An Introduction to Intercultural Negotiations in the Americas and Beyond
By Barbara Buchenau and Marietta Messmer

Armin Paul FRANK
On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations
Abstract: In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations," Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources. This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From a comprehensive perspective, this is how the history of literature -- which differs from, but is not unrelated to, the history of literary life -- is being made: Not intra-nationally nor in the context of an indiscriminate internationality but within configured sets of more or less closely connected literatures that change throughout time. In order to outline the internationalist making of American literatures and to compare typically American configurations of interliterary processes, Frank presents a number of such interliterary configurations.

Frank LAUTERBACH
British Travel Writing about the United States and Spanish America, 1820-1840:
Different and Differentiating Views
Abstract: In his article, "British Travel Writing about the Americas, 1820-1840: Different and Diffentiating Views," Frank Lauterbach analyzes representations of the United States and South America in British travel writing of the post-Monroe years. His analysis rests on examples from two travelogues by Basil Hall, written in 1824 and 1829, respectively. Lauterbach discusses three related points: 1) Intent on overcoming the colonial affiliation with Anglo-American culture, British travelers try to establish a clear (romance of) difference between themselves and the United States, they employ a post-colonial rhetoric that stresses the strangeness rather than likeness of America; 2) Ironically, US-American responses to Basil Hall's work refute such claims of difference and, in turn, re-assert British hegemony through a colonial rhetoric designed to leave sameness between both countries virtually transparent; and 3) In contrast to their differentiating view of the United States, British writers approach South America with a different objective: Here a colonial rhetoric both enhances their self-identification and parallels neo-colonial interests by making the Other recognizable and easily penetrable despite its (thus neglected) differences. Lauterbach proposes to view colonial and post-colonial representations or narrations of alterity as a potentially neutral duality in discourse since both rhetorics can equally well emerge in writings from the (former) imperial metropolis and ex-colonial periphery.

Annette PAATZ
The Socio-Cultural Function of Media in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Abstract: In her article, "The Socio-Cultural Function of Media in Nineteenth-Century Latin America," Annette Paatz explores the function of the review genre in the context of Latin American nation building. Paatz focuses, on the one hand, on the genre's nationalist purposes and, on the other, on the appropriateness for intercultural communication. Drawing on the concept of mediated communication as social practice in the context of media cultural studies, Paatz analyses the reviews as representations of nineteenth-century Latin America's negotiations of transatlantic and thus intercultural relationships. She highlights the pragmatic ways in which Latin America utilized European media products in order to increase the flow of information and to sustain a Latin American pan-subcontinental communication. This fact suggests that the often noted importance of Paris as the cultural center of the Western world throughout the nineteenth century can be described in terms of the medial support it offered to Latin American nations in their claim for and building of cultural identity. By considering the conditions of production as well as reception, Paatz pays attention to cultural biases inherent in media communication between Europe and Latin America.

Marga GRAF
Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural Self in Présence Africaine
Abstract: In her article, "Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural Self in Présence Africaine," Marga Graf investigates some of the difficulties African, American, Brazilian, and Caribbean Blacks of the mid-twentieth century encountered in their attempts to voice their cultural and racial self-understanding, a self-understanding struggling to a large extent to challenge the established dichotomy between black racial inferiority versus white superiority. After the Second World War, black intellectuals meeting at the Sorbonne in Paris founded the journal Présence Africaine, a journal that became the voice of blacks investigating their history and culture throughout the different regions of Africa as well as diasporas worldwide. In Présence Africaine, well-known black writers, poets, and intellectuals joined hands with white authors, most of them French writers and intellectuals, in a common endeavor to support the formation of a new cultural, historical, and political identity of and for blacks. Focusing on the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s, a time of multiple struggles for political independence, Graf explores the journal's material with regard to major regional differences in the processes of black identity formation and in the interpretation of négritude as a concept supporting blacks in their search for the roots of their identity.

Josef RAAB
El gran viejo: Walt Whitman in Latin America
Abstract: In his article, "El gran viejo: Walt Whitman in Latin America," Josef Raab examines the role and relevance of Walt Whitman within Latin American poetry. It is observed that since the publication of José Martí's essay of 1887, "El Poeta Walt Whitman," Whitman has been a prominent figure in the literary imagination of Latin America. While Martí lauded Whitman as a prophet, his reception in the Americas is far from homogeneous, however. Raab's study addresses ways in which some of the more prominent Latin American poets -- José Martí, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vinícius de Moraes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz -- have re-fashioned Walt Whitman. Further, Raab argues that the reception of and response to Whitman illustrate that we can think of Whitman as a kind of Rorschach test: The ways in which he is being read and employed by Latin American writers reveal more about his readers than about him. Depending on their own poetic and political agendas, Latin American poets pick up (approvingly or disapprovingly) divergent aspects of Whitman’s sometimes contradictory positions, thus constructing their own versions of Whitman and integrating them into their own poetic imagination and practice. The heterogeneous appropriations of Whitman by Latin American poets underline the vitality and polyvocal quality of Whitman's work and the continuing appeal of the man whom Darío called el gran viejo.

Marietta MESSMER
Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography
Abstract: In her article, "Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography," Marietta Messmer analyzes the ways in which contemporary histories of American literature -- members of a discursive formation that has traditionally privileged a nationalist paradigm -- position themselves in the context of current debates on constructions of post-national cultural identity. Concentrating on the changing conceptualizations of the term "American" employed in these literary histories, Messmer traces briefly the major shifts in historiographical negotiations of American interliterary and intercultural relations throughout the twentieth century. Messmer discusses the ways in which American histories of literature move from an earlier -- albeit reductionist -- interest in defining American literary identity through difference (manifesting itself in attempts to disaffiliate American literary texts from their transatlantic, and in particular their British, contexts) toward a seemingly more inclusive focus on American literature's intracultural diversity and polyvocality. Ultimately, however, Messmer argues that, to a large degree, the current historiographical emphasis on intra-American pluralism is all too frequently accompanied by new attempts at establishing (a revised version of) historiographical nationalism. In this sense, transatlantic disaffiliative and intra-American pluralist constructions of identity can be interpreted as two versions of American cultural and literary nation building.

Barbara BUCHENAU
Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography
Abstract: In her article, "Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography," Barbara Buchenau points towards problematic processes of selection and narrative positioning at work in historiographical studies when analyzing and synthesizing early American frontier fiction. Apart from selecting only a small number of literary texts from the large pool of frontier fiction, these over-arching narratives tend to reduce the meaning of the literary works selected to those characteristics that are understood to be of importance for the emerging national literature. Concentrating on two novels long excluded from the American canon, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), Buchenau argues that even literary histories that aim at a depiction of the diversity characterizing the American literary landscape find it difficult to incorporate novels that either, as in the case of Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, find fault with certain established myths (the American West as virgin land; unsubdued nature as pitiless danger zone), or, as in the case of Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, deconstruct both the heroic implications and the perceived optimistic consequences of a mythic metaphor (the frontier’s privileging of the survival of the fittest, its suggestion of a glorious national future).

John NEUBAUER
Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence
Abstract: In his paper, "Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence," John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas Llosa's 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauer's article looks at Vargas Llosa's work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and urbanity and on the problematics of the concept and workings of peer groups while stylistically the texts show their authors' experimentation with new narrative forms.

Angela M. SENST
Regional and National Identities in Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's Criticism
Abstract: In her essay, "Regional and National Identities in Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's Criticism," Angela M. Senst analyzes Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's criticism in order to explore their different concepts of culture and to determine their respective regional and national identities: While both poets stress the necessity of unified cultural entities, Frost is deeply committed to the American principle e pluribus unum, whereas Eliot disapproves of internally heterogeneous societies that strive to level out differences which he considers a prerequisite for the mutual revitalization of cultures. Instead, Eliot promotes the idea of intercultural exchange, whereas Frost credits the experience of immigration with producing and continuously revitalizing the American culture. Considering New England the cradle of the cultural and political American nation, Frost is convinced that his regional loyalty is the foundation for his national loyalty. T.S. Eliot, however, considers a cultural nation to be an organic, and not an artificial, structure. Consequently, he can become a naturalized British citizen without giving up his cultural loyalties to the regions of his childhood and youth, while denying America, as the product of colonization, its claim to being not only a political, but also a cultural nation.

Krzysztof KOWALCZYK-TWAROWSKI
Southern American Regional Sensibility versus the North
Abstract: In his paper, "Southern American Regional Sensibility versus the North," Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski investigates some key myths underlying the culture of the American South. Kowalczyk-Twarowski discusses the issue of national versus regional sensibility in early statesmen and writers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Fitzhugh,  and John C. Calhoun. Starting with the mythology that evolved about North-South relations in the wake of the Civil War, Kowalczyk-Twarowski delineates some steps in the construction of regional feeling. In his analysis of the latter, Kowalczyk-Twarowski argues that the romanticized image of the South is a product of Northern needs for an antidote to the fast pace of change which swept America in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Using the examples of the 1930 anthology I’ll Take My Stand and The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy, Kowalczyk-Twarowski shows how Southern mythology resists change and supports self-defensive passivity instead.

Eugenia SOJKA
Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry
Abstract: In her article, "Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry," Eugenia Sojka explores contemporary English-Canadian feminist avant-garde and language-focused writing and its intertextual linkages with American Language Poets. Texts of English-Canadian feminist writers such as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, and Gail Scott are read with reference to ideas and techniques inscribed in the writing of Ron Silliman, Charles Berstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman. Sojka focuses first on the socio-historical dimension of the writing and proceeds to the exploration of several discourses inscribed in the texts of writers associated with both groups. Their texts return to the politics and aesthetics of the historical avant-garde and reincarnate the spirit of carnival. They re-read earlier female avant-gardes, carnivalize monologic concepts of language and writing, experiment with the "new sentence" and interartistic projects, and carnivalize the traditional concept of the genre. While Canadian writers engage in the re-reading of American feminist avant-garde, their focus is on the Canadian socio-historical and political situation. What distinguishes Canadian language writing from other international avant-gardes is their intertextual dialogue with Québécois-Canadian feminist writers and the intense work on language closely linked with the complex and problematic nature of Canadian identity in a post-national and globalized world.

Terence MARTIN
From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity and Revenge in American Writing
Abstract: In his article, "From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity and Revenge in American Writing," Terence Martin argues that one of the basic narrative patterns in American writing is that of revenge for the violation of innocence. Martin explores in his study Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, Brian Garfield's Death Wish, and John Grisham's A Time to Kill, texts in which ambiguities of the pattern are expressed in a dramatic and disquieting fashion. After brutality to innocent victims precipitates the action, each of these novels identifies predators and revenge figures and thus sets in motion an escalating spectacle of retribution. Typically, predators are drawn from groups society views with disdainful hostility -- Indians in the frontier setting of Nick, nameless and vicious "bad guys" in the New York of Death Wish, or rednecks in the Mississippi locale of A Time to Kill. Set against such antagonists are the avengers, frequently fathers who become obsessed with the need to destroy the destroyer. As the selection of predators reveals social biases and frustrations, so the actions of the avenger manifest a need to get even for something no longer possessed. Additionally, as part of a fascinating sub-drama in these novels, the avenger tends to become the creature of his obsession; he is thus prone to resemble the predator in unsettling ways.

Roland HAGENBÜCHLE
Living Together as an Intercultural Task
Abstract: In his article, "Living Together as an Intercultural Task," Roland Hagenbüchle explores the multi-faceted challenges we face in a multicultural world. At the same time, he refers the reader to a survey of recent studies indispensable to an informed investigation of this topic. After analyzing the various options for coming to terms with life in multicultural societies and paying special attention to John Rawls' global model of justice as fairness and Martha C. Nussbaum's concept of a good life (based on the capability model), Hagenbüchle advances the transcultural concept of personhood as a non-hegemonic starting point for a dialogic intercultural exchange. Surprisingly enough, the correspondences of values among otherwise widely differing cultures tend to converge in the form of a common human ethos, thus strengthening our trust in a peaceful coexistence of peoples and (hopefully) laying to rest the ghosts of an inevitable and close-to-apocalyptic "clash of civilizations" (Huntington).

Bibliography

Barbara BUCHENAU and Marietta MESSMER
Selected Bibliography for the Study of Interculturality in the Americas: Theories and Practice