Foreign Literature RRL

Abstract
Concepts travel (or fail to travel) within the disciplines as well as between them: The conceptual
approach of any one subject can vary dramatically according to the institutional, national or historical
culture of knowledge in which it is conducted, raising important questions about the role of academic
context and community in influencing the aims and findings of research. The discipline of studies in
English language and literature in Europe is a remarkable case in point: The increasing currency of
English as an international lingua franca has – alongside the many political questions this raises –
transformed continental European English Studies into a prime site in which concepts in literary and
cultural studies have travelled between diverse national philological contexts. Yet there remains a
considerable divide between the study of English Literature in the anglophone world and what might be
called ‘English as a Foreign Literature’. Focusing in most depth on the relationship between ‘domestic’
English Literature and German Anglistik, this article considers the challenges and opportunities
presented by increased mobility and exchange between differing conceptions of a discipline.
Keywords: travelling conceptsintellectual stylesEnglish language and literatureAnglistikinternational

literary and cultural studies
Notes
1 The recent interest in, for example, the relationship between the primarily German-speaking and
Dutch conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) and its relationship to the history of mentalités in France
and the history of discourses in English, would make an apposite case study (cf. Hampsher-Monk,
Tilmans and Van Free, 1998).
2 It is not insignificant in this regard that Bal's book is dedicated to the postgraduate students of the
Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and is written in English rather than Dutch.
3 It should be noted at the outset that this essay, concerned as it is with the way scholarly work takes
place in a nexus of social as well as linguistic and disciplinary relations, is very much indebted to
‘conference’ with others – however successfully the debt has been spent. I have drawn on numerous of
Ansgar Nünning's unpublished lectures and seminar discussions on the topic in addition to the works
cited, as well as on the many events he has enabled me to engage in. I have also been fortunate to have
had several illuminating conversations with Herbert Grabes on approaches to English literature in
Germany. Martin Kayman, in addition to the work cited in this study, gave extensively of his thoughts on
the topic by email. I also benefited from delivering an early version of this article for discussion at an
Institute of Ideas' Postgraduate Forum in London in January 2007, organized by Maria Grasso and James
Gledhill; and Birgit Neumann, not for the first time, carefully and patiently read earlier drafts of the work
in progress and gave generous feedback in numerous discussions of the topic.
4 The geopolitical background here is the concern that ‘Europe is lagging behind other higher education
systems in the world, notably the United States [of America] and Asia’ (European Commission, 2005: 2,
see also European Commission, 1999). The geopolitical questions raised in this pitting of a ‘Europe of
Knowledge’ as a competitor on the world economic stage, compelling as they may be, are beyond the
scope of this essay to assess.
5 The present study is written by a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study
of Culture in Gießen who studied previously at University College London (which recently set up a
Centre for Intercultural Studies); and, while university degree programme listings and rankings are
currently highly national in their focus (meaning that short of extensive international data research
there is no systematic way of quantifying the development of international centres, rendering the
following list somewhat idiosyncratic), we might also note several other graduate centres, programmes
and departments that have been established in the course of the last 10 years or so, including, for
example, in Germany, the International Center for Graduate Studies at Hamburg, Munich's department
of Intercultural Communication, and the International University of Bremen's programme in
Intercultural Humanities. The participating institutions in such networks such as the European Summer
School in Cultural Studies, ACUME (A Cultural Memory Network) and the Hermes International Seminar
in Literary Studies, though too numerous to list here, all demonstrate that the international context has
become a major component of institutional ventures.
6 We should note that this is a question Bal herself is very much concerned with, highlighted in the role
of intersubjectivity in her introduction to Travelling Concepts (2002: 13) and prominently cited in the
outline of the ongoing Travelling Concepts projects on her website (Bal, 2008).
7 The issue may of course be traced throughout the history of ideas. Freud's work on group psychology
is an obvious modern example, in which it ‘remains an open question’ as to ‘how much the individual
thinker or writer owes to the stimulation of the group in which he lives, and whether he does more than
perfect a mental work in which the others have had a simultaneous share’ (Freud, 1989: 20).
8 Such a comparative perspective on ‘Englishness’ need not be at the expense of a recognition of the
more subtle marks of conformity to and deviation from what Benedict Anderson (1983) famously
termed the ‘imagined community’ of a nation inherent within it. That is, we need not overlook the
intercultural implications of the general epistemological insight that, as Barbara Johnson (1982, x–xi) has
put it, ‘the differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt
and innocence) are … based on a repression of difference within entities, ways in which an entity differs
from itself’. It is true that we might read, say, George Orwell's essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’
(1974: 143–57) as an object lesson in a highly ‘English’ prose style and approach (Rule V of his guide for
using English is, after all, ‘Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think
of an everyday English equivalent’ (1974: 156). Yet it is also true that The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell,
2001) finds this Englishman travelling to the ‘foreign country’ (passim) that is the industrial North of
England (and with Orwell we are considering the case of a writer whose national background, though far
from limiting him to any simplistic patriotism, is relatively unproblematic; in the Britain of post-war
immigration, the situation becomes far more complex.) From both vantage points – the ‘distant’
comparative perspective and the ‘closer’ inspection of internal dissonances – it is the capacity to inhabit
the point of view with a sense of its specificity that prevents the perspective becoming coercively
hubristic.
Source : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13825570802708147?journalCode=neje20
Foreign Literature Studies

Scopus journals Arts and Humanities(all) Literature and Literary Theory
The scientific journal Foreign Literature Studies is included in the Scopus database. Based on 2020, SJR is
0.192. Publisher country is China. The main subject areas of published articles are Literature and Literary
Theory.
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Source : https://www.york.ac.uk/english/undergraduate/foreign-literature/

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Abstract

Keywords: travelling conceptsintellectual stylesEnglish language and literatureAnglistikinternational

Foreign Literature Studies

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