Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion VIII:		Internationale wissenschaftliche Organisationen und International Scientific Community
Sektion VIII:		International Scientific Organisations and International Scientific Community
Sektion VIII:		Organisations scientifiques internationales et communauté scientifique internationale

Hans-Joachim Müller (Innsbruck)

German

French

Transnationality and Fragmentation in the Field of Romance Studies in a German-speaking Environment

0. My personal point of departure:

I am a tenured person firmly rooted in the Austrian university system. This means that for all decisions concerning the field of activity in the Department the professors, lecturers and students are responsible in equal thirds (Drittelparität).

But the most superior official office for allowances and decisions isn't the universities, but the Federal Ministry in Vienna. This prior information is extremely important for my following comments, because they set to demonstrate - just as in Germany -the precarious tension between university research and vocational training.

1. The Concept and History of Romance Studies:

Romance Studies is, in the broadest sense, the occupation with all cultural and civilization-related phenomena of those countries whose languages have developed over the centuries from Latin or Vulgar Latin, to the Latin languages of today. This doesn't concern "neo-Latin" languages at all, but languages that amalgamated at first in Europe, through the relevant geographical peculiarities, with Celtic, Slavic, Greek and many other elements. Through colonial expansion of the Romance -language countries and regions, especially in America, Africa and Asia, there were further unique developments and mixing with local as well as later with peoples imported as slaves. Essential here is that the final result isn't only a linguistic, but a generally cultural and also frequently ethnic synthesis that has led to completely new syncretic forms of life.

In German language usage, the concept "Romance Studies" (Romanistik) only came into fashion after the last World War. Previously the term here, as well as in the Latin countries up till today, most usually used is "Romanische Philologie" (filologia romanica, filologia romanza, philologie romane etc.). Its history commences at the beginning of the 19th century against the background of the historicism of the Romantic Movement with comparative language studies, especially with Franz Bopp (1791-1787), as well as the Brothers Grimm and the works of Friedrich Diez (1794-1876) with his "Grammar of the Latin Languages" (1836-42), which was followed by an "Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Languages". Parallel to this a start was soon made world-wide at universities with editing, completing and commenting of o;der texts in the Romance literatures with the primary aim of being able to define the previous state of language and its rules. Only slowly did a concept develop out of this, which, in addition, took whole cultural phenomena into consideration, which could have determined the written text. With modern linguistics, apart from the written text, the spoken language gains in importance and the synchronic is becoming serious competition for the diachronic way of looking at things. In addition to this separation of philology and linguistics that of philology and literary scholarship that uses from the sociological and psychoanalytical, extending to structuralist methods on a body of text, which ever increasingly also takes contemporary literature into consideration. This development in Romance Studies is the same as with Indogermanic Studies, German Studies and Slavic Studies, which came into being at the same time.

2. Romance Studies today:

In its basic idea, Romance Studies, as a philology of the 19th century, can offer a future-oriented model for transnational cultural studies. In reality, however, another path should be taken. On the one hand, continually increasing nationalism that allows particularly Romance Studies to become "Foreign Scholarship" in the German-speaking orbit and leads scholars in Latin countries to great skepticism, if not even to the idea of an unwelcome interference in their "internal affairs". The gaze of the foreigner thus becomes a danger and not a positive addition. On the other hand, the enormous volume worked upon and especially the course of careers at universities forces an increasingly narrow specialization, where the view fixed on minor details allows the encompassing overview to become lost.

In addition to this comes another difficulty for Romance Studies:

As English/American Studies (which had long since separated from German Studies, which for its part is mostly only "German Philology") can lead its transcultural studies of "the international dimensions of literatures in the English language" at least back to the basis of one language, even if there are a great number of language variants and mixtures.

Romance Studies should concern itself with at least 8 - 10 languages and a multiplicity of its variants, as well as with a number of dialects and literatures and cultural histories. That this isn't possible is self-evident, and so the traditional Romance Studies of the 60s settled on a maximum of 4 languages. With this foundation - and that of Latin - it is possible to passively understand further Latin languages without difficulty, as well as old texts with the appropriate cultural-historical education.

The reality of Departments of Romance Studies has, however, become completely different:

Specialization continues to increase, and initiatives for a global view are in the minority. Those directly suffering - but also co-responsible - are the students, who because of the timetables they help to draw up, mostly study one area of Romance Studies, and then also want to use it practically in a job. In this way, future academics are supposed to be guaranteed to fit smoothly into the existing school and work system, through which, the next generation is again kept away from the possibilities of transnational patterns of thought. But above all, the incorporation of these narrowly educated academics into the world of work no longer functions.

3.Opportunities and Dangers of Cultural Globalization:

Precisely as a literary scholar, one is constantly confronted with inherently multicultural texts of the "New Historical Novel", the theories of intertextuality, as well as the "Deconstruction" of the "Postmodern" connected to this. With all due respect to these texts and theories, they have nothing, but absolutely nothing to do with our theme. The arbitrariness of Postmodernism makes a fragmented mixture out of culture(s) and their epochs, a "Remix", to speak the language of popular music, without regard to temporal, geographical, cultural as well as ethic connections, obscures the actual problem of "International Cultural Studies": i.e. the portrayal of the historicity of the different cultural present, in order to, with the conclusion to be drawn, to be able to gaze into a distant (not Postmodern!) future. Perhaps exactly this cultural trend in the arts explains our task of serious debate concerning globalization.

To be able to consider the chances of a globalization of "International Cultural Studies", it appears extremely important to me to once again return to the sources from which the spirit of Romance Studies was born: Departing from the French Enlightenment, Friedrich Schiller held his famous inaugural lecture in Jena on 26 May, 1787 on the topic: "What does it mean and to what purpose does one study universal history?". In August 1792 Schiller was declared an honorary citizen by the French National Assembly. Following on this are the lectures of Fichte "Concerning the destiny of the scholar" (1794) and "Philosophiccal Thinkers". One could postulate the following: In the present situation of Romance Studies in the German-speaking area, young scholars are chiefly forced into the role of the mere bread-and-butter scholar, i.e. scholars who only work as much as necessary to obtain their job/position. The results of this are all too often narrowmindedness, envy, anxiety, as well as the regressive flight into adminstrative tasks. The "Philosophical Thinker" should, on the contrary, see the wider connections and communicate these. It doesn't, therefore, concern archiving the historical heritage and communcating purely factual knowledge, but it does concern throwing light on and comparing these facts and the basis of these facts.

A procedure such as this may not be an additive and descriptive "Landeskunde", but should lead to an understanding of the socialization individuals of the respective cultural areas in a "different symbolic history". The cultural-anthropological differentiation thus attempted is, however, only then possible and meaningful if one's own comprehensive socialization is compatible with its symbolic history and is largely "accessible". Only in this way is an acquisition and "translation" (in the broadest sense of the word) possible in our language: one only has to think of concepts such as "Nation", "Nacion de naciones", "Volk", "peuple" or "Einsamkeit", "soledad", "suadade". Romance Studies thus imples for all concerned, a debate with one's own society and its yardsticks, which especially in the field of the debate concerning Latin America and vast parts of Africa may lead to a dismantling of eurocentric arrogance.

		Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion VIII:		Internationale wissenschaftliche Organisationen und International Scientific Community
Sektion VIII:		International Scientific Organisations and International Scientific Community
Sektion VIII:		Organisations scientifiques internationales et communauté scientifique internationale