Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion II:		Transformation alter wissenschaftlicher Institutionen
Section II:		Transformation of Old Scientific Institutions
Section II:		Transformation dans les anciennes institutions scientifiques

Alexandr W. Belobratow (St. Petersburg) [BIO]

German

French

Transformation of the Subject: On the Role and Meaning of Cultural Studies for Departments of Literary Studies in Russia

The considerable social change being experienced in the West and the East and which one tries to describe and explain in the most different ways, exercises its direct effect on Literary Studies as a subject, whereby the subsequent discussions running parallel to this or resultant transformations respectively, are on the one hand, to be traced back to the unavoidable historical permanence of the developmental processes in the Arts and, on the other hand, to the immanent qualities or lack of qualities of scholarship in the study of language. The most vigorously debated problems, especially in recent years that point to a crisis of legitimacy in Literary Studies (from the historical perspective, not for the first and perhaps not for the last time either). These impact particularly strongly on the side of institutions, i.e. principles, structures and organisational models of education in literary scholarship and research, which should guarantee the (social) usefulness of the acquired qualifications and skills.

One asks if the study of literature shouldn't be replaced by the communication of basic language skills, the usefulness of which can be sold on the academic market. One considers if "German Studies is still a philology with its own canon, or will it transform itself into German Cultural Studies or into a dwarf of Comparative Literature"(Hartmut Böhme). One fears that a "Literary criticism that continues to remove the ground from under its own feet and rather do the business of historians, sociologists, political scientists, psychoanalysts and ecologists, instead of analyzing literary texts, will sooner or later lose the basis of its existence" (Walter Hinderer). Literary scholarship turning to the practices and discourses of artistic studies, makes one suspect that literary texts no longer count as "privileged objects", but must be treated as only one area of cultural objectivization among others.

In the Russia of the 1990s the broad methodological field with its Babylonian confusion of languages and methods appears to be intertwined with the wretched institutional and economic situation and the extraordinary expansion of perspectives and accelerated processes of integration into the international Science Community. Within this context of "an eternally interwoven surface", where "everything has already become non-narrative and no longer follows a 'thread'"(Musil), the concept of "Cultural Studies"( in Russian one uses the not very beautiful but rather precise word: Culturology) plays a particular role, because this denotes the area of teaching and research, itself also an eternally interwoven surface, presenting itself somewhat like a "rhizome".

There are three areas of concern to be emphasized in the new situation in Russian literary scholarship. In the first instance, it concerns overcoming the pervasive monologism of Soviet literary scholarship, which strictly negated any form of pluralism of method and cultivated, within the system of "School-University-Literary Research/Literary Criticism", the "Superstructure-Basis-Model", the Theory of Reflection and the ethically class-oriented belief in progress and objectivism. The perspective of Cultural Studies already appears to be useful for the simple reason that the variety and complexity of differing cultural images contributes much to the enrichment of that which is fixed in literary texts in different ways and the interpretation of the state of the world at the moment and its observers. The (previously overwhelmingly dominant) socio-historical perspective can be retained, but also most strongly relativized, in that Art History, History of Philosophy, the Natural Sciences, Psychology, Music, The History of Thought etc. can be integrated into the research programme of Literary Studies.

In the situation of the flood of information (poured onto the dry and arid ground are streams of the psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, feminist, multicultural, system theoretical and many more, in an often chaotic form of representation, sometimes in translations that couldn't stand up to even the kindest examination or in the renderings of fluent mediators, who aren't always true to the word or the sense). Secondly, one runs the risk of changing from the old into a new monologism in the face of threatening disorientation and becoming lost, with regard to the postmodernist "anything goes". Here, too the question posed by Cultural Studies appears to have a silencing effect and could serve as a possible transition to a pluralist model of Literary Studies in education and research.

Thirdly, the "multilingualism" inherent in Cultorology appears to be a good incentive for doing away with the absolute concentration of every (here: Russian) national philology on a language of culture through polyglot efforts and to discover interdisciplinary and intercultural fields of learning and analysis. To put it in Robert Musil's words: "It is a characteristic of culture that the human being most deeply mistrusts people living outside his own cultural circle (...). Finally, the thing only exists through its boundaries and in so doing through a, in a certain sense, hostile act against his environment". Thinking and learning in literary scholarship in its thought transcending subject and culture can make the boundaries transparent and uncover the "hybridity" of the cultures which stand in a permanent systemic connection and do not depict completely isolated phenomena.

The often prophesied danger of dilletantism can be avoided through reflecting back on the Intercultural and Cultural Studies potential from the beginnings of Russian literary scholarship and the consistent orientation toward the literary work as the point of departure for research and teaching.

		Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion II:		Transformation alter wissenschaftlicher Institutionen
Section II:		Transformation of Old Scientific Institutions
Section II:		Transformation dans les anciennes institutions scientifiques