Forza Bottez

human contact with other cultures is ethnocentric-tendency to attribute specific characteristics to different societies
-everything that deviated from one’s own culture is ‘othered’ as odd, abnormal
-different nations have different characters
-this belief was active in the 18-th century, it became embedded in the comparative-historical paradigm in the 19-th century
and in the 20-th century The twentieth century showed,  first,  an  a-
critical comparatist preoccupation with registering and  describing  the
textual evidence of such national characterizations, and later an increas-
ingly stringent disavowal of national essentialism and national deter-
minism.

Swallow and Zapp even consider remaining permanently. The book ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room to decide their fates. The novel ends without a clear-cut decision. However, from the sequel Small World: An Academic Romance, Swallow and Zapp returned to their respective countries and domestic situations.
. The archeology leads
us to the cultural criticism of early-modern Europe which began, in the
tradition of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), to sort European cultural
and societal patterns into national categories, thereby formalizing an older,
informal tradition of attributing essential characteristics to certain national
or ethnic groups.
-Anti-Enlightenment cultural relativism, Herder-style, thus created an
ethnic taxonomy which saw .nation and .culture as the natural and funda-
mental, mutually interdependent units of humanity. This led to the rise of
the comparative  method  in  the  human  sciences.
-We  see  its  impact  in
anthropology, e.g. Humboldts vergleichende Anthropologie (in lieu of the older
pattern which had held, in undifferentiated, universalist terms, that .the
proper study of Mankind is Man.) and in language, where linguistic diffe-
rence was thematized by the Humboldts, Schlegels and Grimms, who felt
that each language was held to be the very breath of the nations soul,
characteristic identity and individuality.
-The philology of Jacob Grimm
extrapolated this ethnolinguistic identitarianism to literary history, which
was held to contain a record of the nations collective imagination through
the medium of its proper language. Jacob Grimms philology already used
arguments  of  national  character  and  national  identity  to  address  the
problems of the Stoffgeschichte of widespread themes (e.g., animal fables like
that of Reynard the fox) among different nations and language areas.
-philosophy of Fichte and Hegel, which held that  the
individuality of a nation, more than a mere .character (i.e. a salient singu-
larity in manners and customs), was in fact informed by a transcendent,
spiritual principle, an ontologically autonomous Volksgeist.
-The philological departments in the new, nineteenth-century universities
prototyped by Humboldts University of Berlin involved the twinning of
linguistics and literary studies (Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, .Lang-and-
Lit); similarly, the rise of Comparative Linguistics triggered the idea of a
Comparative Literature
-The  rise  of  literary  history-writing
(Wellek 1941; Spiering 1999) in these decades provides ample illustration:
.literature is seen first and foremost as the expression, through its proper
language, of a specific nationality; the natural and proper taxonomy of
literature is therefore by nationality and language (the two criteria were
used interchangeably), and the historical meaning of literature lies in its
way of manifesting and documenting the nations identity and its moral
and aesthetic world-view. Literary history is thus a form of studying the
nations true character as expressed in its cultural history
-This model culminated in the positivistic determinism formulated by
Hippolyte Taine in the theoretical introduction to his Histoire de la littrature
anglaise of 1863. Famously, Taine presented a cultural geometry in which
a given cultural artefact (in concreto,  a literary text) could be situated,
characterized and understood with reference to three defining parameters:
race, milieu and moment. All three of these had their own, un-argued presup-
positions. Moment is not merely a date or a chronology but rather  the
ambience of a Hegelian-style Zeitgeist: texts breathe a .spirit of the age, a
climate or mentality which is held (on unspecified  grounds)  to  be
characteristic of the period, and which thus anchors the text in, and also
instills it with, a particular, historically  situated  world-view.  Milieu is
explained by Taine in a similarly deterministic way: as the physical, geo-
graphical environment of which any given text must bear its traces. The
prime manifestation  of  milieu is climatological (.cold, .temperate and
.warm literatures), and thus invoked the entire array of stereotypes current
in the long-standing climatological theory of cultural-temperamental
difference (Zacharasiewicz 1977). Race, finally, speaks for  itself:  Taine
unhesitatingly sees texts as co-determined in their literary characteristics
by their authors physical ethnicity; the nature of the determination ob-
viously invoking the presupposition that physical ethnicity entails specific
moral and cultural particularities.
-their
approach is that of Stoffgeschichte, listing and tracing a given type of literary
preoccupation from text to text across succeeding generations. Stoffgeschich-
te can address many such precoccupations or themes (lovers parting at
dawn, incest, the Noble Savage, revenge, the dandy, Reynard the Fox), and
a given national type can be chosen as just another such theme. At its
worst, Stoffgeschichte is merely a thematic bibliographical track-record; at its
best, it can trace changing fashions, poetics, literary attitudes and cultural
values through the fil conducteur of a longitudinal theme across the centu-
ries, with all its constants and variables (
-The actual emergence of imagology as a critical  study  of  national
characterization could only take place after people had abandoned a belief
in the .realness of national characters as explanatory models.  Literary
scholars finally reached this stage in the years following the Second World
War
- the study, not of nationality per se,
but of nationality .as seen, as a literary trope
-In Guyards programme, the
analysis of the representation was divorced from the (politically conten-
tious and methodologically contaminating) reliance on a representandum.
Nationality could be studied as a convention, a misunderstanding, a con-
struct; something that resulted from its articulation as a representamen, which
was brought into being by being formulated; something which could
therefore be analysed in its subjectivity, variability and contradictions.
-The Wellek-imposed dilemma between .intrinsic. textual analysis and
.extrinsic. contextualization did much to paralyse Comparative Literature
worldwide.
-The ultimate implication here was that
images concerning character and identity are not mental representations
which are conceived by nations about nations but which, as articulated
discursive  constructs  circulating  through  societies,  are  constitutive  of
national identification patterns. Meanwhile, at the Nouvelle Sorbonne,
Daniel-Henri Pageaux continued a French preoccupation with imagologie,
much indebted to a L.vi-Straussian anthropology, as an imaginaire of per-
ceived characterological (and national-characterological) diversity (Pageaux
1981, 1983, 1988, 1989).
-Postcolonial theorists in the wake of Frantz Fanon
(Peau nore, masques blancs, 1952) and Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) began
to address the imposition of reputations and stereotypes as part of a
colonial power imbalance between hegemon and subaltern. Feminists and
scholars  in Womens Studies  thematized  the  relation  between  sex and
.gender and began analysing the latter as a cultural construct. Finally,
Ernest Gellners hugely influential study Nations and nationalisms (1983)
advanced its provocative central contention that.nations had been made
by .nationalism, not vice versa . that a sense of a primordial national
identity had been retroactively constructed by nineteenth-century ideolo-
gists as a sort of collective false memory  syndrome
- ad-hoc theorizing and contradictory nomenclature.
In the last twenty years, a fundamental realignment in literary studies
has taken place. By and large the old  philologies  have  seen  a  divorce
between linguistics and literary studies; and the older idea that historical-
comparative literary research was to underpin generalizing theories about
literature has also undergone a fission. .Theory is now a more self-suffi-
cient pursuit, relying less on extrapolations from the comparative use of
literary-historical  data  and  more  on  the  applicability  of  contemporary
cultural  philosophy  to  textual  interpretation.  The  historical  study  of
literature has grown closer  to  the  social  or  historical  sciences,  which
themselves have undergone a .cultural turn and show increasing interest
in literary
-Culture
was, unquestioningly, national culture, held a priori to be different from
other cultures and singled out by the nations underlying characteristic
individuality.

-Method

To begin with, Imagology, working as it does primarily on literary
representations,  furnishes  continuous  proof  that  it  is  in  the  field  of
imaginary and poetical literature that national stereotypes are first and
most effectively formulated, perpetuated  and  disseminated.
-What is more, that textual record is one long, continuous and volu-
minous proof that images work, obtain their effectivenes in the cultural and
communicative field, primarily because of their  intertextual  tropicality.
They are tropes, commonplaces, obtain familiarity by dint of repetition
and mutual resemblance; and in each case this means that whenever we
encounter an individual instance of a national characterization, the primary
reference is not to empirical reality but to an intertext, a sounding-board,
of other related textual instances. In other words: the literary record de-
monstrates unambiguously that national characters are a matter of com-
monplace and hearsay rather than empirical observation or statements of
objective fact.
-Third, literary sources, depending on their canonicity,  have  a  long
currency and topicality. Notions concerning a German character may have
been expressed in schoolbooks, journalism, cultural criticism and govern-
ment reports, but novels like Heinrich Manns Der Untertan (1918) or even
Jerome K. Jeromes Three men on the bummel (1900) have outlasted all such
more ephemeral sources. For a similar reason, a canonical text like Shake-
speares The merchant of Venice, with its Shylock-figure, may not only testify
to attitudes towards Jews at the time of its origin, but also, in its long-
standing reception history, provides an interesting track record of shifting
attitudes in subsequent centuries.
-Fourth, there is reason to assume, at least as a working hypothesis, that
literature (as well as more recent poetically-ruled and fictional-narrative
media, such as€cinema or the€comic strip) is a privileged genre for the
dissemination of stereotypes, because it often works on the presupposition
of a €suspension of disbelief and some (at least aesthetic) appreciative
credit among the audience.
-Imago-
logy is concerned with the representamen, representations as textual strate-
gies and as discourse. That discourse implicitly raises a claim of referen-
tiality vis-.-vis empirical reality, telling us that nation  X  has  a  set  of
characteristics Y, yet the actual validity of that referentiality claim is not the
imagologists to verify or falsify.
-The nationality represented (the spected) is silhouetted in the perspectival
context of the representing text or discourse (the spectant). For that reason,
imagologists will have particular interest in the dynamics between those
images which characterize the Other (hetero-images) and those which charac-
terize ones own, domestic identity (self-images or auto-images)
-7. Historical contextualization is also necessary. Literary texts cannot be
interpreted in  a  timeless,  aesthetic  never-never-land.  Historical  factors
must be taken into account when assessing, respectively, the Italian set-
tings in Ann Radcliffes and George Eliots novels. Class politics and re-
gional differences play into the English self-image of Evelyn Waugh and
John Osborne, respectively, or the Italian self-image of Giuseppe Tomasi
di Lampedusa and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
8. Recently, a pragmatic-functionalist perspective has also been urged.
What is the texts target audience? How is its rhetoric and deployment of
national tropes geared to this target-audience? Is there any evidence con-
cerning the texts reception and impact?

Britanic:

Changing Places is a comic novel with serious undercurrents. It tells the story of the six-month academic exchange between fictional universities located in Rummidge (modelled on Birmingham in England) and Plotinus, in the state of Euphoria (modeled on Berkeley in California). The two academics taking part in the exchange are both aged 40, but appear at first to otherwise have little in common, mainly because of the differing academic systems of their native countries.

The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very conventional and conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of life. By contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only agrees to go to Rummidge because his wife agrees to postpone long-threatened divorce proceedings on condition that he move out of the marital home for six months. Zapp is at first both contemptuous of, and amused by, what he perceives as the amateurism of British academia.

As the exchange progresses, however, both Swallow and Zapp find that they begin to fit in surprisingly well to their new environments. In the course of the story, both men have affairs with the other’s wife. But before that, Swallow even sleeps with Zapp’s daughter Melanie, without realizing who she is. She, however, takes up with a former undergraduate student of his, Charles Boon.

Swallow and Zapp even consider remaining permanently. The book ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room to decide their fates. The novel ends without a clear-cut decision. However, from the sequel Small World: An Academic Romance, Swallow and Zapp returned to their respective countries and domestic situations.

Britanic:Lodge’s two protagonists are cleverly drawn to personify what we have come to assume, rightly or wrongly, are national characteristics of the stereotypical Englishman and American.  Philip Swallow is a polite, mild-mannered, diffident fellow, who is introduced to us as a paradigm of the solid family man, devoted to his wife Hilary and their two young children.  As a professor of literature he is colorless and unexciting; he has been marking time at Rummidge in a dead-end teaching job, with little hope of a promotion, and is feeling bored and unfulfilled as he leaves for his new adventures in America.
Morris Zapp, by contrast, is a brash, swaggering, funny, lecherous academic, who has gained a world-wide reputation for being the premier expert on, of all things, the genteel writings of Jane Austen.  In a neat little jab at the hypocrisy of the literary world, Lodge lets us in on the fact that Zapp has written five scholarly books on Austen, despite the fact that he personally finds her writing something of a bore.  Morris reeks of academic hubris and has been such a relentless womanizer that his tough-talking feminist wife, Desiree, is about to give him the gate.
Lodge takes great fun in contrasting the direct, in-your-face American style of the brilliant and abrasive Zapp with the polite, rather oblique English style of the timid and self-effacing Swallow.  His message to the reader seems to be that English academia could use a few more free-wheeling Morris Zapp types
-Lodge also draws amusing parallels between his two faculty wives:  Hilary Swallow, as we first meet her, is, like her husband, a model of English rectitude and probity, if a bit dull and humorless – along the lines of the Queen herself.  Hers is a very British stiff upper lip, and she seems a shade too practical to be a wholly sympathetic character.  After she learns of her husband’s sexual flings in America, she vents her ire by letting him know that she has just spent a bundle on installing central heating in their perpetually damp and cold Rummidge home.
-By these few amusing lines, Lodge suggests to us that whereas spoiled Americans may take their creature comforts for granted, for the more deprived English middle class they are something devoutly to be wished for – and in the end perhaps even better than sex!
In contrast to the very repressed and correct Hilary Swallow, Desiree Zapp, like her husband, is a tough, no-nonsense American type who seems to have seen it all and done it all.  A disillusioned, wise-cracking feminist, she is not about to be taken in by anybody or anything, least of all by her cheating husband.  As we first meet her, she is embarked on a journey of self-discovery and self-awareness through the women’s liberation movement and her various encounter and consciousness-raising groups on the Euphoric State campus.  Of course, Lodge takes great fun in lampooning all of these American social phenomena of the 1960s and 1970s and the absurd jargon which they engendered; yet at the same time he hints rather broadly that stodgy old Rummidge (not to mention mother England) might have benefited from a little of the same.

American:

The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper
-The story takes place in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of the North American colonies. During this war, the French called on allied Native American tribes to fight against the more numerous British colonists.
In the Spring of 1757, Lieutenant Colonel George Monro became garrison commander of Fort William Henry, located on Lake George (New York) in the Province of New York. In early August, Major General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and 7,000 troops besieged the fort. On 2 August General Webb, who commanded the area from his base at Fort Edward, sent 200 regulars and 800 Massachusetts militia to reinforce the garrison at William Henry. In the novel, this is the relief column with which Munro’s daughters travel.
-On 7 August Montcalm sent to the fort under a truce flag to deliver Webb’s dispatch. By then the fort’s walls had been breached, many of its guns were useless, and the garrison had taken significant casualties. After another day of bombardment by the French, Monro raised the white flag and agreed to withdraw under parole.
-When the withdrawal began, some of Montcalm’s Indian allies, angered at the lost opportunity for loot, attacked the British column. Cooper’s account of the attack and aftermath is lurid and somewhat inaccurate. A detailed reconstruction of the action and its aftermath indicates that the final tally of British missing and dead ranges from 69 to 184,[6] although over 500 British were taken captive.
-The action takes place around Glens Falls in upstate New York. Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Munro, are traveling with a column of reinforcements from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry. In the party are David Gamut the singing teacher, and Major Duncan Heyward, the group’s military leader.

The Huron scout, Magua, offers to take the Monro party by a shorter route than that which the column must take. Unknown to them, Magua – who they believe to have been expelled from his tribe in disgrace – has been reinstated as chief and is a supporter of the French cause. Magua intends to lead the party into an ambush, but is foiled when they meet Natty Bumppo, also referred to in this novel as Hawkeye, and the two Mohicans, Chingachgook and his son Uncas, on the road.
-Magua flees and escapes the battle. Later, he returns with more Hurons and captures Cora, Alice and the two men. After a short chase, Natty Bumpo rescues them and Magua escapes once more. Heyward and Bumppo lead the Munro women to Fort William Henry, which is by now surrounded by the French. Munro aggrees to surender to the french under the conditions that they will leave with their honor and their flags. Montcalm agrees but his indian allies, one of whom is Magua, are
enraged by this and attack the british after leaving the fort. In the chaos of the massacre, Magua finds Cora and Alice, and leads them away towards the Huron village. David Gamut follows at a distance.
hree days later, Natty Bumpo and the Mohicans, Heyward and Colonel Munro follow Magua’s trail. Outside the Huron village, they come across David Gamut, teaching beavers to sing psalms. The Huron have not killed him as they will not harm a madman. Gamut tells them that Alice is in the village, Cora is in another village belonging to the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribe, and Magua has gone moose hunting. Heyward disguises himself as a French medicine man and enters the village with Gamut, intending to rescue Alice. Hawkeye and Uncas set out to rescue Cora. Chingachgook remains with Colonel Munro, who has become somewhat deranged as a result of events.
-Uncas offends the Huron, who tear off his clothing. They discover he has tattoos marking him as a great chief. Realising this, Tamenund accedes to all that Uncas asks, except that he says he cannot free Cora as it was Magua who brought her to the village. Magua reluctantly agrees to Uncas’s demands but announces his intention to keep Cora as his wife, and leaves the village. According to custom, Tamenund has agreed to give Magua a three hour head start. David Gamut finds his way to the Delaware village, and tells the group that he saw Magua and Cora return to the Huron village.

A battle breaks out between the Hurons and the Delaware, who are in three parties – one led by Hawkeye and Heyward, one by Uncas, and one by Chingachgook and Munro. Magua escapes with Cora and two of his warriors, and they seek to flee by a mountain path which has a precipitous drop on one side, but Cora stops on a rocky ledge and refuses to go further. Uncas attacks the Huron, but both he and Cora are killed in the fight. Natty Bumpo arrives too late, and shoots Magua.

The novel concludes with a lengthy account of the funerals of Uncas and Cora. The Lenni Lenape sing that Uncas and Cora will marry in the afterlife. Hawkeye does not believe this, but he renews his friendship with Chingachgook. Tamenund foresees that “The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again….”
-Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste. These are qualities, it is true, which do not distinguish all alike; but they are so far the predominating traits of these remarkable people as to be characteristic.

It is generally believed that the Aborigines of the American continent have an Asiatic origin. There are many physical as well as moral facts which corroborate this opinion, and some few that would seem to weigh against it.

The color of the Indian, the writer believes, is peculiar to himself, and while his cheek-bones have a very striking indication of a Tartar origin, his eyes have not. Climate may have had great influence on the former, but it is difficult to see how it can have produced the substantial difference which exists in the latter. The imagery of the Indian, both in his poetry and in his oratory, is oriental; chastened, and perhaps improved, by the limited range of his practical knowledge. He draws his metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice.
-Like nations of higher pretensions, the American Indian gives a very different account of his own tribe or race from that which is given by other people. He is much addicted to overestimating his own perfections, and to undervaluing those of his rival or his enemy; a trait which may possibly be thought corroborative of the Mosaic account of the creation.
-The whites have assisted greatly in rendering the traditions of the Aborigines more obscure by their own manner of corrupting names. Thus, the term used in the title of this book has undergone the changes of Mahicanni, Mohicans, and Mohegans; the latter being the word commonly used by the whites. When it is remembered that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the French, all gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which is the scene of this story, and that the Indians not only gave different names to their enemies, but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will be understood.

-Canadian:

Wiebe was born at Speedwell, near Fairholme, Saskatchewan in what would later become his family’s chicken barn. For thirteen years he lived in an isolated community of about 250 people, as part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian west. He did not speak English until age six since Mennonites at that time customarily spoke Plautdietsch (Low German) at home and standard German at Church. He attended the small school three miles from his farm and the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church.
-A Discovery of Strangers tells of the meeting of two civilizations – the first encounter of the nomadic Dene people with Europeans – in an imaginative reconstruction of John Franklin’s first map-making expedition in 1819—21 in what is now the Northwest Territories. At the heart of the novel is a love story between twenty-two-year-old midshipman Robert Hood, the Franklin expedition’s artist, and a fifteen-year-old Yellowknife girl known to the British as Greenstockings.
-Random House of Canada
-The novel is the work of a poetic mind, written in several voices: of the British explorers, of the Tetsot’ine people – named Yellowknife by the strangers – and, most unexpected of all, of the animals that live on the Barrenlands. Wiebe climbs inside the characters, bringing them and the North to life. “Most Canadians have never seen that landscape. Yet I see it as being at the centre of our national psyche. That’s the roots of our world, right there.” He began work on the novel in earnest following a canoe trip between the Coppermine River and the site of Fort Enterprize in 1988, when he was first enraptured by the landscape. The novel contains vivid images, such as stunning descriptions of caribou bursting through snow. In calling the Arctic ‘A Land Beyond Words,’ Wiebe admits how difficult it was to do it justice. “I think there’s always a total contradiction in even trying to do such a novel,” he said in an interview, “and yet it’s the very contradiction out of which any kind of artistic struggle must come. It’s not even worth trying if it doesn’t seem impossible.”
-In researching historical sources, Wiebe found letters, earlier accounts of the region such as those of Samuel Hearne, as well as oral stories and mythology told by the Dene elders. “I take the facts, as many of the facts as history gives me, and I use them to tell the story that I believe these facts tell us beyond themselves . . . . How did it happen, why did it happen, what was going on inside people’s heads while it was happening, why did they do what they did?” Franklin’s book on the first expedition contained a small paragraph mentioning Greenstockings as the most beautiful girl of the Dene, and a sketch of her and her father Keskarrah drawn by Robert Hood. Wiebe also discovered a claim made years later by one of the members of the team that Greenstockings had had a child by Hood (these facts are related in his book Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic). From these details, he created a powerful story of their union. “It’s imagination all right, but it has to be an informed imagination.”
-Discovery of Strangers is the springboard from which Wiebe sets out to vent all his pet peeves: European imperialism, the Christian faith, misogeny, chauvinism, and the fur trade. In true 90s fashion, he whines about all that’s wrong and how we’ve been screwed by others. His characters mouth the slogans of the politically correct – voyageurs are “paddle slaves”, the English are always “killing, killing, killing” animals.
-Rudy Wiebe’s writing is careful but not cautious, dense but almost painfully clear, sensual and never explicit. I loved this book: the ways Wiebe juxtaposed the Tsot’sine and British perspectives, acknowledging the arrogance of early Canadian explorers and yet allowing them their humanity. He writes people in all their complexity, their strengths, their poor choices, their assumptions and limitations.

A key theme is the specificity and limits of cultural knowledge, depicted through the metaphor of eating and the eventual death by starvation of many in Franklin’s expedition. One scene that particularly stands out is that of the Dene character Greenstockings feeding caribou stomach to Robert Hood, her British lover; probably the most erotic depiction of eating I have ever read.