Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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Item Regards français sur l'Amerique: de l'entre-deux-guerres a la Guerre froide(2007-08-02) Dawley, Edward A; Verdaguer, Pierre M; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Regards français sur l'Amérique : de l'Entre-deux-guerres à la Guerre froide (French Perceptions of America: From the Roaring Twenties to the Cold War) examines the reactions of French intellectuals to various aspects of American culture and politics. Based principally on the writings of contributors to Les Temps modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945, this work will examine in great detail the aforementioned co-founders' impressions of the United States as well as the observations of many of Les Temps modernes' contributing writers. Moreover, this dissertation will compare and contrast the views espoused by the Les Temps modernes group with the depictions of the United States exhibited by French thinkers such as André Siegfried, Georges Duhamel, Vladimir Pozner, Frantz Fanon and Bernard-Henri Lévy. This work analyzes these writers' pronouncements on American cultural and political phenomena, including Puritanism, literature, music, race relations, and anticommunism. In light of the above, this dissertation may be considered a study in transcultural perception and the epistemological pitfalls said perception poses. In this regard, people generally judge foreign cultures through the prism of preconceived notions derived in large part from their native culture. This prism, in fact, is a metaphor for the "barriers of otherness" that come into play whenever the act of transcultural perception takes place. This study will examine the effects of these barriers of otherness on the French observers' appreciation of the United States by placing their findings somewhere along a sliding scale ranging from the most objective to the most subjective. The articles by Philippe Soupault and Claude Roy are examples of a relatively objective appraisal of the checks and balances inherent in the way the so-called puritanical moral code is maintained in American society (Chapter 1). At the other end of the scale is the Temps modernes group's totally subjective conjecture on the Rosenberg affair, sparked in large part by the group's Communist sympathies and its stance against the American government (Chapter 5). This study will conclude with a discussion on the varying degrees of certitude associated with various modes of transcultural perception.Item Mimetischer Zauber: Die englischsprachige Rezeption deutscher Lieder in den USA, 1830-1880(2005-04-22) Hadamer, Armin Werner; Frederiksen, Elke; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The English-language reception of German songs in the United States was a textual practice that extended across many social contexts in the 19th century. Translation, adaptation and circulation of these songs were a form of rhetorical and quasi mimetic representation that helped various American discourses constitute their worlds and identities (Transcendentalism, reform movements, revivalism, education, popular culture, political parties and the Civil War). Homi Bhabha's concept of the "Third Space" is a valid approach to the reception as these discourses made German songs part of their negotiations of American national identity, class, moral values, gender, and ethnicity, thus creating their own usable as well as ambivalent German point of reference. German and American cultures did not simply coexist in symbiotic relations. Rather, as the reception shows, they constructed their identities and differences through multiple intertextual relations within a shared discursive sphere of song. Cultural transfer was thus as much an inside as an outside phenomenon. The dissertation builds on extensive archival research and a collection of several hundred German songs, each with melody and English text, ranging from the Classics, Romanticism, the Napoleonic Wars, to German, Austrian and Swiss folk songs. The main objective is to move the American reception of German songs from its hidden archival existence into the light of scholarly investigation by applying an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies approach. The dissertation uses Michel Foucault's discourse analysis to refine this approach methodologically, demonstrating with an in-depth archeology the discursive function of the songs within their contexts. Two results of this analysis are crucial. First, it goes significantly beyond the existing scholarship on German-American relations in the 19th century (New England Transcendentalists, immigrant history) as it explores the German within the wider contexts of American popular culture. Second, by doing so it reads these relations against their scholarly and collective narratives, sharing Walter Benjamin's emancipatory vision of history as a site of potentially many readings. In addition, the dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of German literature within the historical, cultural and interdisciplinary contexts of German Studies.