Nina Berman has made a number of excellent points about the advantages
of transnational perspectives and the necessity of undertaking
interdisciplinary work in order to access and use such perspectives. Yet
we are precisely at an institutional crux regarding the training of the
next generation of scholars in North America. Both Carleton and McMaster
Universities in Ontario have closed down their modern literature and
language programs, shifting to a service-teaching model that sees
low-cost adjuncts teaching modern langauges at the undergraduate level
only. One of the primary requisites of the kind of transnational work
Berman discusses is expertise at a level beyond intermediate skills in a
contemporary foreign language: on must become something of an expert on
the literature and culture, or history, or whatever, articulated in that
other language (besides, say, German, in this context): thus a scholar
of German history or literature in the 18th century must not merely find
out about French philosophy and literature in the 18th century via
English-language scholarship, but become expert enough in 18th-century
French to access the primary materials herself. Adjuncts teaching on
piece-work will hardly be able to provide the necessary skills or range
of knowledge to graduate students training to work on German Classicism
or 18th-century German history. Just as the rich university
infrastructure of  scholars of foreign languages and literatures is
starting to unravel, we begin to discover how much more useful it could
have been--or could yet be. I have watched, passively perhaps, yet
essentially as an outsider without 'intervenor status', as the language
and literature departments in my own large public university have been
trimmed, amalgamated, and now finally redirected from 'full-service'
centres for the study of (admittedly inadequately, nationally defined)
cultures/literatures/languages into an essentially ahistorical
conglomerate of scholars working on disparate contemporary issues.

Beginning language courses are taught, as ever, largely by graduate
students and sessionals. There is no-one left to teach my graduate
students medieval German or French--I have to do that myself. Thank
goodness Latin is thriving in my department! We are all guilty of having
said too little and done too little while literature and language
departments shrink and give up their traditional fields of expertise.

I strongly agree that for German polities up to perhaps 1960, the
transnational culture of Christianity is an essential part of (most)
German identies--just as Religious Studies departments are shrinking,
and positions in 'old-fashioned' areas like the history of Christianity
are especially endangered! This all sounds a bit like 'let's hold the
line on the old humanities'--and that's not my message. But if we do
discard the 'old humanities' wholesale, as is happening in many places,
we won't have a chance to produce new, less 'eurocentric' disciplinary
formations--including transnational ones--at all, at least not for our
fields.

I would like to add a few technical points to Berman's survey.

Transnational studies can direct our attention to what might seem like
the fringes of 'German studies'. Berman claims that there was no
significant adoption of German outside Europe. This reproduces another
tendentious division in the profession: 'American' versus 'European'
history/literature/studies. The German-language printing presses,
newspapers, bilingual (German-English) schools, churches, sermons,
catechisms, clubs and advertisements and popular culture of the American
mid-west and southern Ontario up until 1917 was a very large 'colonial'
German presence--within non-German nation-states. The jingoistic
suppression of German as the default second language for educated North
Americans of whatever background, and of German as a first and
primary-school language for millions of Americans, mainly
mid-westerners, blinds us to its importance in North America before
1917. American historians generally cannot read German, but defend the
German-speaking history of North America from incursions from
'Europeanists'. The categories of the nation-state prevent transnational
work here too. And even today, the active use of German by hundreds of
thousands of Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites and post-war immigrants
escapes the notice of most 'Germanists'--and the continued presence of
Yiddish in many countries is another matter (I have heard traditional
Jews speaking Yiddish at one end of the West Edmonton Mall, and
Hutterites speaking German at the other).

Andrew Colin Gow, Ph.D.
University of Alberta

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS