Literature in 3D or where is the culture in this text?

Abstract

"Literature in 3D or Where is the Culture in this Text?" suggests the teaching of one literary text per semester in Foreign Languages curricula, in this case Frank Wedekind's 1891 Spring Awakening, to excavate its intertextual references and to study its cultural context. The main text is read in the original, and the intertextual references are read in English. Although this is an unusual approach to teaching Foreign Languages and Foreign Language Literatures, students become engaged in their own development as readers and interpreters of literature and culture. At the end of the course, they are able to negotiate works and ideas that shaped not only German but Western culture. More importantly, they are highly motivated to study more literature in this manner and make it come alive.

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Teaching literature and culture in Foreign Languages constitutes an inseparable enterprise: first, because texts are primarily taught in the original and as such present the extensive linguistic codes of the foreign culture, including idiomatic expressions, syntax, phonetic impressions, and imagery. Second, because the contents of the texts theoretically convey epistemologies, personal and cultural histories, world views, and ways of life that differ significantly from most American students' personal experiences. In general, one currently finds a decrease of literature courses offered in Foreign Languages. After four years of instruction, students' foreign language proficiency often has not reached a level at which they can readily negotiate the complexity inherent to the canons of world literature. More importantly, contemporary students take an interest in more "practical" aspects of their language acquisition, such as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language and culture or a direct application of their foreign language expertise to their (other) major. Most faculty and programs have willingly responded to this change in demand, as joining their field with other areas in the college curriculum has saved enrollments and has fostered a more hands-on approach to language and culture teaching.

However, neither lack of language expertise nor a more inclusive interest in the foreign culture should hinder the inclusion of literary texts into syllabi. In fact, most instructors teaching languages and cultures usually enlist level-appropriate novels, stories, poems, and plays together with ample information and materials (films, images, the Internet, additional reading) about the cultural context to respond to the students' needs for more suitable linguistic challenges. The result is often a very impressive juggling act of managing the language with a plethora of cultural information on the part of the teacher and, on the part of the students, it often results in a learning experience verging on linguistic and cultural overload. Unfortunately, according to Virginia M. Scott and Holly Tucker, "[m]uch research has been devoted to teaching FL [Foreign Languages], however, comparatively little has been done to address the teaching of literature" (1). That is, in the field of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures, the research has been prolific on the teaching of language and culture, but it has yet to focus on the teaching of language and literature. Interestingly, the same seems to be the case for teaching English literature if the very recent appearance of a new journal about pedagogy with the appropriate title Pedagogy. Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture is any indication (2). Despite some helpful texts that facilitate a creative and engaging approach to the practical aspects of teaching language and literature (3), much remains to be done to produce effective and theoretically informed pedagogical methods for teaching literature and culture in Foreign Languages.

With this essay I describe the teaching of a hybrid course in German Studies that incorporates both a mixture of literature and culture and of German and English languages. I suggest the teaching of one literary text per semester to keep the students focused, to keep the language consistent and manageable, and to keep the analysis of literature and culture linked to this one example. Naturally, this one text requires careful selection, and for this course--originally a drama course--I chose the German writer Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Fruehlingserwachen or Spring Awakening. I decided to use a single text because it would serve as the cultural resource for additional readings. More precisely, I planned to excavate its cultural and intertextual references (literature, history, philosophy, art) for the purpose of determining and understanding the foreign cultural context for this particular work. The other works this text referenced were then to be read in English translation, not in the original.

This hybrid approach may strike some in Foreign Languages as odd, even counterproductive. After all, most in the profession aim to use only the target language in instruction in combination with authentic materials, that is, texts in the original. I decided to revisit an ancient and much-censured approach today, the grammar-translation method, and turn it on its head. Rather than read literature in the original and translate it word for word with a focus on grammar and followed, perhaps, with a discussion in the students' native tongue, the main text was to be read in the original, the discussion was to be in the target language, and the intertextual literary and cultural references were read in the students' native tongue but integrated into analysis and discussion in German. Although assigning one major text and exploring its intertextual and cultural references is quite customary in literature classes, the typical problem for the foreign language instructor is the simultaneity of the target language as the object of study and the means of study, at least within the North American educational parameters. Reading any canonical literary work would overwhelm the students as well as the teacher if additional texts of possibly greater linguistic difficulty and cultural complexity would also have to be read and discussed in the language whose more sophisticated facets are still to be learned. The hybrid approach is, above all, a compromise towards the acquisition of cultural competence. It challenges students at their level of foreign language proficiency without generating intimidation, it inspires them to use the target language critically, and it encourages students to step into the language to uncover what it represents, namely the complicated, multi-dimensional, and invariably intriguing aspects we generally call culture.

In the class I taught, students greatly benefited from and enjoyed this hybrid approach and such in-depth examination: in addition to established techniques of teaching literature such as staging in-class mini performances and engaging in varieties of character and plot analysis, students learned about the German school system (past and present), analyzed the text's political background based on videos and lectures, listened to contemporary music, and read excerpts from Goethe's Faust, from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Freud's writings, and even Euripides' The Bacchae to place the author, Frank Wedekind, and the play's protagonists within the cultural everyday of late nineteenth-century Germany. At the end of the course, students were able to maneuver competently in a period that was vivid and produced pivotal texts and debates; they realized that these texts and debates influenced and shaped not only German but Western culture and that they reached beyond literature into social studies, history, education, and philosophy. Notably, students became highly motivated to study more literature and foreign culture in this manner and make it come alive.

The Text

Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening is a popular text in German classrooms even now and is staged frequently by High School (Gymnasium) students. Its author met with considerable disapproval at the time of publication and beyond, and a list of the topics that take center stage clarifies why the play was censored in Wilhelminian Germany and remains significant in the twenty-first century. The protagonists are teenagers, plagued by the oppressions of insensitive parents, an authoritarian school system, and a reactionary society, and while the title refers to their sexual awakening, the subtitle, "A Tragedy of Youth," points to the inevitable clashes between the teenagers' awakening (and questioning and experimenting) and the adult world. Spring Awakening explicitly pinpoints reproduction, puberty, sexual fantasies, sexual intercourse, abortion; homosexuality, and suicide and, on a more "philosophical" level, analyses trends and issues such as skepticism, the search for the self, love, generational conflict, and youth psychology. Evidently, these topics still very much concern and occupy (international) youth today. More significantly, the play does not just lend itself to the discussion of topics with which each teenager can identify to some degree, but possesses a lyrical and literary quality that renders its analysis not just a lesson in social studies but an exploration of human expression and identity.

The intertextual and hybrid approach to the text facilitates this understanding by consulting the references the protagonists themselves bring into play. I use "intertextual" here in the straightforward sense defined by Judith Still and Michael Worton who propose that "[t]he theory of intertexuality insists that a text ... cannot exist as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and so does not function as a closed system" (4). They explain that a) the writer is a reader of texts and brings higher influences into the work and that b) the reader is a reader of other texts and employs higher knowledge or experience to interpret the text. In selecting the texts for this course, I limited myself to the references made by the author, or rather, the references made by the author through his characters. Nevertheless, the students themselves engaged in connecting the play to other material or experiences they had encountered and thus co-produced a current analysis of the play that represented their interpretive community, making this also an exercise in cultural comparison (5).

At this juncture, I would extend Virginia M. Scott and Holly Tucker's call for further research on the teaching of literature in Foreign Languages to include research on the applicability of literary theory to foreign language pedagogy. Reader-response criticism and terms such as "interpretive community" are but one aspect of how literary theory can inform the teaching of literatures and cultures. Incidentally, cultural studies and cultural theory have equally to add to the teaching of Foreign Languages, especially with respect to sociolinguistic competence. In the past, applied linguistics has paid attention to the functional theory of Roman Jakobson and to literary stylistics, but with intensifying requests for the teaching of culture in Foreign Languages and Literatures, pedagogues will also have to inform themselves about the interrelationship between theory and practice in those subject areas just as much as they are obliged to do so in the area of second language acquisition. In fact, teacher training curricula should integrate literary and cultural theory with linguistics and thus bring together what continues to be mutually dependent, as Peter Schofer reminds us: "Ironically, although a considerable amount of recent literary theory owes its success to linguistics and to linguistic models, only rarely have the models been translated into new approaches for teaching literature" (6).

In this class, reader-response criticism and theories of intertextuality added considerably to the soundness and success of the pedagogical goals, in particular, the focus on increasing cultural competence. Predictably, the inclusion of intertextual references made for a much richer fabric in the cultural tapestry that became the subject of the class and demanded the instructor's work in the theoretical areas to foster the students' engagement with a foreign text and culture with which they could not immediately identify. This tapestry was the foundation upon which Wedekind composed Spring Awakening and against which he directed his play. Yet, despite Wedekind's avant-garde, outre, and daring themes, the intertextual material he refers to is considered decidedly "classical" in the western canon, including the 1890s (except for Nietzsche). It is revelatory for today's readers (and was sacrilegious to his contemporary audiences), how he chose to interpret these works and employ them for his play. In what context, then, does he refer to which text or work? The characters Melchior and Moritz are classmates and friends, for example, both highly educated in (or inundated with) Classicism, and they look to those passages in their own reading which leave room for individual interpretation. Upon noticing that Melchior is reading Goethe's Faust, his mother is concerned that he does not yet understand such difficult "reading," implying that he may not grasp the sexual content of Gretchen's tragedy (she takes the life of her illegitimate child by Faust and is condemned to death). Melchior and Moritz understand quite well, however, as they understand the workings of their society; what is more mysterious to them is the passage "Walpurgisnacht" in Faust, which pedagogues often evaded at the time for its subversive and suggestive content. How are they to interpret this part if no one is willing to discuss it with them?

The Culture

Spring Awakening is packed with references like these. Given the predominance of classical literature and history in nineteenth-century German school curricula, the intertextual reading list could consist of Greek and Roman texts alone--in addition to biblical texts--to understand the educational background of middle and upper class Germans at the time. There are allusions to more recent authors and their works, including Friedrich Schiller, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Grimm brothers and indirect or veiled comments on the artistic, philosophical, and intellectual trends such as Friedrich Nietzsche's work. Additionally, there are numerous references to art, medicine, history, and objects of everyday life. In order to explore several layers of the cultural fabric, I decided to have students read excerpts from a text featured in the play (Goethe's Faust), a text that presented aspects of the author's beliefs and interests (excerpts from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy), and a text that turned the students into the teenagers in the play and connected with their curriculum--as well as with Nietzsche--(Euripides' The Bacchae). Several historical personalities, for example, the chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Nietzsche's teacher Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, provided cultural "signposts" to discuss the background upon which these texts were read (7).

It would require too much detail to describe how these texts and people interconnected with Spring Awakening. What proved remarkable for the students' discussion and analysis of approaching literature through culture and vice versa, was their fascination with the three-dimensionality of this approach. They read and analyzed a text in their foreign language major or minor, but they did not just filter and digest the words and the content; they actually delved into the characters and the topics to comprehend their significance and meaning from within the text and, eventually, from within the cultural period in which they operate. As a result and by following Moritz and Melchior's example, students learned to develop their own perspective and to build self-confidence in their interpretive approaches in addition to studying the "official" contemporary reading (Gretchen's tragedy versus the "Walpurgisnacht") of the intertextual references and the cultural moment. Spring Awakening provided the students with a glimpse into the German teenage culture of the 1890s the way Wedekind saw it--and, in fact, experienced it, if one judges by his autobiographical writings.

The Class

The class itself included a range of German students whose language proficiency and cultural expertise varied considerably. Some had already been to Germany; others had just passed their intermediate language requirement and had yet to take any literature and culture classes. The play posed considerable challenges for two or three of the students, and over the course of the semester I worked closely with them outside of our class meetings. The hybrid intertextual approach helped them gain confidence in their language acquisition skills because they could handle the workload of one text; it proved pivotal for their motivation to study the culture behind it. They attempted to comprehend not just the plot and the language, but studied the cultural elements that helped create the characters and put them onto a stage. Unsurprisingly, the students engaged in very creative final projects themselves, and the entire class argued (in the target language) about one student's video dramatization about today's youth. As another student summarized in his paper: "Every generation is faced with the same decisions and discoveries. It is part of the culture of time" (8). I propose that many literary texts would lend themselves to such an excavation of cultural references and that students' cultural competence, together with the level-specific language learning instruction, will improve considerably. It is literature where we find both language and culture in uniquely individual and artistic presentation, and it is through literature that students can explore how to express themselves and their culture. Literature in 3D may be one way to work in this direction.

Notes

(1) Virginia M. Scott and Holly Tucker, "Introduction," in Scott and Tucker, eds., SLA and the Literature Classroom: Fostering Dialogues, (Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 2001), p. xv.

(2) Pedagogy is published by Duke University Press and has been named Best New Journal 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

(3) For example, Joanne Collie and Stephen Slater, Literature in the Language Classroom. A resource book of ideas and activities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

(4) Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds., Intertextuality. Theories and practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 1.

(5) The term "interpretive community"--and the subtitle of this paper--allude to Stanley Fish's influential contribution to reader-response theory in literary criticism entitled Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Fish argues, roughly, that the interpretation or "reading" of a specific text is determined substantially by the social context that has conditioned the text's readers. For an extensive bibliography on the teaching of language, literature, and culture see Appendix A in Peter Schofer, Text as Culture.

(6) Peter Schofer, Text as Culture. Teaching through Literature and Language (Fort Worth: Harcourt College, 2002), p. 43.

(7) Freud's writings, of course, were a product of the age as Freud's work gained prestige later on. Alfred Kessler has examined, how Wedekind and Spring Awakening in particular influenced Freud's thinking in "Eine Anmerkung zu Freud und `Fruehlingserwachen'," in Elke Austermuehl, Alfred Kessler, and Hartmut Vincon, eds. Pharos I. Kein Funke mehr, Kein Stem aus Fmeher Welt. Frank Wedekind: Texte Interviews, Studien (Darmstadt: Verlag der G. Buechner Buchhandlung, 1989), pp. 37-54.

(8) My translation. Paul Tong, "Fruehlings Erwachen bei Texas A&M University." Final paper for German 485.

Anke Finger, University of Connecticut 

Finger is Assistant Professor of German. Most recently, she has published on film and on the cultural ambiguities of the "native speaker," and she is the editor of Vilem Flusser's The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, 2003 from the University of Illinois Press.