenging and international centre for creative diversity. At least four small UK presses have shared in increasing the international scope of innovative poets: Barque, The Many Press, Reality Street, and Shearsman. To begin with Barque, it was founded by Andrea Brady (herself an American) and Keston Sutherland in London in 1995. Alongside established British contemporary poets like Allen Fisher, J. H. Prynne and Andrew Duncan, Barque has published: Che Qianzi (China); William Fuller and Brian Kim Stefans (United States); Michael Kindellan (Canada); Monika Rinck (Germany); Eléna Rivera (Mexico); and John Tranter (Australia). This press has published over 40 chapbooks and six perfectly bound books, and has also found its way into CD-R publications involving “spoken word performances by a variety of artists alongside improvizational music” (Brady and Sutherland 2013). The London-based The Many Press was founded in 1975, in the wake of the British Poetry Revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its editor, John Welch, has said “there was a feeling, quite widely shared, that much of what was most interesting was likely to be found outside the productions of the mainstream publishers” (in Peverett 2009). And the eighty books, pamphlets and broadsheets published by The Many again signal a strong international ambition. Included were: Riccardo Durante, Giorgio Verecchia and Vittorio Sereni (Italy); Amarjit Chandan and Sudeep Sen (India); and Alfred Celestine and Martha Kapos (United States). The quality and format of The Many books follow their American counterparts, and have had a strong impact on contemporary UK poetry, partly through the two associated magazines, Vanessa Poetry Magazine and The Many Review, with their strong emphasis on experimental modes.



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Reality Street would seem to be the British small press most thoroughly committed to innovative poetry. In a short note entitled “The History of Reality Street”, the editor Ken Edwards expresses his interest in the “parallel tradition” derived from the British Poetry Revival, the Cambridge diaspora, and so-called “linguistically innovative” poetry – “all overlapping categories” (Edwards 2013). Since Edwards founded it in 1993, Reality Street has played a major role in highlighting the most influential poets. The compilers David Miller and Richard Price refer to it as “a key small press, with books of the poets associated with the earlier magazines and their broadly modernist and postmodern poetics” (2006, 218). Almost all the major experimental poets from the 1970s to the present have been included: Allen Fisher, Wendy Mulford, David Miller, Cris Cheek, Bill Griffiths, Tony Lopez, Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, Robert Sheppard and Lawrence Upton, to mention just a few. In point of fact, Reality Street emerged from Ken Edwards’ Reality Studios and Wendy Mulford’s Street Editions, founded in 1978 and 1972 respectively. Today, Ken Edwards runs it with the help of Elaine Edwards, after Mulford gave up publishing in 1998. But in any case, Reality Street increasingly opened up to a wider international community, publishing: Nicole Brossard, John Gilmore, Lisa Robertson (Canada); Maurice Scully (Ireland); Susan Gevirtz, Jim Goard, Barbara Guest, Anselm Hollo, Fanny Howe, and Sarah Riggs (United States). As Edwards himself has pointed out: “There was also a common interest in post-New American Poetry, Language Writing and related North American fields, as well as adventurous poetry in other English-speaking regions and from other languages and cultures” (2013). As a result, Reality Street books not only show the foreign poetry community what has been going on in UK literary circles, but has also promoted links between authors on both sides of the Atlantic. The motto of Shearsman Books is “for the best in contemporary poetry.” This means that editor and publisher Tony Frazer is constantly searching for new poetry from his base in Bristol – “mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list” (Frazer 2012). Frazer first founded Shearsman magazine in 1981 and then Shearsman Books in 1982. The press has shown the new direction taken by many small presses in the twenty-first century, i.e. the shift towards digital and print-on-demand production. This has allowed a whole new range of possibilities, including cheaper costs and a higher number of authors edited per year. The production statistics tell a clear enough story: In 2004 we published 18 new titles, 24 more in 2005, 23 in 2006, 42 in 2007, 60 in 2008, 63 in 2009, and 58 in 2010, 48 in 2011 and more than 60 volumes in each of 2012 and 2013. Starting from January 2014, there will be a more measured publication schedule, but we still expect to see more than 40 volumes, across the full spectrum of our core lists, to appear every year.  (Frazer 2013)

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On the other hand, Frazer’s policy as regards accepting submissions has not changed since his days at Shearsman magazine: There is a clear inclination towards the more exploratory end of the current spectrum. Notwithstanding this, however, quality work of a more conservative kind will always be considered seriously, provided that the work is well-written. What I do not like at all is sloppy writing of any kind; I always look for some rigour in the work, though I will be more forgiving of failure in this regard if the writer is trying to push out the boundaries. (Frazer 2004)

Perhaps Shearsman is the only British press whose translations into English parallel the editions in original English. The list of authors is varied and includes both new and well-known names: Anne-Marie Albiach and Emmanuel Hocquard (France); Rosa Alcalá, Merle Lyn Bachean, Rachel Tzvia Back, Ellen Baxt, Debby Jo Blank, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Clark and Spencer Selby (United States); María Baranda (Mexico); Ilhan Berk (Turkey); Hanne Bramness (Norway); María do Cebreiro and Luis Ingelmo (Spain); Avik Chanda (India); Tsvetanka Elenkova (Bulgaria); Kjell Espmark (Sweden); Valentino Gianuzzi (Peru); Anna Glazova (Russia); Alfred Kolleritsch (Austria); José Kozer (Cuba); Mai Cheng (China); Erin Mouré (Canada); Ilma Rakusa (Slovakia); and Michael Mehrdad Zand Ahanchian (Iran). In short, Shearsman has brought together numerous widely varying authors for the single purpose of exploring verbal invention. Through this exercise it has revealed the globalized presence of great talents all thinking about what’s new and what’s up. In Ireland, the double role of internationalization and innovation is strongly embraced by Salmon Poetry, which has been operating from County Clare since 1981. According to Jessie Lendennie, founder, Managing Editor, and herself a poet, Salmon “has continually taken risks. The challenge has always been in walking the tight-rope between innovation and convention” (2013). Her tacit but known goal is to promote poets, especially women poets, and the 300 volumes of poetry produced to date amply justify her interest in new ground: The judgment of what is Good and Bad in art is fraught, and it is, unfortunately, easier for many people to focus on what has already been accepted into the established stable. New work is work which is vulnerable; the greatest of artists can look back at their early work and see how far they have progressed. In order to progress there has to be a starting point. And if we are broad minded and willing to nurture the individual voice inherent in the work, the artist will emerge. Salmon has always given focus to this concept and seen its writers flourish. (Lendennie 2013)

Salmon has also developed “a cross-cultural, international literary dialogue” (Lendennie 2013), which has meant that Irish poets like Rita Ann Higgins, Mary O’Donnell, Theo Dorgan, Gerard Donovan and Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons have



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figured alongside Adrienne Rich and Marvin Bell (United States), Mélanie Francès (France), Rob McLennan (Canada), Primrose Dzenga (Zimbabwe), and Peter van de Kamp (The Netherlands). In 2011 Salmon celebrated 30 years of literary publishing, and could look back on a fine track record in promoting interest in, and new perceptions of, poetry. Like some other innovative small presses in Australia and the United Kingdom, Salt Publishing, too, has widened the boundaries of the poetry community. Its origins are related to John Kinsella’s Salt Magazine, first published in Western Australia in 1990. In the 1990s, Kinsella, together with Tracy Ryan, was the editor of Folio(Salt), publishing and co-publishing books and chapbooks focused on a pluralist vision of contemporary poetry which extended across national boundaries and a wide range of poetic practices; a vision which still permeates our literature publishing today.  (Salt 2013)

However, the press itself emerged only in 2002, when Chris and Jen HamiltonEmery started up a viable editorial venture with offices in Perth (Australia) and Cambridge (England). The internationalism of Salt is specially notable in two respects. First, there is its energetic search for alternative literary modes anywhere in the world. In fact Salt editors have proposed an international editorial team, including Janet McAdams, commissioning editor for the multi-award winning Earthworks Series of writing by indigenous peoples, and Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, joint commissioning editors for the Latin American Poetry Series. Secondly, from its locations in both Perth and Cambridge, Salt has shown its openmindedness by publishing 80 books a year by authors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe. The blend of authors includes: leading British poets such as John James, Tony Lopez, Peter Robinson and John Wilkinson; American authors such as Charles Bernstein, Maxine Chernoff, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Paul Hoover, Ron Silliman, and Susan Wheeler; and the Australians Pam Brown, Jill Jones, Kate Lilley, Peter Rose, Tom Shapcott and John Tranter. Salt’s organization has expanded beyond the field of poetry, and now covers fiction, drama, biography, literary criticism, children’s books, magazines (Salt Magazine and Horizon Review), and pamphlets. It has actually done much to counteract the pessimism often associated with small presses and their prospects, not least by setting up resources and prizes (the Crashaw Prize and the Scott Prize) aimed at promoting interaction and creativity. Although the Australian Five Islands Press has ever since 1986 published Australian poetry, its five managing co-editors have also accepted manuscripts from emergent and established poets of diverse origins: Sandy Fitts and Anna

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Kerdijk Nicholson (United Kingdom); Tatjana Lukic (Croatia); Michelle Cahill (India); and Ian McBryde (Canada). Not much information is to be had from Australian archives, except that the press was founded in Wollongong (New South Wales) by Ron Pretty. Although the editors describe Five Islands as an independent publisher, its postal address is within the University of Melbourne. This academic link differentiates it from the other small presses I have mentioned, but its goal is nevertheless to foster innovative poetic modes and publish foreign authors. In New Zealand, Cold Hub Press prints and publishes books and chapbooks of contemporary New Zealand poetry, and specifically collaborates with international poets and translators. It is located at Governors Bay, Lyttelton, and of the fifteen authors published to date, nearly half are foreign: Floarea Tutuianu (Romania); Aleksey Porvin, Mikhail Aizenberg and Tatiana Shcherbina (Russia); Juan Cameron (Chile); Jean-Pierre Rosnay (France); and J. Kates (United States). The editor Roger Hickin does not provide much information on the Cold Hub Press website. But he and David Howard, editor of the New Zealand small press Black Doris, did jointly organize a table of New Zealand poetry – “New Zealand Independent Presses” – at the 2011 Annual Conference and Bookfair of the US Association of Writers and Writing Programs. This reinforced the concerns of the small presses already discussed: to contrast diverse poetric modes and to establish all kinds of relationships with the world’s other poetry communities. In 1989 the French poet and editor Emmanuel Hocquard founded Un bureau sur l’Atlantique, a non-profit association fostering relations between French and American poets. In cooperation with the Fondation Royaumont, he had organized events with innovative American poets, translated them into French, and invited them to regular readings in Paris between 1977 and 1998: Harry Mathews, Kenneth Koch, David Antin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Keith Waldrop, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Gustaf Sobin, Joseph Simas, Robert Kelly, Tom Mandel, Barrett Watten, Carl Rakosi, Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Stephen Rodefer, Michael Gizzi, Norma Cole, John Taggart, Peter Gizzi, Fanny Howe, Connel McGrath, Ray Ragosta, Marjorie Welish. Hocquard’s numerous activities in support of American poets had begun with the co-edition 21+1 poètes américains d’aujourd’hui with Claude Royet-Journoud in 1981, and the Bureau’s first publication was a second anthology of American poetry, 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains, again co-edited with Royet-Journoud, in 1991. The focus on American poetry was extended through collaboration with Éditions Créaphis, with whom the Bureau’s published books by individual American authors such as George Oppen, Ray Di Palma, Elizabeth Willis, Jerry Estrin, Jack Spicer, Larry Eigner, Michael Palmer, Stacy Doris, Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, Cole Swensen, Norma Cole, John Taggart, Barbara Einzig, Keith Waldrop, Bill Luoma,



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Bernadette Mayer, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Jena Osman, and British poet Tom Raworth. Hocquard’s enthusiasm and hard work is reflected in the Bureau’s computer inventory: All the translations of contemporary American poetry in French since 1945 began in 1993 at the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay-aux-Roses. This work continues, directed by Marc Chénetier. The inventory now contains more than 3000 entries; a CD-ROM edition and a web-accessible version are now under consideration. (Un Bureau 1998)

Hocquard’s project has been widely recognized as a pragmatic effort to stimulate dialogue within a transatlantic poetry community of shared values and practices. The French editors Franck Pruja and Françoise Valéry publish both French and international poets, and claim that their Éditions de l’Attente pay attention to the boundaries of poetry, texts written by artists, essays, translations, and everything that encourages, interrogates, and makes a commitment to a vital and innovating language that upholds its inclusion in the real or imaginary beyond the limits of the formal. (Pruja and Valéry 2011)1

The origins of this press can be traced by to the example set by Emmanuel Hocquard, Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop, who edited innovative poets but also considered the books as aesthetic objects which interact with the readers’ eye. Among the foreign poets published by Éditions de l’Attente are: Démosthène Agrafiotis (Greece); Bruce Andrews, Peter Gizzi, Robert Grenier, Kristin Prevallet, Sarah Riggs, Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop (United States). Both editors have aimed to to clear away those hermetic apriorisms, the marks of which some contemporary literature can bear and open up new fields to readers of all ages who care to sample a little or a lot. (Pruja and Valéry 2013)2

Sometimes innovative poetry has been accused of obscurantism, whether after the fashion of Gertrude Stein or by bringing in poststructuralist theoretical issues. Without prescribing how poetry should affect us, Éditions de l’Attente has sought to reveal essential aspects of the life we globally share. Zasterle is a Spanish press based in La Laguna (the Canary Islands), and has been publishing books of poetry since 1989. All of the 49 poets so far published 1. “à la limite de la poésie, aux écrits d’artistes, aux essais, aux traductions et à tout ce qui anime, questionne et aventure une langue vivante innovante qui puise son inscription dans le réel ou l’imaginaire, au-delà du formel.” All translations are my own. 2. “déverrouiller les a priori d’hermétisme dont peut souffrir une certaine littérature actuelle et ouvre des champs aux lecteurs de tous les âges, désireux d’en découvrir un pan ou plus.”

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have been innovative, some of the most notable names being: Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Robert Creeley (United States); Steve McCaffery and Karen McCormack (Canada); Tom Raworth (Britain). Through these publications, thousands of readers have been confronted with new poetic forms, newly discovered work, and new developments of age-old literary traditions. For over two decades, Zasterle has supported special poetry ventures such as Nerter, a magazine founded in 1999. The press is also deeply committed to the Canary Islands’ own poetry community, initiating various seminars, forums, and colloquia. Zasterle’s motto “everything changes, everything converges” aptly describes the editor’s confidence in continual research and exploration in the definition and pursuit of new goals. And despite its strong roots in the Canary Islands, the press is also clearly global in scope and approach. The internationalization of all these small presses substantiates their common claim that innovative poetry can build large audiences and earn support all over the world. Their terms of operation are along two main axes. The first is their anticommercialism, which is a necessary condition for promoting experimentalism, new authors, and original departures. The second is their stress on international dialogue as a constitutive communal value in the poetry community. Needless to say, these principles in no way conflict with their other aims, slogans, and attitudes: rebellion against conservative tradition; anti-academicism; and a certain hostility to writing programmes housed in universities. The impact of small presses cannot be measured by comparing their statistics with those of the commercial book industry. Although Albert N. Greco compiled truly alarming results for commercial book consumption in the United States in the late twentieth century – Consumer book usage (i.e. hours per person per year) declined 11.88% between 1995 (101 hours) and 2001 (89 hours). … Overall, consumer books will experience a total decline of 16.83% between 1995 and 2005. (Greco 2004: 127)

– he also pointed out that consumption is determined by cycles related to supply and demand, and in 1999 operating income actually rebounded, so that by 2001 the book industry had “positive gains in all of the major financial categories” (Greco 2004: 135). But in contrast with the global commercial publishing industry, with its interest in reader demand, revenues, foreign sales, and other financial operations, the small presses publishing international innovative poets have sought faithful readers through subscriptions, donations, patronage, grants, and the support of state or regional agencies. The most obvious funding support has come from exemplary agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, which has helped with production costs for The Figures, Litmus and Roof. Other national or regional funding sources are the Canada Council for



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the Arts (Tsunami), the Arts Council England (Barque), the Australia Council for the Arts (Five Islands Press), the Centre National du Livre (Un bureau sur l’Atlantique), and the Conseil Régional d’Auitaine (Les éditions de l’Attente). At the same time, many other small presses are not dependent on this kind of institutionalization, preferring to operate within an alternative economic model, and more attached to private financing and even the trade market (The Many, Reality Street, Salt, and Zasterle). Just in the United States, William M. Brinton argued that “the small press community, and it numbers an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 publishers, accounts annually for an estimated 50% of all books published each year, about 52,000 of them” (1989: 11). Brinton’s own title, Publishing in a Global Village: A Role for the Small Press, operates within the dynamics of globalization, and he specifically warns about the publishing industry and the regulation of contents. Facing up to the challenges, small presses have been able to create suitable conditions for their more limited possibilities. And to look into the future, surely new technology, especially internet-based small presses and digital printing, will continue to maximize the innovative poets’ reach and strengthen their presence in the world. Small press editors can look to the new communicational outlets as a dynamic way to carry their mission further – to provide their readers with a poetry of invention that is itself reponding to the requirements of our global age.

References Bernstein, Charles. 2008. “The Task of Poetics, the Fate of Innovation, and the Aesthetics of Criticism.” In The Consequence of Innovation: 21st‑century Poetics, ed. by Craig Dworkin, 37–57. New York: Roof. Brady, Andrea, and Keston Sutherland. 2013. “About Barque Press.” http://www.barquepress. com/about.php. Brinton, William M. 1989. Publishing in a Global Village: A Role for the Small Press. San Francisco: Mercury House. Un bureau sur l’Atlantique. 1998. “Detailed Description.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/orgs/bureau/ detail_a.html. Coffee House Press. 2013. “Our Mission.” http://www.coffeehousepress.org/about/. Edwards, Ken. 2013. “The History of Reality Street.” http://realitystreet.co.uk/about-us.php. Frazer, Tony. 2004. “Tony Frazer: Editor and Publisher.” http://www.shearsman.com/pages/editorial/editor.html. Frazer, Tony. 2012. “Welcome to Shearsman.” http://www.shearsman.com. Frazer, Tony. 2013. “Books Home Page.” http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/home.html. Greco, Albert N. 2004. “The Economics of Books and Magazines.” In Media Economics: Theory and Practice, ed. by Alison Alexander, James Owers, Rod Carveth, C. Ann Hollifield, and Albert N. Greco, 127–147. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Grinnell, Tracy. 2013. “Mission.” http://www.litmuspress.org/about/mission. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 54–77. Durham: Duke University Press. Kelsey Street Press. 2013. “History.” http://www.kelseyst.com/about.htm. Kootenay School of Writing. 2013. “About KSW.” http://www.kswnet.org/fire/aboutksw.cfm. Krupskaya. 2013. “About Us.” http://krupskayabooks.com/about.htm. Lendennie, Jessie. 2013. “About Salmon.” http://salmonpoetry.com/about-salmon.php. Miller, David, and Richard Price. 2006. British Poetry Magazines, 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of “Little Magazines.” London: The British Library and Oak Knoll. Miyoshi, Masao. 1996. “A Borderless World: From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State.” In Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dassayanake, 78–106. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9780822381990-004 Peverett, Michael. 2009. “Samples from The Many Press.” http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot. be/2009/06/samples-from-many-press.html. Pruja, Franck, and Françoise Valéry. 2013. “Présentation.” http://editionsdelattente.com/site/ www/index.php/static/front/read?id=1. Roof Books. 2013. “Roof Books: The Best in Language since 1976.” http://www.roofbooks.com. Salt Publishing. 2013. “About Us.” http://www.saltpublishing.com/info/info.htm#AboutUs. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. 1988. Springfield: Merriam-Webster. Young, Geoffrey. 2007. “The Figures: A True Account of the Origin of a Literary Small Press.” http://www.geoffreyyoung.com/thefigures/history.html.

chapter 14

Between “minor” and “major” The case of Polish literature Marta A. Skwara The problem It is certainly possible, albeit somewhat artificial, to divide the literatures of the world into “major” and “minor” literatures. A “minor” literature is then usually regarded as a literature created by a smaller nation, or a literature created in a part of the world that is politically or culturally remote from the Western centres. When “minor” literatures are regarded from the outside and in a “world” perspective, they are typically seen from the vantage point of “major” literatures, which will distort the image of them, or at least provide an image that is different from their own image of themselves. As a Polish literary scholar, I am not altogether comfortable with the perception of my own native literature as a “minor” one. After all, the origins of Polish literature date back to the fourteenth century, and there is a rich earlier, but also parallel tradition of literary writing in Latin. Furthermore, Polish literature has produced many outstanding poets and writers, including four Noble Prize laureates. Even more important, Polish literature was able to preserve the language, culture and spirit of Poland through 123 years of political non-existence (1795– 1918), and through the long years of Soviet dominance in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also worth noting that, because of hostile political conditions, Polish literary émigrés have been working in many countries all around the world ever since the mid-nineteenth century. The most prominent nineteenthcentury example would be Adam Mickiewicz, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, while the pre-eminent twentieth-century example is Czesław Miłosz, a professor at Berkeley, California. As a result of large-scale emigration for political and economic reasons, for the last two centuries the Polish language has actually been spoken worldwide, with Polish cultural centres growing up in many different places, including Paris, London, Geneva, and Chicago. None of this will cut much ice with the world’s perception of Polish literature and culture as minor. If we dip into encyclopaedias of world literature or world writers, we shall note that the number of Polish writers recognized as “world” doi 10.1075/fillm.1.14skw © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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authors varies from only four (in European Writers (Jackson 1983)) to only eleven (in Reference Guide to World Literature (Henderson 1995)). True, the Cyclopedia of World Authors (Magill 1997) included 24 Polish writers, but this was the result of a very special definition of “authors from Poland” by which, for example, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was included, because he was born in Warsaw under Russian rule. With a criterion like that, writers such as Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch or Joseph Roth could also be deemed “Polish” writers, since they were born in Poland under Austrian rule. But joking aside, when we think of Polish literature and its historical development, the language in which authors chose to write is surely what decides which literature they belong to (with a few exceptions, as in the case of Neo-Latin literature). I do not believe that Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad), a child of Polish patriots, who spent his childhood and early youth in Poland under Russian rule but who wrote and published in English, should be “returned” to Polish literature – an option which is sometimes discussed. Conversely, I cannot believe that Bruno Schulz, born in the Polish (now Ukrainian) town of Drohobycz under Austrian rule, who wrote and published only in Polish, should sort under Jewish literature, as in some accounts today. Although we can, and should talk of all kinds of cross-cultural affinities and intertextual relationships, I readily accept that literary scholarship is not at its best when it turns into a power game, in which every writer recognized as a “world” author is called on to add a “major” character to a given “minor” literature. Yet on the other hand, I do think that, whether for historical, political or linguistic reasons, a “minor” literature like Polish literature always runs the risk of being misrepresented. This is especially so, it seems to me, when the literature is described as forming part of a larger literary area, a point I shall illustrate by asking, first, whether Polish literature comfortably belongs together with other so-called Slavic literatures and, secondly, whether it fits in any better with a group of so-called East Central-European literatures.

A Slavic literature? For obvious reasons, Polish literature is often described within the framework of Slavic (or Slavonic – the use of the English adjectives is not always consistent) literatures. Dmitrij Čiževskij argued strongly for the importance of Slavic literatures in his Comparative History of Slavic Literatures (1971). One of his obvious aims was to demonstrate the value and European relevance of a literary tradition that was undeservedly neglected in the culture of the West. In Čiževskij’s view (1971: 198), “the Slavic literatures stand largely within the broader community of European intellectual and literary development.”



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Another of Čiževskij’s aims was to oppose the Soviet interpretation of Slavic literatures, which usually described Russian literature as the “major” literature, and which neglected or hid many important facts. I shall not discuss such travesties in depth, but must at least mention that the Soviet perspective on Slavic literatures has left a bitter aftertaste. Even today, the notion “Slavic literatures” has a somewhat ideological and imperial undertone, which is perhaps one of the reasons for its relative lack of popularity. Partly as a result of this, I believe, the Slavic methodology of comparative literature invented by Dionýzy Ďurišin, with its concept of “interliterary communities”, used to function much better in Marxist-structuralist theory than in literary-historical practice. It was applied to Russian and Slovak literatures by Ďurišin himself, but not to any other Slavic literatures, despite the fact that it attracted some attention in certain other parts of the world (JanaszekIvaničková 2007: 16–17, 70–81). Because Čiževskij, in his eager advocacy of all Slavic literatures, did not dwell on differences between the particular literatures in that grouping, so making some of his commentary seem rather self-contradictory, I need to spell out the basic reasons why an account of Slavic literatures as a separate literary area is problematic. Paradoxically, Čiževskij’s book can serve as a rich source of knowledge here. Despite its generalizing approach, it still enables us to perceive some important differences between different Slavic literatures. First of all, Slavonic cultures are underpinned by two different religious traditions: those of the Western Christian Church and of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This division resulted not only in the adoption of two different alphabets, the Latin and the Cyrillic, a difference which still exists, but also in the development of different approaches to culture and literature. Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Slovenians and Poles became part of the western community of the European Christian world, and for a long time they used Latin in their Church and in their writings. Bulgarians, Serbs, and Russians were connected with eastern Christendom and for centuries experienced the profound impact of Byzantine culture. One of the striking examples of the cultural and literary differences between Western and Eastern Slavs was that in the western cultures of the Czechs, Croats and Poles there arose a flourishing Renaissance literature that was closely connected with the Renaissance literature of Italy, France and the Low Countries, whereas in Russia there was no Renaissance at all. Čiževskij himself comments on the pre-Ottoman Bulgarian influence on Russian literature, referred to as the “Russian pre-Renaissance,” but only to emphasize that it was not in fact followed by any Renaissance, “at least not in the field of literature” (Čiževskij 1971: 59). The foundational West/East differentiation was further deepened by the political history of particular Slavic countries. Roman Catholic Slavs never

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experienced any long-term domination by Asian and non-Christian powers, whereas Russia was under Mongol rule for about 200 years from the thirteenth century onwards, and Serbs and Bulgarians were under Turkish domination for almost half a millennium. Roman Catholic Slavs, on the other hand, were conquered by Europeans, and the cultural consequences of such political distinctions can hardly be overemphasized. Whereas Czechs almost lost their language under German domination (it had to be artificially rebuilt), the language and literature of Poland positively flourished during the time of German-Russian-Austrian rule  – many jewels of Polish literature date from that epoch. In Bulgaria the Turkish invasion confined literary life to monasteries, in which mostly religious literature in Latin was produced, and Bulgarians did not experience a literary revival until the nineteenth century, as did the Serbs as well, and to a different extent the Croatians, who were dominated by Germans and Hungarians. Russia was able to liberate itself from its Mongol overlords in the fifteenth century and, after a period of civil wars, slowly began to modernize both its state and its literature. The process gained momentum in the eighteenth century, with Peter I and his secularization of the language, and so did Russian imperialism. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Polish culture was dominant in relation to western Russian culture; would-be Byelorussia and Ukraine remained part of the Polish-Lithuanian Res Publica until the Russian partitions of the Res Publica of Two Nations between 1772 and 1795. But from the end of the eighteenth century till the end of the First World War, more than a third of all Poles, and of all the eastern Slavs, were subjects of the Russian czar. After that, and through the second half of the twentieth century (albeit with some differences in political and cultural circumstances from one state to another), all the Slavic countries were dominated by Communist Russia both politically and culturally, with the exception of Tito’s Yugoslavia. If one takes into account these basic historical and cultural differences, how can the concept of Slavic literatures have any real substance? It is true that one can trace important similarities in the origins and development of different Slavic literatures, and down the ages there are also crucial cross-cultural influences, such as: the influence of the earliest Czech writings on Russian literature in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and subsequently on Polish literature; the powerful response to Russian realism in most Slavic countries; and the dominance of Socialist Realism from the 1950s onwards, effected by Soviet communism and the elevation of Russian to the status of an international language, compulsory in all schools within the Soviet sphere of influence. But even so, the various Slavic literatures all have their own complexities, which need to be examined in relation to all the literatures of Europe. Čiževskij, too, knew this, but unfortunately did not mention it until the end of his book:

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It must be admitted that research in literary history, and indeed Slavic research as well as West European, has devoted less attention than might be desired to the problems of connections between Slavic East and the European and American West.  (Čiževskij 1971: 198)

Particularly the literatures that were seen as a tool of national liberation, as was the case with Polish literature, have had more in common with Italian, English, American, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Danish literature than with other Slavic literatures, which were seldom in a similar situation at the same time. This is very clearly demonstrated in the brief essays on particular literatures brought together in the Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature (Pynsent and Kanikova 1993). The author of the essay on Polish literature is Stanisław Barańczak, a Polish scholar, poet, translator, an émigré from People’s Poland, and a professor at Harvard University. What he emphasizes is the continuous rich tradition of Polish literature from the early sixteenth century onward, a continuity which is more or less unparalled in other Slavic literatures.

An East Central-European literature? If that continuity tends to be overlooked when Polish literature is grouped together with other Slavic literatures, it is perhaps even further from view in the newer conceptual framework offered by the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) in their History of the Literary Cultures of East Central-Europe (2004). The classification proposed here is “East Central-Europe”, and what most struck me on my first reading of the general introduction to the third volume was the strong declaration on the first page: We describe and analyse common historical mechanisms that operated in the literatures of the region. Thus, the national awakenings that we describe below shared some common frameworks and a common historical mechanism. They followed a common pattern …. (Neubauer 2004: 1)

After this statement, the different names of the allegedly simultaneous and consubstantial “national awakenings” are given in Estonian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Romanian, and Hungarian. There is no name in Polish, and such a name could not have been given, quite simply because there was no “awakening” in the Polish culture of the nineteenth century. In order to think of Polish literature in terms of an “awakening,” one has to go back to the Renaissance and the first writers who switched to Polish from Latin. The application of the dictum about a nineteenth-century pattern to cultures where it obviously does not fit has various unfortunate consequences. When

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the ICLA History speaks of Polish universities, for instance, Warsaw University, established in 1812, is mentioned first, since that date is compatible with the pattern of the nineteenth-century “awakening.” Jagiellonian University, established in 1364, is mentioned after that, in an enigmatic remark about the “ancient” Cracow University whose “Polonization” became possible in 1879 within the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Neubauer 2004: 6). Yet this late-nineteenth-century “Polonization,” which would apparently corroborate the desired pattern of “awakenings,” was nothing more than a politically motivated revival of the old university’s rights and independence. The Cracow (Jagiellonian) University had its real “awakening” in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Polish replaced Latin as the language of instruction. The wish to integrate all the literary cultures involved within the frame of a common “awakening” also leads to various exclusions. For instance, attention is paid to Samuel Gottlieb Linde as the “compiler of the first great six-volume Polish dictionary” between 1807 and 1814 (Neubauer 2004: 10), even though from a Polish perspective the “first” important philological achievement in Poland was Jan Mączyński’s Lexicon Latino-Polonorum (Latin-Polish Dictionary) of 1564, which was followed by many others, including the Gramatyka dla szkół narodowych (Grammar for National Schools) published by Onufry Kopczyński in 1778, preparing the ground for Linde’s big dictionary. While the ICLA History scrupulously lists many other East Central European nineteenth-century national grammars (Neubauer 2004: 10–11), Kopczyński’s grammar is simply not mentioned. Nor is anything said about Polish in the subchapter “(Re)constructing the Vernacular,” for the obvious reason that there was no need to reconstruct Polish in the nineteenth century. Having referred to the supposedly common “language reform” in the East-Central Europe of the nineteenth century, the History then focuses on this in the next subchapter, “Vernacular Literatures and Cultures,” beginning with the example of a Hungarian poet who championed poetry in Hungarian “as early as the 1770s” (2004: 13). Then the History discusses the literary situation in Hungary, where Latin was abandoned only in the nineteenth century, as well as other examples of literary reconstructions. As a result, Polish literature, which did not have to rebuild anything, which can boast a poet who championed writing in Polish as early as the mid-sixteenth century (Mikołaj Rej, known as the “Polish Breughel” because of his love of detailed descriptions), disappears from view. Such are the dangers of discussing a large and differentiated literary area in terms of “common mechanisms.” In the History’s subchapter on Modernism in East Central Europe, the term “awakening mechanism” is replaced by a distinctly appreciative consideration of “the first serious break with romantic nationalism”, said to have been brought about by Polish positivists who “embraced Western ideas on modernization”. Yet



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this is much too simplistic. For one thing, it in effect completely overlooks the role of patriotism. For another, the “ideas on modernization” were actually not only of Western origin. And the same subchapter also tells us that the Polish novel was East Central-Europe’s strongest representative of Realism, and that “the novels of Orzeszkowa, Świętochowski and, above all, Prus belong to the best achievements of the European realist novel. Prus’s Lalka is actually said to go ‘beyond doctrines’ ” (Neubauer 2004: 49). Imperceptibly, then, the focus shifts from the literature of the region to the literature of Europe. No matter how much I am flattered by the high opinion of my native literature and the affirmation that it transcends the limits of “the region”, I must still contend that Świętochowski was never a great novelist (though a great journalist). The writer of the History could actually have brought in Sienkiewicz at this point. Perhaps it is the work’s regional perspective which has made him pour superlatives on a few average novels by Świętochowski, whose harsh criticism of Prus’s Lalka long since proved his incomprehension of the modern novel. Anyway, mistakes or misinterpretations are pretty frequent in this part of the History. In the very next sentence we are told that new genres “like Świętochowski’s chronicles” were invented by positivist writers, whereas in fact the inventor of those masterly chronicles (Kroniki) was Bolesław Prus. Then again, the “greatness of Polish realism” did not come out of nowhere, but drew on several centuries of national and European literary experience. To try and understand it without that background is very reductive. In the History the historical narrative is further obscured by being presented in reverse order. The historical “nodes” structuring the history of the literatures of “East-Central Europe” go from 1989 to 1776, which creates a strangely uprooted and mechanically restricted perspective. What the History claims as an important element in the modern manner of writing literary history (Neubauer 2004: 16–18) is really a way of wriggling out of the obligation to justify the presentation of the literatures of East-Central Europe as an “entity” about which one can generalize. As far as I know, there is no history about the literatures of Western Europe, and it is surely difficult to imagine anyone dreaming up such a project. Would the “history of the literary cultures of Western Europe” seem a natural construction to German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, English, Portuguese, or Italian literary scholars and readers? Two prima facie examples of such a history, Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), were in fact based on completely different premises. Had it not been for the comparatively limited geographical spread of the Polish language, Polish literature might easily have been included in both these seminal works; in Polish literature down the ages, the concept of mimesis and the functioning of ancient topoi are well represented. Or perhaps the real obstacle lay in Polish literature itself, in that it was not as well known as “major” European literatures.

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As a specialist in one of the “minor” literatures, I am also struck by the History’s paternalistic tone: Today, one of the important cultural and political questions of East-Central Europe is whether it can overcome its cultural provincialism, whether, after its various awakenings, it can regain in some new form the cultural and literary diversity it once possessed – a diversity of which its past culture still offers some evidence.  (Neubauer 2004: 3)

Instead of commenting in detail on this remark – which sounds like a modern example of the Western Enlightenment narrative of a backward Eastern Europe in constant need of improvement from the outside (Wolff 1994: 26–27) – I will quote the preface published in the first volume of the same History, written by Mario J. Valdés, general editor of the Literary History Project: We must not forget that this [East-Central Europe] is the literary culture of Mickiewicz, Kafka, Kundera, Lukacs, Wiesel, Ionesco, Miłosz, Mrożek, Szymborska, and Gombrowicz, to name but a few of the many world authors from East-Central Europe.  (Valdés 2004: xv)

Five of the ten authors mentioned here are Polish writers: Adam Mickiewicz, the only one from “the past”, Czesław Miłosz, Sławomir Mrożek, Wisława Szymborska, and Witold Gombrowicz all writing in Polish. This leaves me with not the slightest fear that I belong to a provincial literary culture which needs to regain some diversity. I do appreciate the idea of devoting literary-scholarly attention to the undervalued “East-Central European literatures.” I do appreciate the History’s many insightful essays on particular literatures or problems. Yet I still find its impressively comprehensive volumes unsatisfactory in their general overviews. Facts which do not fit the favoured pattern are too often distorted or simply omitted. With respect to some epochs and some genres, Polish literature is described, rightly or wrongly, as a “major” literature in the region. In other contexts, however, the chosen general perspective does not even make Polish literature “minor”, but simply lets it disappear. I have far more reservations about describing the literatures of East-Central Europe as a kind of entity than about describing Slavic literatures as an entity. After all, Slavic literatures had common linguistic roots, sometimes shared important ideas such as Romantic “Pan-Slavism”, and experienced periods of close cultural relationship. Even if there are huge historical differences between Polish and Bulgarian literature, or between Czech and Russian literature, in some periods the relationships between them were very close indeed, which was never true of relationships between Albanian and Polish literature or Czech and Estonian literature, all of which find a place, somewhat artificially, under the umbrella of the “East-Central European literatures.”



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European literatures Why not drop groupings such as “Slavic literatures” or “East-Central European literatures” altogether and simply talk about these literatures as European literatures? The strongest advocate for understanding Polish literature against a European background is Andrzej Borowski, a modern Polonist and comparatist from Jagiellonian University. He points to the long tradition of European literature sharing the same Graeco-Latin and Biblical roots, displaying much the same set of genres and motifs, using a common literary language (Latin) for a considerable period of time, and exhibiting many cross-cultural contacts over the ages. His conclusion is that all these literatures should not be separated into two artificially created literary areas, but should be compared one with another (Borowski 1999: 7–22). Certainly, Polish romantics cannot be understood without their background in classical literature, or without reference to Lithuanian or Ukrainian folk tradition on the one hand, and to French and English literature on the other. An outstanding example of this is Juliusz Słowacki, one of Poland’s most imaginative poets and playwrights, who, partly owing to his sophisticated and deeply metaphorical use of Polish, still unfortunately remains just a “Polish” author, as Georg Brandes put it more than a century ago in his famous essay Weltliteratur ([2009 [1899]: 63). Perhaps it is time to overcome such obstacles which, it seems to me, are hardly caused by translation problems alone – after all, even James Joyce’s works were translated into Polish – several times! Nor do I believe that modern Polish writers should be seen as standing primarily in the East-Central European tradition and be pressured to live up to some ideal of a once lost diversity. I am not nostalgically waiting for them to regain “in some new form the cultural and literary diversity it [East-Central Europe] once possessed” (Neubauer 2004: 3). My hope would be that they can join the world literary community on equal terms, neither handicapped nor privileged. Even if Polish literature were to be elevated to the status of a “major” literature both in the Slavic and the East-Central European context – in the latter case becoming artificially and counterproductively free of its “major” Slavic “rival”, Russian literature – I do not think that the future lies in dividing Europe into smaller literary areas, especially when such division is undertaken for mainly political reasons. There used to be a scarcity of information about the literatures of Eastern Europe (and perhaps there still is), but things have certainly changed since the fall of communism in 1989. It would be sad and ironic if the division into Western and Eastern (Central) Europe were re-established, even if it were to occur in a very attractive, almost mythically alluring form, as in a charming essay by Caryl Emerson entitled “Answering for Central and Eastern Europe” and published, ironically enough, at a time when perhaps only one Eastern European culture, the Byelorussian, could not freely speak for itself, a fact which tells us a

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lot about the real presence of “minor” East-Central European literatures in the world debates on literature. Emerson paints the picture of a “patchwork of small nations”. This makes me wonder why Poland, with a population of nearly forty million, belongs in that group. And there are more such questions, as I can signal in square brackets: All those small peoples who name their streets and public squares, not after generals [?] (for their military victories are few), but after poets …. Central and East Europeans go on growing up with three or four [languages] [?] …. And thus the fertile meta-capacities of the Central European mind: cosmopolitan [?], restless, homeless, a natural translator and hub …. They’ve had a good look at our Western victories as well as at our patterns of protest and are indifferently impressed [?]. We could begin learning from them. (Emerson 2006: 203–210)

No matter how alluring and flattering the picture may be – even a bit mystical, with its evocation of some hidden “potentiality” in East Central Europe (Emerson 2006: 209–210) – it is not likely to improve the handicapped position of these literatures. Perhaps we (and I use the pronoun “we” with the “taste of special irony” Emerson ascribes to Central and East Europeans) are more like the students whom Emerson describes, expecting that “history or hearsay should be made real”. “We” – I dare to paraphrase Emerson – do “have to be made real.” But that is not going to happen through transforming the area once “frozen into the fake homogeneity of the Warsaw Pact” (Emerson 2006: 204) into the beautifully frozen heterogeneity of Central and East Europe, a region expected to deliver wonders such as a mythical redemption of the past. It will happen when “we” start to be perceived as old, yet perhaps hitherto oddly absent citizens of the literary republic of Europe. I do not wish to absolutize European Literature as an unproblematic literary entity. But I do believe that it is a distinctive entity characteristically connected with other literatures of the world, with its Far Eastern and African roots on the one hand, and transatlantic developments on the other, and perhaps with the threat of that grey global future foreseen by Auerbach “as early as” 1952 in his perceptive essay Philologie der Weltliteratur. My deepest conviction is that the more we come to know about “minor” European literatures, the more we can say about “major” ones. The more writings in which a means of communication, language, has been wonderfully transformed into a means of art, literature, which we can retrieve, interpret, translate and share, the more European and human we become. By which I do not mean, needless to say, that only Europeans can be truly human. My point, my entire problematization of the categories “major” and “minor”, has really had to do with the human as a ubiquitous potential.



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References Auerbach, Edward. [1952] 1969. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Edward and Marie Said (trans.). The Centennial Review 13: 1–17. Borowski, Andrzej. 1999. Powrót Europy [Return of Europe]. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka. Wydawnictwo naukowe. Brandes, Georg. 2009 [1899]. “Weltliteratur.” Haun Saussy (trans.). In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature. From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, ed. by David Damrosch, Natalie Melas and Mbongiseni Buthelezi. Princeton and Oxford: ­Princeton University Press. Čiževskij, Dmitrij. 1971. Comparative History of Slavic Literatures. Richard N. Porter (trans.). Martin P. Rice (ed.). Baltimore: Vanderbilt University Press. Emerson, Caryl. 2006. “Answering for Central and Eastern Europe.” In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. by Haun Saussy, 203–211. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Henderson, Lesley (ed.). 1995. Reference Guide to World Literature. vols. 2. Detroit: St. James Press. Jackson, William T. H. (ed.). 1983. European Writers. vols. 14. New York: Scribner. Janaszek-Ivaničková, Halina (ed.). 2007. The Horizons of Contemporary Slavic Comparative Literature. Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy “Elipsa”. Magill, Frank Northen (ed.). 1997. Cyclopedia of World Authors. vol. 5. Pasadena: Salem Press. Neubauer, John. 2004. “General Introduction.” In History of the Literary Cultures of East CentralEurope: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. by Marcel CornisPope and John Neubauer, vol. 3, 1–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/chlel.xix.05cor Pynsent, Robert B., and S. I. Kanikova (eds). 1993. Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature. New York: HarperCollins. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Valdés, Mario J. 2004. “Preface by the General Editor of the Literary History Project.” In History of the Literary Cultures of East Central-Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 1, xiii–xvi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/chlel.xix.05cor

chapter 15

“The world at large … is only an expanded homeland” From Goethe’s idea of world literature to contemporary migration literature Leena Eilittä Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas about literature’s potential mobility and interculturality, so central to his concept of Weltliteratur, can be traced in his journals, letters and essays, particularly, but not only, in those written towards the close of his literary career. As early as 1801, he suggested in his journal Propyläen that people should distance themselves from a nationalistic notion of culture and accept the fact that the arts and sciences do not have national borders: It is to be hoped that people will soon be convinced that there is no such thing as patriotic art or patriotic science. Both belong, like all good things, to the whole world, and can be fostered only by untrammeled intercourse among all contemporaries, continually bearing in mind what we have inherited from the past.  (In Strich 1949: 35)1

Goethe wrote these words only a fairly short time after the early German Romantics had launched their literary programmes. The Romantics, too, gave voice to universal ideals, as for instance in their notion of Universalpoesie. But Goethe was implicitly criticizing sides of Romanticism which certainly did emphasize national values, as in Herder’s notion of the Folk, and in the Romantics’ general fascination for non-Classical, Germanic myths. Goethe’s brief statement here reflects a concern about such developments which was only strengthened when the Romantic movement subsequently moved from Jena to Heidelberg. His worries about the state of German literature as expressed in his Essays on Art and Literature were a good deal more explicit:

1. Except where otherwise indicated, as in this case, by the list of references, all translations into English are my own. doi 10.1075/fillm.1.15eil © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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German literature, as can be seen from our dailies and the two latest literary magazines, offers only exclamations, sighs and interjections produced by wellmeaning individuals. Views are expressed according to temperament and education. There is hardly any concern for more universal or loftier matters.  (Goethe 1986: 226)

Although Goethe himself had contributed to the emergence of both Romanticism and the earliest German “national” literature, what he had to say about World Literature shows that he subsequently came to hope that literature would take a completely different turn from the nationalistic project dreamed up by the Romantics. His remarks on Weltliteratur are too scanty and fragmentary to form a consistent theory, yet are crucial to any understanding, not only of his reservations about the literature of his own time, but also, and even more interestingly, of his visionary ideas about literature’s development in the future. In my closing paragraphs here, I shall be suggesting that, in the globalized world of today, those ideas have actually become reality, not least in contemporary migration literature. Goethe contextualized his idea of World Literature in the modernization so rapidly under way within the surrounding society. As suggested by a remark of 1828 in his journal Kunst und Altertum, a main precondition for the emergence of World Literature was improvements in communications: My confident statement that in these truly stirring times, and with the consequent greater ease of communication, there is hope of a world literature in the immediate future, has met with the approval of our western neighbours, who to be sure could do great things in this matter.  (In Strich 1949: 350)

In an essay of 1829 he repeats the idea: the new communication networks were catalytic for World Literature by providing connections between places and individuals. This development he now saw as changing the notion of the homeland from a particular country to the entire world: “The world at large, no matter how vast it may be, is only an expanded homeland and will actually yield in interest no more than our native land” (Goethe 1986: 227). In another remark of 1828, he also drew attention to the expansion of publishing, the channel by which World Literature was to be mediated and diffused. Especially notable were new cultural periodicals such as, in Scotland and England, the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. Publishing ventures like these would contribute to better understanding between people of different nations and cultures, and without forcing them all into just a single mould: These journals, as they gradually reach a wider public, will contribute most effectively to the universal world literature we hope for; we repeat however that there can be no question of the nations thinking alike; the aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, understand each other, and, even where they may not be able to love, may at least tolerate one another. (In Strich 1949: 350)



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It was mainly through literary translation, however, that the universal qualities enshrined in World Literature would come into their own. Goethe reflected on the role of translators both for the literature of their own nation and for the foreign literature from which they were translating. In his view, translators did not just adapt a foreign literary work to the target language, but made a positive contribution in their own right to the literature of that language. It was with this in mind that he discussed the translations of his own works into other European languages. In a letter of January 1st, 1828, for instance, he solicited the views of Thomas Carlyle – himself the author of a Life of Schiller (1825), and of several other works promoting a better understanding of Germany in English-speaking countries – on Charles De Voeux’ English translation of his own Torquato Tasso: I should like to have your opinion on how far this Tasso can be considered English. You will greatly oblige me by informing me on this point; for it is just this connection between the original and the translation that expresses most clearly the relationship of nation to nation and that one must above all know (understand) if one wishes to encourage a common world literature transcending national limits.  (In Strich 1949: 349–50)

As for translators’ positive influence on the literature from which they were translating, this point he developed in a slightly later letter to Carlyle, written on June 15th. When admiration for a well-known work had become too routine, a good translation could reinvigorate responses to it even in its own “native land”: Here we note something new, perhaps scarcely felt, and never expressed before: that the translator is working not for his own nation alone but also for the nation from whose language he takes the work. (In Strich 1949: 22)

Goethe’s strong emphasis on the new perspective that a foreign translator, writer or critic could offer readers was inspired precisely by Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, a text which had clearly helped him see his fellow-countryman in a new light: Carlyle has written a life of Schiller, and judged him as it would be difficult for a German to judge him. On the other hand, we are clearer about Shakespeare and Byron, and can appreciate their merits better than the English themselves.  (Goethe 1986: 227)

It was in terms of their capacity to receive cultural influences from other nations that Goethe in several places drew comparisons between France, England and Germany. In general he thought that cultural exchange and critical discussion between these three countries had recently expanded, and on July 15th, 1827 he commented that “[i]t is pleasant to see that intercourse is now so close between the French, English, and the Germans, that we shall be able to correct one another” (Goethe 1986: 227). Especially when foreign critics and writers touched on a country’s internal problems, this in itself could speed the emergence of World

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Literature. As Goethe said in the letter to his friend Sulpiz Boisserée on October 12th, 1827, “what I call world literature develops in the first place when the differences that prevail within one nation are resolved through the understanding and judgment of the rest” (quoted in Strich 1949: 349). And the most advanced country when it came to absorbing beneficial foreign influences was in Goethe’s view France. In a letter to K. F. von Reinhard, a loyal supporter of France, he complimented France on the particular role it had played in the move towards a more universal literature: The various branches of world literature react sharply and strangely on one another; if I am not mistaken, taking a broad and general view, the French gain most by it; they have, too, a kind of premonition that their literature will have, in the highest sense, the same influence on Europe that it gained in the first half of the eighteenth century. (In Strich 1949: 350–51)

His view that the French are better than other nations at snapping up foreign ideas and incorporating them into their own thought-world was repeated in a letter to Boisserée on April 24th, 1831. Reflecting on French translations of his own and other German texts, he suggested that the French quickness of assimilation was one of “the immediate consequences of a general world literature; the nations will be quicker in benefiting by each other’s advantages” (quoted in Strich 1949: 351). As for the role of German literature in spreading influences and expanding world literature, comparisons with France and England were not flattering. Commenting in mid-July, 1827 on Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, Goethe claimed that Germans were hitherto “weakest in the aesthetic department, and may wait long before we meet such a man as Carlyle” (Goethe 1986: 227). At some time in the future, however, he thought that Germans might well have a good deal more to contribute, and said as much in a letter to his friend A. F. C. Streckfuss on January, 1827: I am convinced that a world literature is in process of formation, that the nations are in favor of it and for this reason make friendly overtures. The German can and should be most active in this respect; he has a fine part to play in this great mutual approach. (In Strich 1949: 349)

Elsewhere, in drawing attention to two French reviews of Alexander Duval’s play Le Tasse: Drame historique en cinq actes, which was an adaptation of his own play Torquato Tasso, Goethe again stressed Germany’s future role. German literature, being until then less well known in Europe than the literatures of France and England, could draw much benefit from the praise and criticism now increasingly offered from many different quarters: “All nations are paying attention to us; they praise and criticize, accept and reject, imitate and distort, understand or misunderstand us and open or close their hearts to our concerns” (Goethe 1986: 225). In 1828 Goethe argued that the impact of such foreign commentary on stagnant



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national literatures could indeed be very considerable. In his journal Kunst und Altertum he said it provided national literatures with a mirror in which to see themselves more clearly, and was also comparable to the feedback a young person receives from a tutor: Left to itself every literature will exhaust its vitality, if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one. What naturalist does not take pleasure in the wonderful things that he sees produced by reflection in a mirror? Now what a mirror in the field of ideas and morals means, everyone has experienced in himself, and once his attention is aroused, he will understand how much of his education he owes to it. (In Damrosch 2003: 7)

Now Goethe’s emphasis on the importance to human individuals, nations and, most of all, national literatures of a foreign perspective is still valid today. But whereas Goethe’s reflections mainly centered on western models, we have long been aware of far wider implications. As David Damrosch (2003: 4) has pointed out, since the time of Goethe “the dramatic acceleration of globalization … has greatly complicated the idea of a World Literature”. In closing, therefore, I should like to apply Goethe’s positive thinking about cultural exchange and foreign perspectives to a few works by contemporary migrant writers in Switzerland. Throughout the ages, Switzerland has been a country for exiles, utopians and travellers from abroad, who have often written about their experiences in that country. A present-day example is Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin (born in 1961), whose own background is in Russia. Apart from several novels, he has written literary travel books such as Die russische Schweiz – ein literarisch-historischer Reiseführer (The Russian Switzerland – A Literary Historical Travel Guide), first published in 2001, in which he depicts the travels of several Russian writers, composers, royals and revolutionaries in the Switzerland of the past. Drawing upon letters and journals, Shishkin brings to life Swiss cities and landscapes as the setting in which these historical travellers had some significant experiences: In August 1789 a talented young Russian writer in the diligence coming from Strasbourg approaches the city of Basel. “And so I am already in Switzerland?” Nikolaj Karamsin cries … “… It appears that the air here has something animating. It is lighter and easier for me to breathe. My step becomes stronger, my head rises higher, and I am proud to think that I am a human being.”  (Shishkin 2003 [2001]: 152)2 2. “Im August 1789 nähert sich in einer Diligence, von Strassburg kommend, ein junger, begabter russischer Schriftsteller der Stadt Basel. “Und so bin ich denn schon in der Schweiz?”, ruft Nikolaj Karamsin … ‘… Es scheint, als hätte die hiesige Luft etwas Belebendes. Ich hole leichter und freier Atem. Ich trete fester auf, mein Kopf erhebt sich mehr, und mit Stolz denke ich daran, dass ich ein Mensch bin.’ ”

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This is clearly a very positive experience. But then, in Shishkin’s next travel book, Montreaux–Missolunghi–Astapovo: Auf den Spuren von Byron und Tolstoj (Montreaux–Missolunghi–Astapovo: In the Steps of Byron and Tolstoj), published in 2002, the history of earlier travellers to Switzerland clashes with a contemporary Swiss reality that is rather more dystopian. While describing Byron’s and Tolstoj’s historical hiking-tours from Lake Geneva to the mountains of Bern, Shishkin also depicts his own tour of the same surroundings. The narratives relating to Byron and Tolstoj, two exiles for whom Switzerland offered, nearly two hundred years ago, such a welcome relief from difficult personal and political circumstances, contribute to a very positive image of Switzerland in its relations with the foreign. That image is problematized, however, by Shishkin’s own, more recent recollections of the same country. His book alternates between the utopian narratives about Switzerland as a country where exiles used to find refuge and the present state of the country, which for foreign individuals needing help and support today is much more disappointing. By introducing both historical and present-day perspectives on exile and migration, Shishkin goes beyond the merely historical, bringing up the subjective experiences of contemporary migrants as an indication of a dramatic change which has taken place, involving, for one thing, a much more technocratic way of handling problems related to migration. His narrative captures the anguish of the many migrants now living in a no-man’s land between their new homeland and their culture of origin. Catalin Dorian Florescu (born in 1967), in his novel Der kurze Weg nach Hause (The Short Way Home), published in 2002, depicts the paradoxical experiences of a Romanian protagonist in Switzerland. Although this young man confronts no apparent difficulties in his new home country, he has not really adjusted to life there. Swiss milieus and the Swiss way of life come across as very much in the wings. The main focus of attention is the inner life of a protagonist whose adaptation to new circumstances is much slower than his body’s. In dream-like scenes he moves between his present life in Zürich and memories of his childhood in Romania, a tension captured in an epiphanic moment as he contemplates Lake Zürich: From that time onwards I was daily reminded of something in the past. For that I only needed a blow of light wind, a particular light in the city, a special calmness on Sundays, and everything came back again. While watching the fog on Lake Zürich, I saw Timișoara. (Florescu 2002: 48)3

3. “Seitdem fiel mir täglich etwas von früher ein. Es brauchte nur eine leichte Brise, ein besonderes Licht in der Stadt, eine besondere Ruhe an Sonntagen, dann war alles wieder da. Während ich am Zürichsee in den Nebel hineinschaute, sah ich Timisoara.”



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Haunted by such visions, he sets out to find the idealized spaces of his childhood, yet ends up feeling even more distant from his country of birth. Not unlike Shishkin’s second travel book, then, Florescu’s novel shows how migrants’ mental life can occupy a no-man’s land between their background culture and a new milieu which only gradually comes to seem like a home. Similarly, despite having lived for several years in Switzerland, Radka Donnell’s (1928–2013) protagonist in Die letzte Héloïse (The Last Héloïse), published in 2000, has not adjusted to life there. As in Florescu’s novel, in which the unfamiliar becomes familiar in a brief and unexpected moment of epiphany, so in Donnell’s recollections the alien Swiss scenes sometimes take on a greater familiarity which makes her more self-confident: It was as if she had seen for some time the eyes of her mother, for a short moment or for a long time, and all questions around her were then stilled. She herself was not alienated and in spite of everything saw everything with her own eyes.  (Donell 2000: 25)4

It is this kind of psychic tension which in the end compells her to leave for a trip to Scandinavia. In the natural beauty and stillness of a milieu which is unrelated to both her original background and her present life in Switzerland, she experiences a moment of clarification. Such heartening episodes nourish her psychic re-integration, in a narrative which otherwise depicts the difficulties of her life as a migrant. By elaborating some of the opposed, if not mutually incomprehensible, perspectives which can affect an individual’s experience in a rapidly changing social world, Shishkin, Florescu and Donnell are all contributing to the World Literature of our own time. That elaboration complements readers’ ordinary everyday perceptions and assumptions with social, psychological and literary perspectives which are less familiar, an interaction of the non-foreign and the foreign which might have interested Goethe, even if the price paid by today’s migrant writers for their place in World Literature can be truly disturbing in terms of mental dislocation. The works of my three chosen authors certainly offer no houseroom to the blander kinds of utopianism. But at least the communication likely to take place between them and their readers will be more rewarding than the communication described in the narratives themselves. As Roger D. Sell has noted, literary works, from the most tragic to the most comic, have always been “about communicational dysfunction”, but literature itself has been “communicationally 4. “Es war, als ermesslich lange hätte sie dabei die Augen ihrer Mutter gesehen für einen kurzen Augenblick oder für eine lange Zeit, und es verstummten um sie dann alle Fragen. Sie selber fremdete nicht und sah trotzdem alles mit eigenen Augen.”

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ameliorative within society as a whole” (Sell 2011: 369). It was ultimately this same insight which inspired Goethe to conceive of a maximally communicational World Literature, a project which, in a global society where his more Eurocentric premises have fallen out of favour, now seems more viable.

References Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Donnell, Radka. 2000. Die letzte Héloise. Zürich: Schmid. Florescu, Catalin Dorian. 2002. Der kurze Weg nach Hause. Zürich: Limmat. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1986. Essays on Art and Literature. Ellen von Nardroff (trans.). John Gearey (ed.). Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 3. New York: Suhrkamp. Sell, Roger D. 2011. Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/ds.11 Shishkin, Mikhail Pavlovich. 2002. Montreaux–Missolunghi–Astapovo: Auf den Spuren von Byron und Tolstoj: Eine literarische Wanderung vom Genfersee ins Berner Oberland. Zürich: Limmat. Shishkin, Mikhail Pavlovich. 2003 [2001]. Die russische Schweiz: Ein literarisch-historischer Reiseführer. Franziska Stöcklin (trans.). Zürich: Limmat. Strich, Fritz. 1949. Goethe and World Literature. C. A. M. Sym (trans.). London: Routledge.

chapter 16

Who is the Other? Goethe’s encounter with “China” in his concept of Weltliteratur Yi Chen In his influential book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said defined “Orientalism” as an attitude of superiority and hegemony on the part of the West vis à vis the East, an attitude derived from, and justified by, the historical process of colonization. Said demonstrated such Orientalism through a critical analysis of the writings of mainly British and French authors, but also applied the label to Goethe (Said 1978: 19), claiming that Goethe, even though belonging to a different historical context, nevertheless represented a specifically “German” version of Orientalism: “a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture,” which was the common denominator with both Anglo-French and, later, American Orientalism. Applied to Goethe, the father of the concept of Weltliteratur, this criticism – if valid – has significant consequences, and has provoked a correspondingly vigorous response. Most scholars have argued that Goethe engaged in conversations with “the Orient” throughout his lifetime, and achieved an imagined unification between the East and the West. This, it has been claimed, was based upon his own personal fascination for, and identification with, the East, particularly as reflected in his lyric poems in West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan). In the case of Goethe, the sense of superiority and distance to the Other so central to Orientalism as described by Said is, on such a view, simply not a factor (Bahr 1982; Birus 1991; Veit 2002; Einboden 2005). This, though, may not be the whole story. For one thing, at the time of Goethe’s composition of West-östlicher Divan the concept of the East comprised “Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew” but did not “extend to the Far East” (Mommsen 1998: viii). What, then, we may ask, was Goethe’s attitude towards the cultures of East Asia? For another thing, if, in West-östlicher Divan, Goethe pursued his identification with “the Orient” by accepting “the Other” as “an equal”, did this attitude alone suffice to avoid “Orientalism”? Or was his apparent egalitarianism

doi 10.1075/fillm.1.16che © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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here actually based on a misunderstanding that appreciated the Other’s texts only as long as they seemed to converge with his own cultural beliefs? Any attempt to answer these questions today inevitably highlights the difficulties to be encountered in transporting texts from one language and its culture to another. But the questions are also relevant to our understanding of Goethe’s own thought processes in January 1827, when he first developed the idea of Weltliteratur, and when he also read a translation of Chinese poetry which spurred him to write, only four months later, the most important lyric cycle of his later years: Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (Chinese-German Book of Seasons and Hours). It is only in recent times that scholars have made this connection, but there is already widespread agreement that in his conceptualization of Weltliteratur Chinese influences were of crucial importance (Mommsen 1985: 19–20; Damrosch 2003: 7–10). What needs to be demonstrated, however, is that Goethe’s true attitude towards the East (the Other), and the core of what he originally meant by Weltliteratur, can still not become fully clear without a closer reading of his reception and adaptation of Chinese poetry than has so far been attempted.1 Goethe’s first public use of his new term Weltliteratur2 was in an essay of 1827 for the journal Über Kunst und Altertum,3 where he dealt with the reception of some of his own earlier works in France, and made a clear connection between Weltliteratur and his own patriotic pride: “there is being formed a universal world literature, in which an honourable role is reserved for us Germans” (Goethe 1921: 89).4 At the time when he wrote this, however, his main literary concern was not really with cultural rivalries between Germany and France. His diary entries from January 31 to February 11, 1827 show that he had been reading the novel Chinese Courtship, translated by Peter Perring Thoms, an employee of the East India Company, and published in London and Macao in 1824. This curious 1. The earliest Chinese scholar who offers a close reading of Goethe’s reception of Chinese poems is Chén Quán 陳銓, in his 1936 book An Inquiry in Chinese-German Literature (中德文 學研究). 2. On January 15th, 1827, Goethe first introduced the term Weltliteratur in his Tagebuch (Diary): “An Schuchardt diktiert, bezüglich auf französische und Weltliteratur…” (Goethe 1900: 8, also quoted in Shimizu 1989: 12). (“dictate to Schuchardt, relating to French and world literature…”). Except in cases indicated by the list of references, all translations into English are my own. I am indebted to Dr. Boris Steipe for his insightful editing of the poetic translation and helpful consultation on the subtleties of the German texts. 3. On Art and Antiquity. 4. For an important distinction between Weltpoesie (world poetry) and Weltliteratur (world literature), see Strich 1949: 14–16 and Shimizu 1989: 11.



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v­ olume contained: a lengthy and rather disparaging introduction to Chinese poetics;5 the verse translation of Chinese Courtship (Huā Jiān Jì, 花箋記); a section entitled “Biography”, comprising translated excerpts from One Hundred Beauties: New Poems, Images, and Biographies6 (Bǎi Měi Xīn Yǒng Tú Zhuàn, 百美新詠圖 傳);7 and an extensive appendix containing detailed accounts of imperial revenues and of the administrative structure of China’s provinces. Notwithstanding Thoms’s unflattering introduction, Goethe was clearly intrigued by the One Hundred Beauties and subsequently wrote his own German-language translations-cumcompositions based on four of the Chinese poems as translated into English by Thoms. These were then published in the same issue of Über Kunst und Altertum as his thoughts on Weltliteratur. This juxtaposition, and the possibility to compare Goethe’s “Chinese” poems with the original One Hundred Beauties and Thoms’s English translations, provide a perspective within which the relationship between Goethe’s work and western “Orientalism” can be re-examined. Goethe began his selection Chinesisches (Chinese [Poetry]) with a poem about Lady Xuē Yáo Yīng (薛瑤英),8 who was praised in the One Hundred Beauties for her lightness of body and for the flowing, silken clothing made specially for her. Historically, she was one of the wives of Yuán Zǎi (元載), a chancellor (zǎixiàng, 宰相) at the court of Emperor Dài during the Táng Dynasty (Táng Dài Zōng, 唐 代宗, 727–779). Yuán Zǎi’s friends Jiǎ Zhì (賈至) and Yáng Yán (楊炎)9 dedicated poems to her after they had witnessed some of her dancing performances. Jiǎ Zhì wrote (Yán 1787: vol. 4, 57):

5. Take for example, “…for the Chinese not having been favoured with that mine of rich and sublime ideas, (the Sacred Scriptures) or but partially, which other nations have, must generally speaking, be deficient in invention, variety of imagery, sublimity of thought, as well as of boldness of metaphor” (Thoms 1824: v). 6. Abbreviated to One Hundred Beauties in the following. 7. It was written and edited by the Qīng (清) dynasty literati Yán Xī Yuán (顏希源) and Yuán Méi (袁枚; Yuán Jiǎn Zhāi 袁簡齋), respectively, in 1787, with woodcuts based on the courtly paintings of Wáng Huì (王翽). Several, slightly different versions of the work exist (Zhào 2010); the copy preserved at the Cheng Yu Tung East Asia Library (鄭裕彤東亞圖書館) of the University of Toronto is the earliest version and is thus referred to as Yán 1787 in the following. 8. According to standard Mandarin, the name is transcribed as “Xuē Yáo Yīng.” In both Thoms’s and Goethe’s texts her name is transcribed as “See-Yaou-Hing,” according to the pronunciation system adopted by the Western world at that time. 9. Thoms did not translate Yáng Yán’s poem in the One Hundred Beauties, which is also about lady Xuē Yáo Yīng, so Goethe had no knowledge of it and could not understand the custom among Chinese literati of exchanging poems in mutual appreciation.

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舞怯銖衣重 笑疑桃臉開 方知漢武帝 虛築避風台

She dances, I fear her lightest robe too weighty, she smiles, I see a peach blossom’s face. Now I understand Emperor Hàn Wǔ’s windscreen was deemed insufficient for her.

Thoms (1824: 263) translated the poem into English as follows: When dancing you appear unable to sustain your garments studded with gems, Your countenance resembles the flower of new-blown peach. We are now certain, that the Emperor Woo of the Han dynasty, Erected a screen lest the wind should waft away the fair Fe-lin.

Goethe’s (1827: 159–160) “translation” reads: Du tanzest leicht bey Pfirsich-Flor Am luftigen Frühlings-Ort: Der Wind, stellt man den Schirm nicht vor, Bläst euch zusammen fort. Auf Wasserlilien hüpftest du Wohl hin den bunten Teich, Dein winziger Fuss, dein zarter Schuh Sind selbst der Lilie gleich. Die andern binden Fuss für Fuss, Und wenn sie ruhig stehn Gelingt wohl noch ein holder Gruss, Doch können sie nicht gehn.10

Although Thoms’s English translation is much more “literal” than Goethe’s German version, it fails to capture some of the ancient Chinese original’s most important and traditional poetic devices. The verbs “to dance” (舞) and “to fear” (怯), for example, though brought together in the first verse line, in fact have two different grammatical subjects, and the same holds for “to smile” (笑) and “to doubt / to sense” 10. You dance lightly by peach blossoms at the airy place of spring: If one does not place a screen, the wind blows you away, together with them.

You hop on water lilies well to the colourful pond, Your tiny foot, your delicate shoe are themselves like the lily.



The others bind foot by foot, and when they stand still, at most they achieve a graceful salute, but they cannot walk.



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(疑) in the second line. This striking grammatical pattern involving two subjects in the same sentence is typical of the extreme terseness of classical Chinese, which always calls for a very active attempt to understand meanings in their particular contexts. Thoms’s translation also ignores the important adverb “in vain” (虛) in the fourth line, and therefore misinterprets the meaning of the final verses. Here Jiǎ Zhì wrote: “Now I understand that Emperor Hàn Wǔ’s / windscreen was deemed insufficient for her” (方知漢武帝/虛築避風台), which alludes to Zhào Fēi Yàn (趙飛燕), the famous queen of Emperor Chéng of the Hàn Dynasty (Hàn Chéng Dì, 漢成帝, 51 BCE–7 CE), whose body was so light that the Emperor erected a structure to protect her from being blown away by the wind. But even this kind of special measure would be “in vain,” since Xuē Yáo Yīng’s body is even lighter, and her dancing skill surpasses even that of Zhào Fēi Yàn. Thoms’s translation actually compounds the mistake here by misspelling the name of the queen.11 More generally, Thoms failed to appreciate the poem’s genre, not realizing that the Chinese original was a very typical example of the kind of entertainment practised and enjoyed among the literati of the ancient empire. To express courtesy and friendship towards each other by singing the praises of a friend’s wife was a standard and much valued gesture, involving an “impersonal” aesthetic quality that was simply not familiar in the West of Thoms’s time. Instead, he turned the poem into a declaration by an admirer who was more romantically minded.12 Goethe uses the poem’s characteristic elements merely as a topos, which he freely rearranges into his own composition. We do find the peach blossoms, and the wind that might carry the dancer away. But the second half of Thoms’s version, mistranslated and offering no clear interpretation, could have made no more sense to Goethe than it does to us today, so giving him an opportunity to write about another topic he had been interested to read about: the custom of foot-binding, considered in imperial China as an element of the ideal of feminine beauty. Commenting on this unique “Chinese” custom, Goethe reinforced his emphasis on “natural” beauty, expressing an aesthetic value about which he felt strongly. In part, Goethe’s treatment of this topic originates from a footnote by Thoms at another point in his book of 1824. Thoms explained the origin of the metaphor “golden lilies” (jīn lián, 金蓮) in Chinese Courtship as a symbol of small feet, and especially in the expression “Her golden lilies do not measure three inches” (Thoms 1824: 29–30):

11. An additional inaccuracy, mistaking the famous Emperor Wǔ (Thomas spells it “Woo”) of Hàn Dynasty (Hàn Wǔ Dì, 漢武帝, 156–87 BCE) for Emperor Chéng of Hàn Dynasty, in fact is not Thoms’s fault, as the Chinese original contains the same mistake (Yán 1787: vol. 4, 57). 12. In terms of the shift of the subjects in the Chinese original, the historical allusions, and the customs among ancient Chinese literati represented in this poem, see also Lín Jiā (2000).

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The golden lilies has reference to lady Pwan, who was concubine to prince Tunghwan [sic], who lived about A.D. 900 [sic]. She was considered an excellent dancer. The Prince, it is said, had the flower of the water-lily made of gold, six cubits high, from which was suspended precious jewels. The wall and ceiling of the room was painted to resemble the clouds. He caused lady Pwan to bind her feet in the shape of a half moon, by means of tape, over which she wore a stocking, and requested her to dance on the top of the flower of the water-lily, which she did, and appeared as whirling in the clouds; the effect, it is said, was grand. From this, tis probable, originated the singular custom, with the women of China, of binding their feet, and causing them to be small; …. In poetry, their small feet (the smaller the more genteel) are generally styled the flower of the water lily.

Here Thoms’s commentary merges two legendary women into one image. The historical Lady “Pwan” (Pān, 潘) was a “Noble Consort” (Guì Fēi, 貴妃, i.e. the wife of highest rank below the queen) of Emperor Dōng Hūn of the Qí Dynasty (Qí Dōng Hūn Hóu, 齊東昏侯, 483–501), and her feet were naturally small, and not as a result of binding. The beauty of her small feet dancing on lilies of pure gold was so legendary that a later emperor, Lǐ Hòu Zhǔ of the Southern Táng Dynasty (李後主, 937–978) ordered one of his wives, Yǎo Niáng (窅娘), to bind her feet and to dance on golden water lilies. The custom of foot-binding was essentially derived from this imitation. Goethe’s “translation,” however, shows that he must have read independent sources about the foot-binding custom of imperial China.13 In his notes to this poem, Goethe (1827: 160) wrote: To write of her tiny, golden-shod feet: delicate feet were indeed called “golden lilies” by the poets, and this, her quality, is supposed to have made the other ladies of the harem constrict their feet in tight straps, in order to resemble her if not become alike. This custom, as they say, later spread to the entire nation.14

13. In fact, Goethe’s acquaintance with Chinese literature can be traced back to at least 1796. In his Tagebuch entry of January 12, 1796, Goethe wrote: “Mornings, novels. The Chinese novel became subject of conversation…” (früh Roman. kam der chinesische Roman zur Sprache… Goethe 1888: 38), which refers to his discussion of a Chinese novel with Schiller. According to Debon (1985: 55), this Chinese novel was A Life of Noble Pursuit (Hǎo Qíu Zhuàn, 好逑傳), the first Chinese novel translated into German in 1766 by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, and the only one available at that time. 14. “Von ihren kleinen goldbeschuhten Füßchen schreibt sich’s her, daß niedliche Füße von den Dichtern durchaus goldne Lilien genannt werden, auch soll dieser ihr Vorzug die übrigen Frauen des Harems veranlaßt haben, ihre Füße in enge Bande einzuschließen, um ihr ähnlich wo nicht gleich zu werden. Dieser Gebrauch, sagen sie, sey nachher auf die ganze Nation übergegangen.”



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By ignoring other details but emphasizing the lightness of the dancer and her naturally small feet, Goethe regards Xuē Yáo Yīng as an archetype of Chinese beauty. We note that only the natural state meets his ideal of an “aesthetic beauty,” and he in fact rejects the imitation of this “model”, humorously claiming that those who bound their feet could not even walk any more, much less dance as beautifully as Xuē Yáo Yīng. So the second part of Goethe’s “translation” is entirely his own composition. Inspired by another poem from the same collection, that of Pān Guì Feī (潘貴妃), and by the references to “golden lilies” in Chinese Courtship (Thoms 1824: 29, 84), Goethe takes the opportunity to express his own thoughts on one of the hallmarks of ancient Chinese culture and society. He particularly discussed such hallmarks with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) on January 31, 1827, when he referred to a number of Chinese legends, novels and customs. He commented: “But it is just through this severe moderation in all things that the Chinese Empire has preserved itself for thousands of years and through it will continue to endure” (Eckermann 1964: 93). In a similar manner, Goethe informed his readers in a preface to the four Chinese poems “that despite all constraints, in this particularly remarkable empire one may ever more live, love and compose poetry” (Goethe 1827: 159).15 In this sense, the refined artistic skill of Lady Xuē Yáo Yīng, who dances so gracefully and lightly on her small feet and balances so well upon golden lilies, is a metaphor for the Chinese character as Goethe comments on it. Even so, the question remains: Does Goethe’s admiration of the Chinese nation and culture have something to do with that quintessential aesthetic value which he also claims for true Weltliteratur? Does he regard the Chinese as an equal “Other”? As an approach to this issue, let us now turn to the last of the four poems Goethe “translated”,16 which was composed by a lady who served as an attendant in the court of Emperor Xuán of the Táng Dynasty (Táng Xuán Zōng, 唐玄宗, 685–762). Since her own name is now lost, she is customarily named by the Emperor’s epoch Kāi Yuán (開元)17 and referred to as “the Court Attendant of Kāi Yuán” (Kāi Yuán Gōng Rén, 開元宮人). The poem tells how, at that time, the Emperor ordered his court attendants to produce a large quantity of clothing for the soldiers who were fighting on the northern frontiers. One such soldier found a poem in the pocket of the coat given to him (Yán 1787: vol. 4, 91): 15. “daß es sich trotz aller Beschränkungen, in diesem sonderbar-merkwürdigen Reiche noch immer leben, lieben und dichten lasse”. 16. For detailed interpretations of all these four pomes, see Chén Quán 1997: 91–100, Weì Mào Píng 1996: 109–118, and Lín Jiā 2000. 17. In both Thoms’s and Goethe’s texts, it is spelled as “Kae-Yuen.”

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沙場征戍客，寒苦若為眠。 Guest of the battlefield, come to fight, you sleep in bitter cold. 戰袍經手作，知落阿誰邊？ This uniform passed through (my) hands that made it, how to know, whose side it could fall to? 蓄意多添線，含情更著綿。 To store my longing I multiply the stitches, to gather my passions, I fill it with ever more cotton. 今生已過也，願結後生緣。 This life has already passed, may fate join us in the next.

Thoms’s (1824: 270–271) English translation reads: While in the field of battle contending with the enemy, And unable to sleep from intense cold, I make you this garment, Though I know not who will wear it. Being anxious for your preservation, I add a few extra stitches, And quilt it with a double portion of wadding. Though in this life we are unable to dwell together, I desire we may be wedded in a future state. (Thoms 1824: 270–271)

Goethe’s German translation is: Aufruhr an der Gränze zu bestrafen Fechtest wacker, aber Nachts zu schlafen Hindert dich die strenge Kälte beissig. Dieses Kriegerkleid ich näht’es fleissig Wenn ich schon nicht weiss wer’s tragen sollte; Doppelt hab’ich es wattiert und sorglich wollte Meine Nadel auch die Stiche mehren, Zur Erhaltung eines Manns der Ehren. Werden hier uns nicht zusammen finden, Mög’ ein Zustand droben uns verbinden!18

18. To punish rebellion at the border You combat courageously, but to sleep at night the bite of the stern cold hinders you. This warrior’s garment, I sewed it diligently, despite not really knowing who would wear it; I have doubly quilted it and meticulously even my needle would multiply the stitches, to preserve a man of honour. [Though] we shall not meet in this place, may some state unite us in the beyond.

(Goethe 1827: 162–163)



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The poem goes on to tell that the soldier who found this poem presented it to his general, who then passed it on to the Emperor. The Emperor assembled his entire household and demanded to know who had written it. In the end, “the Court Attendant of Kāi Yuán” came forward: “I am the person you are looking for, and I deserve to be killed for this ten thousand times” (自言萬死). The emperor took pity on her, and married her to the soldier who had found her poem. The story concludes with the emperor’s humorous remark: “I wed you in this life” (我與汝 結今生緣) – i.e. not in the “afterlife.” It is significant that the Chinese cultural background already suggests a subtle but distinct criticism of imperial customs. The status of “court-attendant” (gōng rén, 宮人) was that of a woman officially betrothed to the emperor, but without actual physical relations with him. She was in fact confined to a golden cage, not allowed to marry any other man, and – like all the other women sharing this status – with no real hope of fulfilment in her marriage with the emperor. Such women spent their whole lives in idle waiting. And to express any discontent would have been to risk mortal danger, which is why “the Court Attendant of Kāi Yuán” was so afraid when her poem about her loneliness and yearning for a happier after-life was made known to the Emperor. What Thoms and Goethe clearly perceived as a patriotic attempt on the part of the woman to preserve the unknown soldier’s life and honour was in fact a very personal expression of despair. In the Chinese original, the Court Attendant’s inexpressible yearning for love is embodied in her handiwork  – in her extra stitches and the doubled portion of wadding: “To store my longing I multiply the stitches, to gather my passions, I fill it with ever more cotton” (蓄意多添線，含 情更著綿). But the subtle yet profound implications of “to store [my] longing” (蓄意) and “to gather [my] passions” (含情) are difficult to translate. Both expressions imply strong emotions embedded deeply in the heart; the existential longing of a woman in the imperial court contains a highly dramatic potential. Thoms translates these two phrases as “being anxious,” which does not really capture the true nature of the maiden’s desperation. Goethe, surprisingly, translated the passage as “und sorglich wollte / Meine Nadel auch die Stiche mehren” (“meticulously / even my needle would multiply the stitches”), which, in its detachment of action from actor, is paradoxically a good bit closer to the aesthetic quality and emotional desire of the Chinese original. But to repeat, Goethe, too, essentially endows the poem with the spirit of a national endeavour. “The Court Attendant of Kāi Yuán” becomes a loving woman who shares the same patriotic emotion as the soldiers who are fighting in the battlefield. Her love for the unknown recipient of her coat is inseparable from her love of honour, and Goethe’s readers are more likely to be touched by her passion for national and heroic glory than by her wish for personal fulfilment. At the end of the poem, Goethe does convey her hope for

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an encounter with the unknown soldier after rebirth, as implied by the Chinese original’s last line, “This life has already passed, may fate join us in the next” (今 生已過也，願結後生緣),19 and he actually glosses this with the religious theme of a unification in some sort of heaven or paradise beyond: “Werden hier uns nicht zusammen finden/ Mög’ ein Zustand droben uns verbinden!” (“Though we shall not meet in this place, may some state unite us in the beyond!”). But whereas both the Chinese original and Thoms’s English translation end with the emperor’s words, “I wed you in this life” (我與汝結今生緣),20 Goethe concludes his version with a little couplet in which the maiden replies to the Emperor: Der Kaiser schafft, bey ihm ist alles fertig, Zum Wohl der Seinen; Künftiges gegenwärtig.21

By inventing this new ending Goethe brings the Chinese original into line with his political ideal of benevolent dictatorship, based on mutual respect and peaceful harmony between the ruler and his subjects. My commentaries on Goethe’s treatment of two of the four ancient Chinese poems from One Hundred Beauties reveal his poetic devices of familiarization. By changing the addressers’ tones of voice, by leaving out exotic details, and by even adding a new ending, Goethe transports the ancient Chinese poetry into a modern German context. In these two cases, though not in West-östlicher Divan, he does not fully identify himself with the Chinese authors involved. On the contrary, his own personal style is quite unmistakeable. So the question really does arise here: By what right does Goethe see himself authorized to transform such remote materials? What is his justification for projecting his own aesthetic and political ideals? Under the date of 31st January, 1829, Eckermann reports in his Conversations with Goethe (Gespräche mit Goethe, 1836) some comments made by Goethe on a Chinese novel he found rather similar to his own Hermann and Dorothea. The main difference was that, for the Chinese writer, the surrounding natural world seems to be in greater harmony with human figures. Referring to the people and culture of the Far East, Goethe then remarks: “The people think, act, and feel almost exactly as we do … except that with them everything happens more cleanly, lucidly, and morally” (Eckermann 1964: 92). It is intriguing to think that the attitude he was expressing here could well have precipitated his concept of

19. Yuán (缘) is a Buddhist term which means an encounter destined by fate. 20. Thoms’s translation reads: “We notwithstanding have been wedded in this life” (Thoms 1824: 271). 21. The emperor creates, with him everything is accomplished, for the good of his [subjects], future [event] in the present.

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Weltliteratur, for he was indeed recognizing that other cultures most certainly could contribute to the global canon something which deserved not to be overlooked: “if we Germans do not look beyond the narrow circle of our own environment, we all too easily fall into this kind of pedantic arrogance” (Eckermann 1964: 94). But who, in the last analysis, decides what shall become canonical? Whose is the yardstick to be applied? Goethe had strong opinions about this, which he vented to Eckermann on that same day in early 1827: We must not think it is the Chinese, or the Serbs, or Calderón, or the Nibelungen. In our need for the exemplary, we rather must always return to the ancient Greeks, for in their works it is at all times man in his beauty that is depicted. Everything else we must regard merely from an historic point of view, and adopt as much of the good in it as we can. (Eckermann 1964: 94)

Goethe, despite his insightful and intuitive understanding of Chinese aesthetic qualities, in the end defines what constitutes the exemplary by appealing to “intellectual authority” in the way so characteristic of western Orientalism as criticized by Said. A comparative close reading of the Chinese originals, Thoms’s English translations, and Goethe’s own versions of the two poems from One Hundred Beauties finally goes to show that the imaginary geographical division between East and West within his concept of Weltliteratur is in fact pliable. So much so, that “China” can become placeholder for an “Other” who satisfies what Goethe sees as the very essence of Weltliteratur: the realization of the West’s own classic exemplariness. Said’s comments on a German Orientalism, then, were not so misplaced after all. For as long as an aesthetic exemplar is proclaimed as a universal principle, and as long as the “Other” is appropriated into that allegedly universal mould rather than being welcomed and accepted in its own right, even the bestintentioned intercultural discourse, such as Goethe’s rendering of ancient Chinese poetry, certainly does risk reinforcing the Orientalist perspective.

References Bahr, Ehrhard. 1982. “East is West and West is East: The Synthesis of Near-Eastern and Western Rhetoric and Imagination in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan.” In Aufnahme-Weitergabe: Literarische Impulse um Lessing und Goethe: Festschrift für Heinz Moenkemeyer zum 68. Geburtstag, ed. by John A. McCarthy and Albert A. Kipa, 144–152. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Birus, Hendrik. 1991. “Goethe’s ‘Orientalism.’” In The Force of Vision, vol. 2: Visions of the Other, ed. by Gerald Gillespie, Margaret Higonnet, and Sumie Jones, 572–582. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.

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Chén, Quán. 陳銓. 1997 [1936]. An Inquiry in Chinese-German Literature (中德文學研究). Shěn Yáng: Liáo Níng Educational Publishing House (沈陽：遼寧教育出版社). Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Debon, Günther. 1985. “Goethe erklärt in Heidelberg einen chinesischen Roman.” In Goethe und China – China und Goethe, ed. by Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia, 51–62. Bern: Peter Lang. Einboden, Jeffrey. 2005. “The Genesis of Weltliteratur: Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan and Kerygmatic Pluralism.” Literature and Theology 19: 238–250. DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fri029 Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1964. Conversations with Goethe. Gisela O’Brien (trans.). New York: Frederick Ungar. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1827. “Chinesisches.” Über Kunst und Altertum 6: 159–163. Goethe, Johann Wolfgan von. 1888. Goethe’s Werke. III Abtheilung: Tagebücher Bd. 2 1790–1800. in Weimarer Ausgabe. Weimar: Böhlaus. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1900. Goethe’s Werke. III Abtheilung: Tagebücher Bd. 11 1827– 1828. in Weimarer Ausgabe. Weimar: Böhlaus. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1921. Goethe’s Literary Essays, ed. by Joel E. Spingarn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Lín, Jiā. 林茄. 2000. “Goethe and One Hundred Beauties’ New Poems, Images, and Biographies: An Inquiry in Cross-cultural Interpretation.” “歌德與《百美新詠》–跨文化闡釋的一個 嘗試.” Dōng Fāng Cóng Kān (東方叢刊) 5 (1): 109–124. Mommsen, Katharina. 1985. “Goethe und China in ihren Wechselbeziehungen.” In Goethe und China – China und Goethe, ed. by Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia, 15–33. Bern: Peter Lang. Mommsen, Katharina. 1998. “Introduction.” In Poems of the West and East, West-östlicher Divan, ed. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Whaley (trans.). vii–xxx. Bern: Peter Lang. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Shimizu, Kenji. 1989. Goethes Begriff der Weltliteratur: Japanische Sprichwörter im Kontrast zu Deutschen. Bern: Peter Lang. Strich, Fritz. 1949. Goethe and World Literature. C. A. M. Sym (trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thoms, Peter Perring. 1824. Chinese Courtship: In Verse, to Which is Added an Appendix, Treating of the Revenue of China. London and Macao: Honorable East Indian Company. Weì, Mào Píng. 衛茂平. 1996. The History of Chinese Influence on German Literature (中國對 德國文學影響史述). Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Foreign Language Educational (上海：上海外 語教育出版社 ). Veit, Walter. 2002. “Goethe’s Fantasies about the Orient.” Eighteenth-Century Life 26: 164–180. DOI: 10.1215/00982601-26-3-164 Yán, Xī Yuán, and Yuán Jiǎn Zhāi. 嚴希源撰, 袁簡齋鑒定. 1787. One Hundred Beauties’ New Poems, Images, and Biographies. Jí Yè Xuān (location unknown)《百美新詠圖傳》集腋 軒藏版. Zhào, Hòu Jūn. 趙厚均. 2010. “A Discussion on the Printed Versions of One Hundred Beauties: New Poems, Images, and Biographies.” 《 “ 百美新詠圖傳》考論 ”. Xué Shù Jiè 《學術界》 145, no. 6: 102–109.

chapter 17

“Major” and “minor” literatures Indian cases Meenakshi Bharat Circumstances in multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic India result in a piquant confluence of many literatures, some regularly described as “major,” others as “minor.” In any scenario at all, the controversies inevitably arising from any application of the major-minor binarism demand a considered assessment. But in the peculiar environment of India, such disagreements are exceptionally volatile and problematic. Linguistic tension seems to have been written into the history of this federally divided nation. The Hindi-Urdu tussle for supremacy goes back to the early part of the nineteenth century, and the anti-Hindi protests, begun in 1937, continued up until the 1980s in the south. Even today, the calls for the Marathi Manus in Maharashtra seek to outlaw the migrants from outstate, and manifold linguistic tensions and conflicts continue to span the entire subcontinent: the Gokak agitation in Karnataka in the south; the call for a Punjabi suba in the north; the Konkani language and the Goa tensions in central India; and the script issues of Kokboruk in the east. It goes without saying that the ubiquitous linguistic battles spill over into the country’s many different literatures. In this situation, the terms “major” and “minor” can be applied in two rather different ways. First, one can take the terms in their basic lexical sense, as indicating greater and lesser, both as regards numbers or geographical spread, and as regards quality – however subjective or presumptuous this latter assessment may be. Secondly, the two terms can be used in a more nuanced, Deleuzean-cum-Guattarian manner which takes account of literature’s political premises and “effect”. In order to arrive at any satisfactory understanding of this highly fraught question, I believe that both these aproaches must be taken into account, but that the second, Deleuzean-cum-Guattarian approach is ultimately more rewarding. A number of preliminary questions immediately come to mind. Is there a pejorative value attached to “minor”? And if there is, is there a corresponding “grandeur”  associated with “major”? If the qualities marking one literature as “major” imply the “minor” status of some other literature, it is little wonder that doi 10.1075/fillm.1.17bha © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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the situation can become rather explosive. To make matters worse, within the settings of these two literatures the complications of geography and history may make for real confusion. What is incontestably major in one time and place can become, in some other time and place, quite minor. Such indeterminacy is bound to have an impact on responses to both literatures. Then again, the problem needs to be squarely located in the subcontinent and its particular linguistic realities. India is home to multiple language families, to more than 415 living languages, to more than 1500 classified “mother tongues,” and to innumerable dialects. As if this were not complicated enough, one or several of these languages can be awarded the status of “official language” and “mother tongue”. Earlier, Hindi and English were marked as the official languages, but now, with the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of May 2008, twenty-two languages have been given the official status. Which raises another question: Does the law-given status of a language have any connection with the major or minor status of the literature written in it? In Indian contexts, then, there is no simple mathematical method for classing literatures as minor or major. In the context of Maharashtra, for instance, Marathi may be the “major” literature, but in the pan-Indian context, where Hindi is the “major” literature, it cannot maintain the same kind of space. The classification of languages as “classical languages”, similarly, may appear to bestow “major” status on the literatures written in them, yet they can be read by only very few people. According to a 2006 press release entitled “Classical Language Status”, Ambika Soni, the Minister of Tourism and Culture at the time, presented the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House of Parliament) with the following criteria for determining whether a language counts as a “classical Language”: i. High antiquity of its early texts and/or a recorded history over a period of 1500–2000 years; ii. A body of ancient literature or texts which has been considered a valuable heritage by many generations of speakers; iii. A literary tradition which is original – not borrowed from some other speech community; and iv. the classical language and literature are distinct from modern versions, so that there may be an actual discontinuity between the classical language and its later forms or its offshoots. In the light of this extended definition, we can ask whether, if the classical is deemed major, everything which came later than the classical forms must necessarily be minor. Are dialects to be considered minor and the originating language major? What happens when literature starts being written and widely read in the dialectical version of a major language? How does literature in Bhojpuri,



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Mahua, Khariboli, and Maithili, all of them dialectical variants of Hindi, compare with Hindi literature itself? Does the existence of a greater or lesser number of readers of a literature make it major or minor? In which case, what can be said about major languages like Malayalam, which has fewer speakers than a dialect like Bhojpuri? Added to which are the complications of regional administration. In a federal government set-up where provincial divisions are guided by linguistic patterns, can the “major-ness” or “minor-ness” of literatures be decided by political clout? And what about economic clout? As a necessary follow-up to politics, and even as a matter of course, money power may surely play a significant part in bolstering or weakening the case for a literature. But just how significant may be far from clear. Take the case of Indian writing in English, for instance. This is a literature whose standing has certainly benefited from both translations into other languages and from globalization, so that it now has a great deal of visibility and power world-wide. Coveted international awards, huge signing payments, and brisk markets are the order of the day. With this much economic clout, Indian literature in English could ostensibly become a strong contender for recognition as a major literature. The problem is, though, are economic considerations sufficient? Can we disregard the facts that the Indian readers of this literature are relatively few, and are primarily limited to the educated upper crust of a highly discrete populace? Such controversies about the relative major-ness or minor-ness of different literatures are the most unfortunate fall-out of India’s multilingual tensions. The battles for prestige have been going on for a long time, and are apparently endless, inevitably coloured by a plethora of extra-literary factors which lead different categories of readers to make widely different assessments. When all is said and done, the constant and emotionally charged disagreements about literary status, though they cannot be ignored, and though they have much to tell us about linguistic and wider cultural tensions, are a self-defeating waste of time and energy. What we also need, it seems to me, is a more sophisticated and nuanced appreciation of Indian literatures in their multi-linguistic, multi-literary contexts. For a start, I should like to suggest some basic working principles. First, the categories “major” and “minor literatures” need to be seen as post-linguistic. In other words, the question of whether a language has major or minor status will have no bearing on the status of literature written in that language, quite simply because linguistic and literary status can be so patently out of sync with each other. Secondly, the terms “major” and “minor” need to be emptied of evaluative intent, so that they will not point to a hierarchy within which literatures are ranked as better or worse than each other. Thirdly, we need to develop the alternative modes of critique and appreciation which then become available along lines suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

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In the view of Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature does not come from a minor language, but is rather a literature constructed by a minority grouping within a major language. This means that the major language here is not operating on its customary home ground; there is a “high coefficient” of “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16). This involves a fundamentally political dynamic, since the minor culture, in order to represent itself, has to subvert the major language in which it is written, and does so through this deterritorialization and by making the language its own. This, in turn, Deleuze and Guattari see as locating the minor cultural identity within a collective, overarching identity that defies linguistic categorization. So in the Indian context, a minor literature could deterritorialize any one – or even more than one – of the many “major languages” and create an entirely new territory for itself. The example I should like to discuss is that of Dalit literature, which can be written in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, English or any other major Indian language, all of which already have their own, established literatures, which Deleuze and Guattari would classify as major. And sure enough, Dalit minor literature has a radically political impact on those major literatures of precisely the kind they predict. To be more exact, everything to do with Dalit literature takes on a strongly collective value. Barring some details of identifying local colour, the identity channelled by its textualities is one of writing from the margins. Whereas in major literatures the personal concerns of individuals – say, familial and marital matters – are set in a social milieu which functions as a “mere environment or a background” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17), in Dalit literature the life of individuals is subsumed under an overt political positioning, and the politics always moves on from the merely personal to the level of a larger, collective community. This collective identity emerges with special clarity from anthologies or textbooks in which Dalit literary texts written in different major languages are all brought together as translations into some other, single language. In The Individual and Society (2006), for instance, an anthology prescribed by the University of Delhi as a set book, and providing a common platform for Dalit literature originally written in Hindi, Marathi and Urdu, the common agenda is unmistakable. Through the consolidation of the minor entity of Dalit literature here, the three major literatures, Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu, are all threatened with deterritorialization. The complex pluralism of many minor literatures in a country where there are many languages and many major literatures is one of the most striking features of the Indian literary scene. It is difficult to overestimate, and it has far-reaching cognitive consequences. There is a Marathi Dalit literature, a Kannada Dalit literature, a Hindi Dalit literature, and so on and so on. And what ultimately assumes significance in such minor literatures is not the individual talent of particular writers but the communal political agenda. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “what



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each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement”. The “minor” which stakes out a place for itself “within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” is the correlative of a revolutionary spirit. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17, 19.) This is why, in India today, writings from and about the marginalized sections of society, and not least writings covered by the label “Dalit literature”, have become so hotly topical. The historical background is that the term “Dalit” originally referred to the Untouchables of Maharashtra, dalit being the Marathi word for “the spurned.” First used in this limited sense in 1930, the term has subsequently broadened in scope, until it now comprehends Harijans (such as Mahars), Mangs, Mallas, Chambhars and Pulayas, in fact any community which is regarded as “lowly” and is therefore marginalized. Literature which gives voice to such a community’s struggle by protesting against all forms of exploitation, whether based on class, race, caste, or occupation, is called “Dalit literature.” Practitioners are perhaps divided about whether only Dalits themselves can write this kind of literature, or whether the term should also include upper caste and upper class writers who write for and about the dalits. But the distinctive feature of Dalit literature is to my mind the revolutionary impulse which makes it minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Seen this way, both Hira Bansode, the insider dalit poet, and Munshi Premchand, the upper caste and high class sympathizer, come within the ambit of this minor literature. Given its politics of revolution, a minor literature can harness a desire for surer moorings – an impulse to reterritorialize. Reterritorialization, as Deleuze and Guattari envisage it, has everything to do with carving out that space for the marginalized grouping. To take the example of Dalit writers again, the territory claimed may actually have a long history. The extensive research carried out by David Shulman shows that Dalit life was already receiving literary treatment in the twelfth century, as in Sekkizhar’s Periya Puranam (1985). Shulman cannot see Dalit writing as a wholly new phenomenon. The difference is that modern Dalit writing is more fiercely realistic in a way that classical Dalit literature was not. There is great creative potential but the impulses cannot be entirely fulfilled without going into the past and laterally into other languages.  (Shulman 2006)

Once the history of such a cultural territory is enunciated and traceable in a minor literature, that literature may even run the risk of a gradual loss of power and status. Its political task may come to seem, as it were, completed. Yet minor literature has to withstand challenges to its role in any case. To recapitulate, the term “minor” as I am now using it no longer designates specific

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literatures but “the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). Literature which partakes of minor-ness in this sense is the target of unflagging attempts to sabotage and disempower it, not only at the time of its first historical inception but later on as well, after it has begun to acheive success. Efforts are always afoot to neutralize its revolutionary character and render it minor in that other, limiting sense of “unimportant”. And ironically, precisely this constant resistance to its political charge ensures that it remains minor in the sense of “revolutionary”. Whatever its history, a minor literature continues to negotiate fresh space for its oppositionality. Nor, in the Indian case, is this all. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by Deleuze and Guattari from their study of Kafka as the representative of a marginalized minor culture, the minor literatures of India do not reject the more “literary” features of the major literatures they deterritorialize. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari say that the exercise of literary “talent” in the form of poetic embellishments, metaphors and other figures of speech would detract from a minor literature’s revolutionary agenda, Dalit literature is literary and talented in exactly that way, yet without becoming less effectively subversive of major literatures. Indeed, the very features which Deleuze and Guattari regard as not belonging to minor literature become, in Dalit literature, a way of tuning in to, and giving voice to, those who are marginalized, sometimes even wresting agency for them. In so doing, Dalit writers redefine the concept of minor literature in their own way, positively strengthening its political workings. In a nutshell, then, writers like Omprakash Valmiki (2003) and Jotirao Phule ([= Fule] 1873, 2004) have portrayed their own milieu and the reality of those they represent by using the major language closest to hand, Hindi or Marathi or English, the language of the socio-political majority. They have reached out to the wide readership of the major languages that they are using, actively deconstructing their hegemonies, which are deterritorialized through being forced to bring the minor culture of the Dalits to the forefront of attention for the language majorities concerned. Their unabashedly political critique inserts the marginality of the Dalit identity into the central hegemonic spaces occupied by major literatures in the languages they have adopted, an achievement which invests marginalized selves and their writings with very considerable power. Dalit writers strongly believe that their writing affords them a platform for socio-political commentary and constructive critical engagement, and fervently plead for a complete overhaul of society. As Arjun Dangle, editor of a collection of Dalit autobiographies in translation, puts it, “Dalit Literature is not simply literature…. Dalit literature is associated with a movement to bring about change. …. [T]here is new thinking and a new point of view” (Dangle 1992: x). As “a collective



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utterance” Dalit writings have, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase (1986: 17), a “collective value,” clearly suggesting the complications which arise from the interplay of caste, class and gender. Through their sheer act of enunciation the writers of Dalit literature take it upon themselves to be agents. In the case of the Marathi-language poet Hira Bansode, for example, agency and collective utterance are achieved through intimate descriptions of personal experience which become public, critical interventions. Her personal agenda is not limited to the personal. She speaks for her whole minority community, and through the language of the majority. As an illustration of my claims here, take her poem “Sakhi” (1984), translated into English as “Bosom Friend” (1992). In the course of its tense and passionate diatribe, she says: Today you came over to dinner for the first time You not only came, you forgot your caste and came Usually women don’t forget that tradition and inequality But you came with a mind as large as the sky to my pocket size house I thought you had ripped out all your caste things You came bridging that chasm that divides us Truly, friend, I was really happy With the naïve devotion of Shabari I arranged the food on your plate But the moment you looked at the plate, your face changed With a smirk you said Oh My – Do you serve chutney koshambir this way? You still don’t know how to serve food Truly, you folk will never improve I was ashamed, really ashamed My hand which had just touched the sky was knocked down I was silent… The last bit of courage fell away like a falling star I was sad, then numb But the next moment I came back to life… You know, in my childhood we didn’t even have milk for tea much less yoghurt or buttermilk My mother cooked on sawdust she brought from the lumberyard wiping away the smoke from her eyes Every once in a while we might get garlic chutney on coarse bread Otherwise we just ate bread crumbled in water Dear Friend – Shrikhand was not even a word in our vocabulary My nose had never smelled the fragrance of ghee My tongue had never tasted halva, basundi Dear Friend – You have not discarded your tradition Its roots go deep in your mind

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And that’s true, true, true Friend – There’s yoghurt on the last course of rice Today the arrangement of food on your plate was properly Are you going to tell me what mistakes I made? Are you going to tell me my mistakes?

The poem clearly marks out the vast gulf that divides the upper and the lower castes even today. It traces a kind of history and identifies developments in relationships which have resulted from education. But so deeply rooted is the difference that both the upper caste and the lower caste girls find it impossible to get out of the caste-induced internalized superiority and inferiority. The upper caste girl “smirks” and the lower caste girl responds by being “ashamed.” It is also quite clear that the lower castes have been economically repressed. Being consigned to abject poverty, most of the time they “just ate bread crumbled in water.” This has made for such a huge cultural difference that the distance seems insurmountable; the chutney koshambhir served the “wrong” way is a positive obstacle. Yet the low caste speaker has discovered a voice, and places the onus of the repression squarely on the other, whom she assaults with scathing rhetorical questions. By so doing, she has laid claim to a new space for herself and others like her. She has ventured into “untrodden” territory. To take another Marathi example, in a poem entitled “Cruelty” Namdeo Dhasal (2011 [2007]), an iconic Dalit poet from Maharashtra, takes up the high caste preserves of “language” and turns them inside out: “I am a venereal sore in the private part of language.” He talks of the “revolt exploding” within him. He wants to be released from his “infernal identity” and to “fall in love with … stars,” something normally reserved for high castes. His stark, brutal imagery and language are tightly effective in “arousing a corpse from its grave.” Because he adopts a bold, even insolent stance, “[t]he doors of the self are being swiftly slammed shut”; “a current of blood” invigorates “all pronouns”; his “day is rising beyond the wall of grammar.” Significantly and epiphanically, in this collision The flame of the clothless dwells in mythologies and folklore. The rock of whoring is meeting live roots; A sigh is standing up on lame legs; Satan has started drumming the long hollowness. A young green leaf is beginning to swing at the door of desire. Frustration’s corpse is being sewn up. A psychopathic muse is giving a shove to the statue of eternity. Dust begins to peel armour. The turban of darkness is coming off. You, open your eyes: all these are old words. The creek is getting filled with a rising tide;

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Breakers are touching the shoreline. Yet, a venom-like cruelty spreads out from my monkey-bone. It’s clear and limpid: like the waters of the Narmada river.

Clearly, what we see here is a Dalit sensibility aspiring to, and subsequently accessing, all the spaces hitherto occupied by the mainstream, high caste individual. The resonance of this endeavour seems to be enshrined in the mainstream Hindi poet Bharat Bhushan Agarwal’s (1978: 1) dictum that “Yahan tak ki chaand bhi/Jitna ujala hai/Utna vah suraj hai”: “So much so that even the moon is as much of a sun as it has light.”1 To return to the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, when the minor (the moon) takes on the aspect of the major (the sun), this may entail, not so much a dislocation (deterritorialization) as a location. When a literature acquires major or minor status, that does not necessarily affect its intrinsic worth for speakers of some other language. On the one hand, writers of “minor literature” write against the mainstream, the “major” literary space. On the other hand, they do so from within, having chosen a linguistic space that has been occupied by great predecessors, and reaping the benefit of the legacy. Opening the mind to radicalism, their writing points to new paths, towards a truly revolutionary literature, a literature which adroitly accesses the ruptures between the mainstream and the marginal, enunciating something of far-reaching significance, something that is absolutely novel and striking.

References Agarwal, Bharat Bhushan. 1978. Utna Vah Suraj Hai. New Delhi: National Publishing House. Bansode, Hira. 1992 [1984]. “Bosom Friend.” Translated from the Marathi by Jayant Karve and Eleanor Zelliot. In An Anthology of Dalit Literature, ed. by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot. New Delhi: Gyan Publishers. Dangle, Arjun (ed.). 1992. Corpse in the Well: Translations from Modern Dalit Autobiographies. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dhasal, Namdeo. 2011 [2007]. “Cruelty.” Translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre. Posted by Kamlakar on May 7, 2011.http://sotosay.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/namdeo-dhasalspoem/ [from Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld, Poems 1972–2006. New Delhi: ­Navayana Publishing, 2007]. Fule, Jyotirao Govindrao. 1873. Slavery: In the Civilised British Government under the Cloak of Brahmanism. (Marathi version: Gulamgiri.) https://archive.org/details/Slavery-Gulamgiri

1. My translation.

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Fule, Jyotirao Govindrao. 2004. Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule. G. P. Deshpande (ed). Delhi: Leftword. Premchand, Munshi. 1969. The World of Premchand: Selected Stories of Premchand. David Rubin (trans.). London: Allen and Unwin. Press Information Bureau. 2006. “Classical Language Status to Kannada.” Government of India. August 8. Sekkizhar [Cēkkiḻār]. 1985. Periya Puranam: A Tamil Classic on the Great Saiva Saints of South India. G. Vanmikanathan (trans.). Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Shulman, David. 2006. “Healing with Languages.” Interview with Shalini Umachandran. The Hindu, August 6. http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/08/06/stories/2006080600160400.htm. Valmiki, Omprakash. 2003. Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated from the Hindi version of 1997 by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Kolkata: Samya.

chapter 18

A “minor” language in a “major” literature Contemporary Irish literature Micéala Symington   

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived In important places. (Heaney 1980: 129, “The Ministry of Fear”)

In the Statute of Kilkenny, written in Norman French, King Edward III of England enacted a set of laws designed to prevent Normans living in Ireland from behaving like the Irish. In the words of this Statute of 1366, “if any English, or Irish living among the English, use the Irish language among themselves, contrary to this ordinance, and thereof be attainted, his lands and tenements if he have any, shall be seized and placed in the hands of his immediate Lord” (quoted in Crowley 2000: 15).1 Speaking Irish in Ireland was a crime so serious that loss of property and standing must ensue. This ban on the use of the Irish language was merely one of many down the centuries, and although the significance of this particular Statute was not immediately felt (the Normans in Ireland already being so typically Irish as mostly to ignore the Law), the idea of the Irish language as a dangerous counter-power to be eradicated by force had nevertheless been hereby officially enshrined. The Statute linked the Irish language to politics and power in a way which over time would become increasingly significant for the Irish people, a linkage which arguably still has considerable bearing today. The ban on Irish was enforced and reinforced until, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the language was almost completely eradicated. According to the most recent government sources, there is now a community of around 30,000 native speakers living in Gaeltacht areas, with a further 100,000 claiming some knowledge of the language. Numerically, Irish is still a minority language, then, and Rex Hindley (1991) has even claimed that it is still an endangered one – his book is entitled The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. Given the strong institutional and political support which Irish has received as the national 1. The original text reads: “Si nul Engleys iu Irroies [conversant entre Engleys use la lang Irroies] entre eux-mesmes encontre cest ordinance et de ceo soit atteint soint sez terrez et tentz sil eit seisiz en les maines son Seinours immediate.” doi 10.1075/fillm.1.18sym © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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language of the Republic of Ireland, however, reports of its imminent death seem exaggerated. The use of Irish in English-language literature by contemporary Irish writers must first be seen in the light of language history. For them, Irish is a means of placing literary idiom in a particular history and context. As Seamus Heaney says, “given that official Northern Ireland was resolutely British in its orientation, there didn’t need to be any force feeding of the nationalist line for the subject [i.e. the Irish language] to have … counter-cultural implications. It was other” (quoted in O’Driscoll 2008: 314). As it happens, Heaney’s own use of Irish is not a radically political act. For him, the Irish language links to “Gaelic pastoral rather than nationalist politics,” to the “black O / in Broagh” (to quote one of his poems discussed below) rather than to the “Anseo” described by Paul Muldoon in his poem of the same name: He was fighting for Ireland, Making things happen. And he told me, Joe Ward, Of how he had risen through the ranks To Quartermaster, Commandant: How every morning at parade His volunteers would call back Anseo And raise their hands As their names occurred. (The final lines of “Anseo”, in Ormsby 1979: 259–260)

But the fact that Heaney feels it necessary to explain his use of Irish in English language poetry does hint at some of the questions writers in Irish face. These are not merely related to bilingualism, or indeed to the use of a “minority” language within a text largely in English. They stem from the particular political and cultural resonance of the Irish language. In the earlier part of Muldoon’s poem here, a boy’s reply to the schoolmaster’s roll-call is “Anseo, meaning here, here and now,” the word’s literal sense. But the word also implies a recognition of authority and indicates community – the community of nationalists or Catholics in Northern Ireland. In Muldoon’s poem the meaning of Anseo actually varies from context to context. The child, Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, becomes an adult, Joe Ward, engaged in paramilitary activities, a quartermaster with authority over others. The meaning of Anseo in the context of the classroom was “all present and correct”, but evolves, both during the course of Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward’s life and within the poem itself. As a child, Ward was whipped by his schoolmaster. Now, he is himself an authority figure, who also calls a roll, which is answered by those “fighting for Ireland”. By replying in Irish, the recruits fighting for Ireland submit to his authority and claim an identity of which Great Britain and the English language



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are not part. So at this point Anseo evokes hierarchy, cultural belonging, a political stance, and a readiness for action. For the adult Joe it means “here and now” not only in place and time, but also in experience and perception, and this not in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic mode, but as a particular tension between place, history and possibility. In Irish literature, such links between the Irish language and cultural belonging or political stance are unmistakable, particularly in authors who were writing before the Good Friday agreement in April 1998 and the later IRA ceasefire and decommissioning of weapons in 2005. But the use of the Irish language in Englishlanguage literature cannot be entirely reduced to this kind of political topicality. Heaney’s determined reference to the Gaelic pastoral can be seen as a refusal to restrict the amplitude of the language to a simple political tool. Just as Joyce placed his work within a resoundingly European context rather than within the context of English literature, so Heaney’s unpolemical use of the Irish language redefines the context of his writing as a writer who “grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture” (Heaney 1995: 202). The Irish words are a way of marking within a major literature, a literature in English, an identity which is separate. Rejecting the type of monolithic and homogenous identity described by Deleuze (1978: 154–155), this inscribes itself within in a context of “devenir potentiel et créé, créatif,” as a new form by which to express a plurality of histories or the feeling of “minority,” a feeling that is particularly clear in Irish writing, as when, in his poem “A Welcoming Party”, John Montague writes:  to be always at the periphery of incident Gave my childhood its Irish dimension.

(Montague 1982: 30)

Montague’s Irish experience is perceived as situated somewhere “at the periphery of incident,” a “non-place,” as Heaney (1995: 23) says in connection with Marlowe’s Edward II and the banishment of Gaveston (Edward’s favourite) to Ireland: “It was hard not to read in Gaveston’s relegation to the status of non-person an equal relegation of Ireland to the status of non-place.” In this light it hardly surprising that the use of the pre-colonial language in a colonial literature can come to mark both a profound sense of marginality, identified by John Montague as “Irishry”, and, paradoxically, a means to reclaim what we might call “placedom”. The use of a “minor” language within a “major” language and literature can go well beyond the dialectics of colonial versus postcolonial. If postcolonialism refers to a culture or literature that has been transformed by the colonial experience, then the use of a pre-colonial language can be a way of placing literary expression in a realm for which history or historical event is not actually crucial. The notion of “placedom” then has to do with a sensory and emotional interpretation of place.

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Irish words in English-language texts not only capture historical, geographical and economic realities. They can also, as it were, expand real space, by defining it in peculiarly intimate terms. As a result, readers get to experience several cognitive layers of meaning and space reference, in a way that eschews impoverished interpretations along merely political lines. Heaney’s poem about Anahorish (1980: 58) derives from an ancient type of Irish poem called dinnseanchas, i.e. a poem evoking the meaning of place names, a kind of mythological etymology in verse: Anahorish My “place of clear water,” the first hill in the world where springs washed in the shiny grass and darkened cobbles in the bed of the lane. Anahorish, soft gradient Of consonant, vowel-meadow, After-image of lamps Swung through the yards On winter evenings. With pails and barrows Those mound-dwellers Go waist deep in mist To break the light ice At wells and dunghills.

(Heaney 1980: 58)

As Daniel Tobin comments, “what Heaney hopes to capture in the poem is ‘the Gaelic music in the throat,’ the original guttural muse of the name anach fhoir uisce” (Tobin 1999: 75). The use of the Irish language here is far from a matter of simple political or cultural reference. The language is an inheritance, a treasure, a source which is intricately drawn on in the poem’s imagery. The meaning of the word “Anahorish” evolves as the poem moves along, eventually leading the poet to the “mound-dwellers” of the past. As Tobin continues, Heaney’s poem represents a shift into a “mythological in illo tempore in which the first hill of the world becomes a sacred center that would reinscribe the imperial center with its own powers of order and meaning” (Tobin 1999: 75). The Irish word eanach is usually said to mean “place”, the word fhoir (foir) to mean “true,” and uisce to mean “water”. Hence Heaney’s anglicized version of the name Anahorish: “place of clear water”. But in the Irish language adjectives



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following substantives are in certain grammatical contexts aspirated, though whereas in the old Irish script the aspiration was shown by putting a little dot above the letter, nowadays Irish is printed in the standard Western alphabet and the little dot has been replaced by the letter “h” following the consonant, as in fhoir. So the present-day placename “Anahorish” is the consequence of a process of combining concepts (place, clear, and water) at some moment in an undefined Gaelic past, when the springs washed in the shiny grass of the first hill, a semantic combination which grammatically required the aural transformation, and which, since the real meaning of eanach is both “swampy or marshy ground” and “a passage or path through marshy ground”, precisely captures the marshy area around Anahorish, where the Bann (white) River runs into Lough Neagh, and where one of the first human settlements in Ireland grew up after the glacial retreat (Hogan 2013). For Heaney, language, like landscape, involves traces, layers of meaning and time that cannot be reduced to simple category or theory. Colonial and postcolonial are also only layers, elements of a landscape which cannot be limited to any particular era or human domination. His poem “Broagh” can be interpreted along similar lines. Here he again links language to landscape very intimately, and he also uses the physical capacity to pronounce certain sounds to indicate a sense of place: Broagh Riverbank, the long rigs ending in broad docken and a canopied pad down to the ford. The garden mould bruised easily, the shower gathering in your heelmark was the black O In Broagh, its low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb-blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage.

(Heaney 1980: 66)

Here the Old English ford (a word of West Germanic origin that some etymologists trace back to the Indo-European por meaning “passage”), the English riverbank, and the Irish broagh or bruach (which also means “riverbank”) come together in a

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poem evoking a moment that is of no obvious historical significance. The recording of the moment belongs to a different realm, an intimate and physical one. The rain water gathers in the print left by the shoe belonging to the person the poet is following, both marking the trace and effacing it. In this image a profound link is asserted between language, landscape and individual experience, which again also means that the language question becomes much more than a matter of simple political allegiances. Even though the lines “that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage” may recall the fatal inability of the Ephraimites to pronounce the sh–sound in the Gileadite word “Shibboleth” (Judges xii. 4–6), this passage is not in and of itself a discourse of exclusion, but a simple recognition of regional singularity in the physical capacity to utter certain sounds. If some sounds, some words, can be difficult for some people to pronounce, perhaps it is impossible to translate those sounds, those words. What Heaney suggests is that language is the footprint of experiences that are both historically collective and individual. The Irish language may be the “guttural muse” bullied into silence by the alliterative tradition of English. Yet it is still a vestigial presence “like the coccyx,” a physical reality that exists, even if it cannot immediately be seen or heard, and however much somebody might wish to ignore its reality. More than designating a secret club of those who can pronounce “gh” and understand words that contain this sound, such as Broagh or Magherafelt, Heaney points to a form of difference that contraverts the ridiculous stage Irishman Macmorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V (III.2.120–124), for instance: “What ish my nation ? Ish a Villaine, and a Bastard, and a knave, and a Rascal. What is my Nation? Who talks of my Nation?”. The presence of Irish within Heaney’s English language poem is, as it were, a way of answering Macmorris, a way of undoing the English creation of Irish identity (see Kiberd 1995), a more satisfactory way of answering the question “What is my Nation?” The emphasis on primitive Ireland is a way of placing colonial history, and indeed postcolonialism, in a wider context, as just one element of Irish history, both literary and otherwise, but not the defining moment it has perhaps been taken for. And Heaney’s vertical descent to the pre-history of Ireland is also a means of freeing literature from the horizontal limitations of place. Irish literature can therefore be perceived not only in terms of, or in relation to, English or British literature, or indeed in relation to European literatures more generally, but also as a wider human endeavour to be understood in a “world” context. Paradoxically, the “minor” reference becomes a means of widening the literary paradigm. In his analysis of Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), Jean Bessière (2012: 15–34) follows the logic of Walter Benjamin’s writing on melancholy, so showing that, even if we certainly can speak of “melancholy” in relation to postcolonialism, the notion of postcolonialism nevetherless marks a particular era in



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history which will inevitably come to an end. The work of contemporary poets may be seen as an attempt to move beyond melancholy, beyond a self-destructive loyalty to, or reaction against English colonialism, beyond the loss of a language, beyond the sense of being exiled in their own country – incidentally, the Irish word for exile (deoraíocht) has the same root as the word for tears (deoraí). Brian Friel’s play Translations is about the roots of melancholy, about the exile from the Irish language, an experience which arises for some of the play’s characters as they try to record Irish geography in the English language. The writing down of Irish place-names in English seems to set the seal of a different identity in which only the merest traces of the older culture can survive. Translation delimits and distorts. On one level, of course, the staging of the translation into English words of the Irish place names shows the absurdity of imperial law and its enforcement by the English soldiers, and the tragedy of the Irish people’s collusion in this enterprise. It also shows the real complexity of relationships between territory, land, language and literature. In the play, many of the translations are suggested by the character Owen, who comments on “Bun na hAbhann”, for instance, that “Bun is the Irish word for bottom. And Abhann means river. So it’s literally the mouth of the river” (Friel 1981: 39). The translation finally adopted is “Burnfoot.” And such attempts at translation are always implicit or explicit when a “minor” language is present in a “major” literature. In Friel’s play, the staging of relations between the two languages figures a moment of momentous division in Irish history and consciousness as also a moment of linguistic transition, when Irish literature became sealed into a binary relationship with English. The introduction of English-language national schools in 1831 achieved what the Statute of Kilkenny and other measures had not achieved: the switch in Ireland from Irish as the dominant language to English. Traces of the Irish language now resurfacing in English are comparable to the appearance on the land’s surface of artefacts from another time. In Friel’s play, Owen’s absurdly succinct translations of another character’s verbose etymological explanations comically underline differences in culture and worldview, and the writing also touches on what cannot be translated at all: the indelible traces of the Irish language within the English of the Irish themselves. Part of the force of Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word (2005) lies in presenting a history of languages which is also a history of power and of power relationships between people and peoples. Ostler shows how the question of minor and major languages is a political question, and one which only a historical approach can address. He also places languages within a world context, so removing individual languages from binary relationships with a single dominant, “major” language. To some extent, understanding the history of language and distribution amounts to understanding word and world politics, to facing up to the history of domination.

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Take, for instance, Heaney’s late poem “Colum Cille Cecinit” (“Colmcille the Scribe”; 2010: 72–73), which presents itself as a translation from an eleventhcentury poem in Irish about a person believed to have been living around 521 to 597 CE. Heaney recreates the scribe’s environment and experience as a matter of “penwork”: “My hand is cramped from penwork. / My quill has a tapered point”. The focus is not on the scribe’s finished work, but on his perceptions, his cramped hand, the consistency – “runny” – and colour – “blue-dark/ Beetle-sparkle” – of his ink, the texture of the vellum he is writing on. His writing and drawing are a sensual and intellectual experience, and one which links him to the world – “Wisdom keeps welling in streams” –, to his immediate environment, and to a deeper sense of the universe. His quill has a “bird-mouth” and his ink is that “Beetle-sparkle”. Wisdom from the natural world, from streams and rivers, pours onto the surface of the vellum – “Riverrun on the vellum / Of ink from greenskinned holly.” Intellectual and artistic productivity are not more important in his endeavour than physical matter and sensuous experience. His book, his writing, his art: these are not separate from the natural world, but an intimate part of it. Heaney, in both his own literary endeavour and in this scribe’s, is an exponent of writing as a vertical experience into time and history, and as one which expands horizontally towards other experiences and cultures. In this translation of an eleventh-century poem about Columcille, a sixthcentury Irish scholar and saint, Seamus Heaney, a twenty-first century poet, is in fact reassessing the work of poet-scribes, their role and place in the world, and manages to make a piece of writing in a once almost extinct language pertinent in 2010, the year of his own poem’s publication. And to repeat, the bearing of such writing goes beyond the boundaries of Ireland. Also in 2010, in an article entitled “Seamus Heaney and Modern Sri Lankan Poetry,” Wimal Dissanayake writes that “aspiring poets in Sri Lankan writing in Sinhala, Tamil and English can profit immensely by studying carefully the writings of Seamus Heaney … by decoding the way that the sound of sense echoes through the symbolic weave of his poetic world.” In sum, the use of the Irish language in dominantly English-language literature is like the intrusion of the musical minor key in a work dominated by major chords. The minority language plays the role of the minor, adding a different tone, another resonance and depth. It adds complexity and context to the English lyric, expanding the idiom both temporally and spatially. For an Irish writer, bilingualism is a way of gaining power over the notion of “two nations in the land” implied by the Statute of Kilkenny, and of actually transforming it. It turns simplistic monolithic perception and the possibility of some “grand récit” into the “air-wide, skintight, multiple meaning of here”, a plurality which, to quote Frank Ormsby’s



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poem “Home”, eschews place limitations or narrow contexts, and instead embraces divergent pasts and presents, whether “the first settlers in the Lagan Valley” or “the Vietnamese boat-people of Portadown” (Ormsby 1979: 196).

References Bessière, Jean. 2012. “Situer le postcolonial: De ses paradoxes et de sa pertinance contemporaine avec une comparaison de l’herméneutique du roman postcolonial et du roman occidental contemporain.” In Actualité et inactualité de la notion de “postcolonial”, ed. by Micéala Symington, Jean Bessière, and Joanny Moulin, 15–34. Paris: Champion. Crowley, Tony. 2000. The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366–1922. London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1978. “Philosophie et minorité.” Critique 369: 154–155. Dissanayake, Wimal. 2010. “Seamus Heaney and Modern Sri Lankan Poetry.” The Sunday Observer, November 21. http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2010/11/21/mon02.asp. Friel, Brian. 1981. Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Heaney, Seamus. 1980. Selected Poems 1965–1975. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1995. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 2010. Human Chain. London: Faber and Faber. Hindley, Reg. 1991. The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. London and New York: Routledge. Hogan, C. Michael. 2013. “Celtic Sea.” In The Encyclopaedia of Earth, ed. by Cutler J. Cleveland, and John Smith. Washington: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/51cbed307896bb431f 69066d Kiberd, Declan. 1995. Inventing Ireland. London: Vintage. Montague, John. 1982. Selected Poems. Toronto: Exile Editions. O’Driscoll, Dennis. 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber. Ormsby, Frank (ed.). 1979. Poets from the North of Ireland. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press. Ostler, Nicholas. 2005. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. London: Harper Perennial. Tobin, Daniel. 1999. Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Index

A Abbas, Ackbar  74 Aeschylus  126, 158, 165 The Persians  158 Agarwal, Bharat Bhushan  261 Agrafiotis, Démosthène  217 Ahanchian, Michael Mehrdad Zand 214 Ahmad, Aijaz  142 Aizenberg, Mikhail  216 Albiach, Anne-Marie  214 Alcalá, Rose  214 Alexander the Great  46 Ali, Mohamed  134 Anderson, Jack  19 Anderson, Thomas  19 Andrews, Bruce  217 Angot, Christine  182 Anouilh, Jean  177 La Grotte  177 Antin, David  216 Arabian Nights 192 Arai, Takako  210 Aristophanes 126 Aristotle  127, 165 Armantrout, Rae  216 Ashbery, John  217 Ashcroft, Bill, et al.  127 The Post-Colonial Studies Reader  127 Attridge, Derek  145, 147–148, 153 The Singularity of Literature 145 Auerbach, Erich  2, 125, 137, 227, 230 “Philology and Weltliteratur” 11 Mimesis 125 Austen, Jane  193 Pride and Prejudice  193 ’Awad, Lewis  127 Aziza, Claude  174

B Bachean, Merle Lyn  214 Bacon, Francis  128 Badiou, Alain  71 Back, Rachel Tzvia  214 Bailey, Richard E.  85 Bansode, Hira  257–258 “Sakhi” (“Bosom Friend”) 259 Barańczak, Stanisław  225 Baranda, Maria  214 Barnes, Julian  173 Baroni, Raphaël  200 Barthes, Roland  177 Baudelaire, Charles  118 Baxt, Ellen  214 Beckett, Samuel  131 Beier, Uli  160 Bell, Marvin  215 Benjamin, Walter  111, 268 Benveniste, Émile  116 Bergvall, Caroline  210 Berk, Ilhan  214 Bernabé, Jean  107, 109 In Praise of Creoleness  107, 109 Bernal, Martin  160–162 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 160–162, 166 Bernhardt, Stephen A.  85 Bernstein, Charles  208, 215–217 Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei  209, 216 Berzewiczy, Gregor von  60 Bessière, Jean  268 Bhabha, Homi K.  106, 111–112, 115 BioShock  198–199, 202 Blank, Debby Jo  214

Boileau-Narcejac 174 Boisserée, Sulpiz  236 Bolton, Kingsley  71, 75, 77 Bonaparte, Napoleon  9, 128 Booth, Wayne C.  145 Borges, Jorge Luis  118, 182 The Aleph  182 Borowski, Andrzej  229 Bostroem, Eugen  130 Boulé, Jean-Pierre  181 Herve Guibert: L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi  181 Bourdier, Jean  174 Bourdieu, Pierre  194 Bradbury, Ray  200 Brady, Andrea  212 Bramness, Hanne  214 Brandes, Georg  229 Brathwaite, Kamau  106 Brecht, Bertolt  126–127, 131–132 Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti 126 Bremner, Larry  212 Brinton, William M.  219 Publishing in a Global Village: A Role for the Small Press 219 Britton, Celia  116 Bromige, David  216 Brossard, Nicole  211, 213 Brown, Cecil H.  21 “Feature 130A: Finger and Hand” 23 Brown, H. Douglas  84, 86 Brown, Pam  215 Buffington, Albert  32 Bunton, David  73–74 Common English Errors in Hong Kong  73 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 238

274 Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

C Cadiot, Olivier  211 Cage, David  198 Heavy Rain  198, 200–201 Cahill, Michelle  216 Cameron, Juan  216 Campbell, Lyle  25, 27–28 Camus, Marcel  160 Orfeu Negro 160 Carlyle, Thomas  235–236 Life of Schiller 235–236 Carpentier, Alejo  103, 106, 109 Carrion, Guillermo Cuevas 120 Casanova, Giacomo  56 Castro, Adrian  211 Cebreiro, María de  214 Celan, Paul  108, 113 Celestine, Alfred  212 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand  177 L’eglise 177 Césaire, Aimé  103–105, 119, 136  Chamoiseau, Patrick  105, 109–110, 117, 119 Lettres créoles 117 Champion, Miles  211  Chan, Brian Hokshing  78 Chanda, Avik  214 Chandan, Amarjit  212 Chancy, Myriam  107 Chanda, Geetanjali Singh  146 Cheek, Chris  213 Chekhov, Anton  165 Chén, Quán  242, 247 An Inquiry in Chinese-German Literature 242 Cheng, Mai  214 Chernoff, Maxine  214–215 Čiževskij, Dmitrij  222–225 Comparative History of Slavic Literatures 222 Clark, Tom  214 Clouse, Barbara Fine  85 Cole, Norma  209, 216 Collobert, Danielle  210 Collovald, Annie  174 Coloman 55 Colonna, Vincent  176–177, 179–182, 190–193 Comrie, Bernard  16 The World’s Major Languages 16, 17, 18, 23

Condé, Maryse  108–109 Confiant, Raphäel  105, 109– 110, 117 Lettres créoles 117 Conrad, Joseph  222 Coolidge, Clark  216 Corder, Eileen  209 Corder, Stephen Pitt  82 Cornis-Pope, Marcel  225 History of the Literary Cultures of East Central-Europe 225–228 Couagnas, Daniel  174 Craveirinha, José  120 Creeley, Robert  216, 218 Cruz, Victor Hernández  211 Crystal, David  27, 44, 87 English as a Global Language 44 Curtius, Ernst Robert  125, 135, 137, 227 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages  125 Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter 227 D Dài, Emperor (Táng Dài Zōng) 243 Dale, Rick  21 “Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure” 23 Dalí, Salvador  135 Damas, Léon-Gontran  105, 108, 117–120 “Hoquet” 105 Latitudes: Poètes d’expression française 118 Damrosch, David  146, 237, 242 Dandilo, Kwame  120 Dangle, Arjun  258 Danticat, Edwidge  107 Darrieussecq, Marie  179–181 Darwich, Mahmoud  113 Dash, Cheryl M. L.  175 Davidson, Michael  216 Davies, Paul  81, 84 Dawson, Nick  85 Debon, Günther  246

Debray, Régis  187, 190, 195 Deleuze, Gilles  10, 114, 142, 144, 254–259, 261, 265 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature  11 Denstaed, Linda  85 Derek Attridge  145, 147–148, 153 Derkosz, Johannes  61 Genius patriae  61 Derrida, Jacques  109, 113–114 Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre 113 Descartes, René  128 Deshpande, Shashi  149 That Long Silence 149 De Voeux, Charles  235 Dhasal, Namdeo  260 “Cruelty” 260 Di, Xue  210 Dickinson, Emily  82 Dikolo, Jean-Pierre  174 Di Palma, Ray  216 Dissanayake, Wimal  270 “Seamus Heaney and Modern Sri Lankan Poetry”  270 Donnell, Radka  8–9, 239 Die letzte Heloise 239 Donovan, Gerard  214 Dorgan, Theo  214 Doris, Stacey  216 Doubrovsky, Serge  171, 175– 176, 178–183 Fils 175 Autofictions and Cie 180 Dragon Age  201 Drioton, Etienne  127 Dryer, Matthew S.  20, 23 The World Atlas of Language Structures Online  20, 21, 23 DuBois, W. E. B.  106 Duncan, Andrew  212 Duncan, Robert  216 Dunn, Anne  209 Dupuy, Beatrice  85 Durante, Riccardo  212 Ďurišin, Dionýzy  223 Durkheim, Émile  133–134 Duval, Alexander  236 Le Tasse: Drame historique en cinq actes 236

Index 275

Dyer, Geoffrey  210 Dzenga, Primrose  215 E Eckermann, Johann Peter  247, 250–251 Conversations with Goethe 250 Edwards, Elaine  213 Edwards, Ken  211, 213 Eigner, Larry  216 Einzig, Barbara  209, 216 Elenkova, Tsvetanka  214 El-Gindi, Yusri  126 Baghl el-Baladiyya (The Mule of the County Council) 126 Eliot, T. S.  200 The Waste Land  200 Emerson, Caryl  229–230 Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper 134 Engels, Friedrich  1 Ernst, Max  135 Escarpit, Roger  137 Espirito Santo, Alda do  120 Espmark, Kjell  130, 214 Estrin, Jerry  216 Étiemble, René  125, 137 Euripides  158, 163, 165, 167 Everett, Dan  21 F Fairman, H. W.  126 The Triumph of Horus  126–127 Fallout 3  200, 202 Fanon, Frantz  105, 158 Peau Noire, Masques Blanc 105 The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) 158 Farber, Yael  6 Farrell, Dan  210 Faulkner, William  113, 118, 120 Feī, Pān Guì  247 Fennig, Charles D.  23 Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition  15, 16, 19, 23

Ferdinand I  55 Ferguson, Deanna  212 Fischbach, Chris  211 Fisher, Allen  212, 213 Fishman, Joshua A.  26, 28, 30, 37, 72 Fitts, Sandy  215 Fitzpatrick-Simmons, Janice 214 Florescu, Catalin Dorian  8, 238–239 Der kurze Weg nach Hause 238 Fondaneche, Daniel  174 Fordham, Frieda  82 Forest, Philippe  181 Le Roman, le je 181 Les Romans du Je 181 France, Anatole  131 Francés, Melanie  215 Franklin, Benjamin  30, 200 Frazer, Tony  213–214 Freud, Sigmund  184 Friel, Brian  269 Translations 269 Frigerio, Vittorio  174 Fringe  191, 193, 195 Frost, Robert  82 Fuller, William  212 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg  147 Gander, Forrest  215 Ganick, Peter  212 Garron, Isabelle  210 Gasparini, Philippe  175, 179–183 Gaugain, Claude 181 Les Romans du Je 181 Genette, Gérard  180 George, Olankule  161 George, Rosemary Marangoly 146 Gevirtz, Susan  213 Gianuzzi, Valentino  214 Gilbert, Helen  163, 165 Gillespie, Carol  157 Classics in Post-Colonial Words 157 Gilmore, John  213 Gilroy, Paul  110, 268 The Black Atlantic 110

Ginsberg, Allen  113 Giraudoux, Jean  177 Sodome et Gomorrhe 177 Gizzi, Michael  216 Gizzi, Peter  215–217 Glazova, Anna  214 Glissant, Édouard  5, 9, 104–124 Caribbean Discourse 111 Faulkner, Mississippi  113 La Terre, le feu, l’air et le vent: Une Anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde  5, 113, 117–118, 120 Le discours antillais  104, 110 Le Quatrième siècle 111 Une nouvelle région du monde 104 Philosophie de la Relation 104 La Cohée du Lamentin 110 Poetics of Relation  111, 114 Traité du Tout-monde  111 Tout-monde  111 Gnisci, Armando  127 Goard, Jim  213 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 5–6, 8–9, 125, 128, 132, 187, 233–251 Hermann und Dorothea 250 Torquato Tasso 235–236 West-östlicher Divan  241, 250 Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahresund Tageszeiten  9, 242 Goff, Barbara  157 Classics and Colonialism 157 Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora 157 Golasowski, Viviane  191, 193 Gold, Artie  208 Mixed Doubles: Fifteen Poems 208 Gombrowicz, Witold  177, 228 Histoire 177 Grand Theft Auto  200 Greco, Albert N.  218 Greimas, Julien Algirdas  199 Grell, Isabelle  175–176, 178 Grenier, Robert  217

276 Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

Grenoble, Lenore A.  26 Griffiths, Bill  213 Grinnell, Tracy  210 Grosman, Ernesto Livon  211 Guattari, Félix  10, 114, 142, 144, 254–259, 261 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature 11 Guest, Barbara  209, 213 Gueye, Asse  174 Guibert, Hervé  177, 181 Guillén, Nicolas  106 Gutenberg, Johannes  132–133 H Hall, Edith  158 Hallward, Peter  71, 110 Hamilton-Emery, Chris  215 Hamilton-Emery, Jen  215 Hardwick, Lorna  157 Classics in Post-Colonial Words 157 Hariharan, Githa  6, 142, 146–153 The Thousand Faces of Night 6, 142, 146, 148 Harris, Wilson  103 Haspelmath, Martin S.  20, 23 The World Atlas of Language Structures Online  20, 21, 23 Heaney, Seamus  10, 131, 263– 268, 269–270 “Anahorish” 266 “Broagh” 267 “Colum Cille Cecinit”  270 Hedeen, Katherine  215 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 130 Hejinian, Lyn  209, 216 Helman, Albert  106–107 Herbert, Frank  200 Dune 200 Herder, Johann Gottfried  58, 233 Hesse, Hermann  131 Hickin, Roger  216 Higgins, Rita Ann  214 Hilferding, Rudolf  128 Hindley, Rex  263

The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary 263 Ho, Elaine  78 Hocquard, Emmanuel  214, 216–217 Hollo, Anselm  213 Holquist, Michael  69–70 Homer  158, 167 Hoover, Paul  215 Horner, Bruce  70, 72, 74 Hóu, Qí Dōng Hūn  246 Housman, Alfred Edward  82 Howard, David  216 Howe, Fanny  209, 213, 216 Huang, Yunte  211 Hughes, Langston  119 Hunt, Erica  209 Hurst, Charles E.  33 I Ibn Khaldun  133 Muqaddimah 133 Ibsen, Henrik  149, 165 Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) 149 Individual and Society, The  256 Ingelmo, Luis  214 Ionesco, Eugène  126, 228 Iser, Wolfgang  134 J Jacobs, Holly L.  89–91 Jakobson, Roman  209 James, John  215 Jameson, Fredric  6, 142–149, 153, 207 “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multicultural Capitalism” 142 Jauss, Hans-Robert  134 Jeannelle, Jean-Louis  181 Jefferson, Thomas  200 Jegouzo, Joël  176 Jenny, Laurent  180 Jiǎ, Zhì  243, 245 Johnson-Weiner, Karen M. 32–33, 35 Jones, Jill  215 Joseph II  57–58, 60–61, 64 Jost, François  135, 192–193

Joyce, James  229, 265 Jung, Carl Gustav  135 K Kachru, Braj  69–70 Kafka, Franz  108, 113–114, 143–144, 228, 258 Kakar, Sudhir  151 The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India 151 Kamp, Peter van de  215 Kanikova, S. I.  225 Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature 225 Kant, Immanuel  5, 130, 134 Kapil, Bhanu  209 Kapos, Martha  212 Karadzic, Vuk  63 Kates, J.  216 Kavanagh, Dan  173 Kawata, Ayane  210 Keita, Mobilo Sounkalo  174 Kelly, Robert  216 Kesteloot, Lilyan  174 Killian, Kevin  210 Kim, Myung Mi  209 Kindellan, Michael  212 King, Martin Luther  82 Kinsella, John  215 Kipling, Rudyard  130 Koch, Kenneth  216 Kolleritsch, Alfred  214 Kopczyński, Onufry  226 Gramatyka dla szkoł narodowych (Grammar for National Schools) 226 Kornblum, Alan  211 Kosinski, Jerzy  175 Kováts, Martiny Gabriel  59 Kozer, José  214 Kraybill, Donald B.  32–35 Kukuljević, Ivan  62 Kumar, Radha  151 The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1990  151

Index 277

Kundera, Milan  108, 228 Kuortti, Joel  146

Lyotard, Jean-François  187–190, 195–196

L Lacan, Jacques  184 Lamming, George  106 La Palma, Marina  209 Lancelot, Alain  190 Lebris, Michel  114 Pour une Littérature-Monde 114 Le Clezio, Jean-Marie  196 Lecarme, Jacques  179–182 La littérature en France depuis 1968 179 Autofictions and Cie 180 Lecarme-Tabone, Eliane  181 Lee, Ed Bok  211 Lefkowitz, Mary  161 Lejeune, Philippe  176, 178, 180, 182, 195 Autofictions and Cie 180 Lendennie, Jessie  214 Lewis, M. Paul  15, 23 Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition  15, 16, 19, 23 Lĭ, Hòu Zhŭ 246 Lilley, Kate  215 Lim, Shirley  73 Lín Jiā  245, 247 Lincoln, Abraham  200 Linde, Samuel Gottlieb  226 Linna, Väinö  143 Tuntematon sotilas 143 Lits, Marc  174 Loft Story  193 Lopez, Tony  209, 213, 215 Louden, Mark L.  32–36, 38 Lovecraft, H. P.  200 Low, JacksonMac  212 Lucian 182 Ludanyi, Renate  31–32 Lukacs, Gyorgy  228 Lukic, Tatjana  216 Luoma, Bill  216 Lupyan, Gary  21 “Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure” 23 Lusk, Dorothy Trujillo  210

M McAdams, Janet  215 McBryde, Ian  216 McCain, Gillian  209 McGonigal, Jane  201 McGrath, Connel  216 McLennan, Rob  215 Mączyński, Jan  226 Lexicon Latino-Polonorum 226 Magill, Frank Norton  222 Cyclopedia of World Authors 222 Mahfouz, Naguib  131 Makris, Paula  158, 167 Malamud, Bernard  113 Malcolm X  120 Malkin, Irad  158 Mallarmé, Stéphane  118 Mandel, Tom  216 Mandelstam, Osip  222 Manguel, André  194 Mann, Thomas  131 Buddenbrooks 131 Marlowe, Christopher  265 Márquez, Gabriel García  131 Marx, Karl  1 Matthews, Harry  216 Mayer, Bernadette  217 Mboukou, Jean-Pierre Makouta 174 McCaffery, Steve  218 McConnell, David L.  33 McCormack, Karen  218 McFadden, David  212 McMorris, Mark  211 Meddeb, Abdelwahab  114 Metscher, Thomas  136 Metternich, Klemens von  128 Michineau, Stéphanie  179 Mickiewicz, Adam  221, 228 Miller, David  213 Milne, Drew  209 Milosz, Czeslaw  221, 228 Milton, John  200 Paradise Lost 200 Minashita, Kiriu  210 Miquel, André  192

Mittenthal, Robert  212 Miyoshi, Masao  207 Modiano, Patrick  181 Mohanram, Radhika  150 Molière 165 Montague, John  265 “A Welcoming Party”  265 Montremy, Jean-Maurice de 178 Mouré, Erin  214 Mouralis, Bernard  108 Mrożek, Sławomir  228 Muldoon, Paul  264 “Anseo” 264–265 Mulford, Wendy  213 Murr, Christoph Gottlieb von 246 A Life of Noble Pursuit  246 N N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José 110 Naipaul, V. S.  106, 121 Middle Passage 121 Neruda, Pablo  131 Neubauer, John  225–229 History of the Literary Cultures of East Central-Europe 225–228 Neveu, Erik  174 Ng, Aik-Kwang  75 Ngoye, Achille F.  174 Nicholson, Anna Kerdijk  216 Njami, Simon  174 Nobel, Alfred  130 Nolt, Steven M.  32–35 Nunan, David  81 Nuñez, Víctor Rodríguez  215 O O’Donnell, Mary  214 O’Reilly, John Boyle  82 Oliver, Douglas  213 Omotoso, Kole  175 Fella’s Choice 175 One Thousand and One Nights 192 Oppen, George  216 Ormsby, Frank  270–271 Orwell, George  200 Orzeszkowa, Eliza  227 Osman, Jena  217 Òsófisan, Fémi  6, 163–164

278 Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

Ostler, Nicholas  269 The Last Lingua Franca  43 Empires of the Word 269 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine 182 P Palmer, Michael  216 Pang, Terrence T. T.  75–76 Park, Kyong-Mi  210 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich 131 Pearse, Eric  81, 84 Pepetela 175 Jaime Bunda, agente secreto 175 Perelman, Bob  209 Pericles 158 Perse, Saint-John  109 Phelan, James  144 Phi, Bao  211 Phule, Jotirao  258 Píng, Mei Mào  247 Pinsolle, Dominique  191 Pirandello, Luigi  126, 131, 177 Six personnages en quète d’auteur 177 Plato 177 The Republic 177 Poe, E. A.  200 Portugal, Anne  209 Porvin, Aleksey  216 Potowski, Kim  28–31 Potvin, André-Claude  197, 202 Pound, Ezra  118 Premchand, Munshi  257 Prendergast, Christopher  187 Pretty, Ron  216 Prevallet, Kristin  217 Price, Richard  121, 213 Price, Sally  121 Propp, Vladimir  199, 200, 202 Proust, Marcel  179 Prudhomme, Sully  130 Pruja, Franck  217 Prus, Bolesław  227 Lalka  227 Prynne, J. H.  209, 212 Pynsent, Robert  225 Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature 225

Q Quéau, Philippe  203 Qianzi, Che  212 Quirck, Randolph  70–71

Ruprecht, Hans-George  125–126 Russel, Bertrand  82 Ryan, Tracy  215

R Ragosta, Ray  216 Rakosi, Carl  216 Rakusa, Ilma  214 Ramayana  151 Rampton, Ben  71 Rancière, Jacques  195 Raworth, Tom  217–218 Redfield, Marc  106 Reinhard, K. F. von  236 Rege, Josna  145, 149 Retamar, Fernando  106 Reuter, Yves  172, 174 Rej, Mikołaj  226 Rich, Adrienne  215 Richards, Jack C.  83 Riggs, Sarah  213, 217 Riley, Denise  213 Rinck, Monika  212 Rindel, Arnaud  191 Rivarol, Antoine  106 De l’universalité de la langue française 106 Rivera, Eléna  209, 212 Robertson, Lisa  213 Robinson, Nick  209 Robinson, Peter  215 Rodefer, Stephen  216 Romaine, Suzanne  25–26, 28–29 Roosevelt, Theodore  200 Rose, Peter  215 Rosenwasser, Rena  209 Rosnay, Jean-Pierre  216 Ross, Julian  212 Roth, Joseph  222 Rothacker, Erich  135 Rouaud, Jean  114 Pour une Littérature-Monde 114 Rowling, J. K.  193 Harry Potter 193 Royet-Journoud, Claude  216 Rüdiger, Horst  128–129 Runco, Mark  74–75

S Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von 222 Said, Edward  9, 127, 137, 158– 159, 241, 251 Orientalism  11, 127, 137, 158, 241 Culture and Imperialism 137 Saidenberg, Jocelyn  210 Saltz, Jerry  208 Seeing Out Loud 208 Salvayre, Lydie  176 Sánchez, Aquilino  81–83 Saramago, José  136 Sartre, Jean-Paul  118, 158–160, 203 “Orphée Noir” (Black Orpheus)  159–160, 166 What Is Literature? 203 Saussure, Ferdinand de  116–117 Schmitt, Arnaud  180, 183 Schulz, Bruno  222 Schwarz-Bart, André  108, 113, 115 Morning Star 115 Schwarz-Bart, Simone  113 Scully, Maurice  213 Séguret, Olivier  198, 202 Sekiguchi, Ryoko  210 Sekkizhar 257 Periya Puranam 257 Selby, Spencer  214 Sell, Roger D.  147, 239–240 Semprún, Jorge  108 Sen, Sudeep  212 Senghor, Léopold Sédar  105, 118, 120, 159–160 “La Négritude et Civilisation de l’Universel” 118 Sereni, Vittorio  212 Sethe, Kurt Heinrich  127 Settis, Salvatore  159 Shakespeare, William  126, 136, 158, 164–165, 268 Henry V 269 Shapcott, Tom  215

Index 279

Sharot, Tali  99 Shcherbina, Tatiana  216 Sheppard, Robert  213 Shishkin, Mikhail Pavlovich  8, 237–239 Die russische Schweiz – ein literarisch-historischer Reiseführer 237 Montreaux–Missolonghi– Astapovo: Auf den Spuren von Byron und Tolstoj 238 Shklovsky, Viktor  209 Shree, Geetanjali  150 Mai 150 Shulman, David  257 Silliman, Ron  209, 215, 218 Simas, Joseph  216 Simon, Claude  131, 196 Simons, Gary F.  23 Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition  15, 16, 19, 23 Simpson, Michael  157 Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora  157 Singer, Isaac Bashevis  113 Sjödin, Eva  210 Słowacki, Juliusz  229 Smith, Colin  210 Smith, Barbara Hernnstein  176 Smith, Edward L.  85 Smith, Ian  75 Sobin, Gustaf  216 Sobti, Krishna  150 Listen Girl! 150 Sollers, Philippe  196 Soni, Ambika  254 Sophocles  126, 165 Soyinka, Wole  6, 136–137, 159, 161, 163–164, 167–168 The Bacchae  158, 163–164, 167 “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” 161 The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite  163, 167

Spencer, Herbert  130 Spicer, Jack  216 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 147–148 The Critique of Postcolonial Reason 147 Srisermbhok, Amporn  84 Stefans, Brian Kim  212 Stein, Gertrude  217 Stiegler, Bernard  187 Strang, Catriona  212 Stray, Christopher A.  159 Streckfuss, A. F. C.  236 Strindberg, August  165 Strong, Gregory  86 Swensen, Cole  216 Świętochowski, Alexander  227 Synge, John Millington  165 Szymborska, Wisława  228 T Taggart, John  216 Tagore, Rabindranath  131 Táng, Xuán Zōng  247 Tardos, Anne  212 Taylor, Lucien  107, 109 Tchicaya, Gérard Félix “U Tam’si” 174 Les Méduses 174 Ces Fruits si doux de l’arbre à pain 174 Tejada, Roberto  210 Templeton, Fiona  211 Thoms, Peter Perring  242, 244–251 Chinese Courtship 242–243, 247 One Hundred Beauties: New Poems, Images, and Biographies  242, 250–251 Tkalac, Imbro  63 Tobin, Daniel  266 Tolkien, J. R. R.  193 The Lord of the Rings 193 Tolstoy, Leo  82, 238 Tomkins, Joanne  163, 162 Tranströmer, Tomas  131 Tranter, John  212, 215 Trefossa 120 Trimbur, John  72 Tripitaka  132

Tu, Hung Q.  210 Tutuianu, Floarea  216 Tysh, Chris  211 U Upton, Lawrence  213 Ur, Penny  84 V Valdés, Mario J.  228 Valéry, Françoise  217 Valmiki, Omprakash  258 Vanoncini, André  174 Vanoye, Francis  188 Vareille, Claude  174 Vasco da Gama  4 Vasunia, Phiroze  158–159, 162 Verecchia, Giorgio  212 Vicuña, Cecilia  209 Vilain, Philippe  173, 183 Virgil 44 Vojkffy, Franciscus  61–62 W Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ  136, 165 Wah, Fred  212 Walcott, Derek  106, 167 Omeros 167 Waldrop, Keith  216–217 Waldrop, Rosemarie  216–217 Wallerstein, Immanuel  1 The Modern World-System 11 Wáng, Hui  244 Warning, Rainer  176 Watten, Barrett  209, 216, 218 Weaver, Constance  83 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary  207 Wei, Mao Píng  247 Welch, John  212 Welish, Marjorie  216 Wellek, René  134 Westö, Kjell  143 Dar vi en gang gatt 143 Wetmore, Kevin J.  157–163, 165–167 Athenian Sun in an African Sky 157 Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre 157

280 Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World

Whaley, Lindsay J.  26 Wheeler, Susan  215 White, Hazel  209 Wiesel, Eli  228 Wiley, Terrence G.  29–31 Wilkinson, John  215 Willis, Elizabeth  216 Wing, Betsy  111 Woolf, Virginia  118 World of Warcraft  200

Y Yán, Xī Yuán 243 Yáng, Yán  243 Yán, Zháo Feí  245 Yasusada, Araki  211 Yeats, William Butler  131 Xuē, Yáo Yīng  243, 245–247 Yoder, Amanda  36 Yoder, Daniel  36–37 Yoder, Mollie  37–39 Young, Geoffrey  208–209 Mixed Doubles: Fifteen Poems 208

Youssef, Magdi  127 Brecht in Ägypten 127 Yuán, Jiǎn Zhāi  243 Yuán, Kāi Gōng Rén  247 Z Zǎi, Yuán  243 Zhào, Fēi Yàn  245–246 Zijderveld, Theo  200 Zōng, Táng Yuán  247