Critical Issues in Foreign Language Instruction

Ellen S. Silber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780824044329
• eBook ISBN: 9781135766290
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1991. This is Volume 22 of the Source Books on Education series. Politically speaking the study of foreign languages and cultures helps maintain a strong competitive position in an increasingly global marketplace. It was hard to imagine in 1957 that the launching of a Soviet rocket would push the United States into its greatest investment ever in foreign language education. As American policy-makers attempted to play catch-up with our brothers and sisters behind the iron curtain, this country infused federal dollars into extensive foreign language teacher training and the creation of new foreign language educational programs. As suddenly as federal support was given, however, so was it taken away; and its withdrawal was responsible for one of the darkest periods in the history of foreign language education in America. Drawing on the expertise of a number of the nation's most experienced and creative foreign language educators, this volume, edited by Ellen S. Silber, addresses some of the crucial problems we face in foreign language education today.

Resetting the Margins: The Outsider in French Literature and Culture¹

Elissa Gelfand

Mt. Holyoke College

“Nowhere is one more an outsider than in France... And yet, nowhere is it better to be an outsider than in France.”²

“Marginality”: a term that presupposes a dynamic between the center and the margins, between what is integrated and what is “other.” As a category for research or pedagogy, “marginality” is now being used to reevaluate the traditional study of most national literatures and cultures. Critical of the narrowness of standard courses and approaches, some scholars are pressing for greater inclusiveness in area-studies curricula. They are in part imbued with the concept of “otherness” central to contemporary continental theory; they also point to the historical reality of marginality, an undeniable cultural fact of concern to our increasingly diverse student body. Further, the analytic viability of “marginality” itself is currently the subject of hot debate. In the arena I know best, French studies, some scholars (like myself) see marginality as a useful tool not only for dismantling the persistent myth of a coherent French cultural heritage, but also for making explicit the politics of reading and teaching literature. Others, however, reject the concept as a false reification of human experience which, more dangerously, only reinforces the “otherness” of social and literary outsiders. The debate might be viewed as between those who subscribe, albeit with reservations, to a traditional binary or “‘interest model,’ which construes canons ‘as the expression of the interests of one social group or class against those of another’”³ and those for whom adopting that model is “to deny process” and “inevitably to become involved with the law”—that is, with the destructive oppositional concepts (e.g., masculine/feminine, active/passive) on which western thought and culture have been based (Jardine and Menke, 231). This paper will attempt to navigate somewhere between these two positions in its presentation of the theoretical and practical questions surrounding marginality.

Marginality has also emerged as an ancillary issue of the current quarrel over the “new historicism,” or the interdisciplinary methodology that studies history as “a construct made up of textualized traces assembled in various configurations by the historian/interpreter” (Howard, 23–24, her emphasis)⁴ and all cultural “texts” as the products of dynamic processes. An outgrowth of Michel Foucault’s structural approach, especially in his Histoire de la sexualité,⁵ in which the human subject is viewed as fragmented and incoherent and relationships of power as constantly producing social inequalities, the new historicism renounces “the illusory quest of an older historical criticism to recover objective, authentic, or stable meanings” (Montrose, 305). But, the new historicism is being challenged by feminist and minority scholars who claim its generalizing frameworks deny the concrete political, economic, and social differences brought by race, sex, class, and ethnicity. It focuses, they argue, on “the public and political over the private and domestic” (Boose, 738) and on the discourse of the dominant culture alone, thus displacing the material elements that constitute the identities of “otherness.”

My position on marginality is both a political and a strategic one. As a feminist, I believe in the agency of authors and historical subjects and in the interpenetration between cultural and literary texts. And, as teacher and scholar, I believe that acknowledging otherness means attending to alternative forms of historical action and subjectivity. I also speak as a teacher for whom the demands of undergraduate course syllabi preclude in-depth excursions into theoretical terrain. What is more, I believe that reading works by marginal groups can have important ethical consequences: having students enter life experiences different from their own encourages a kind of imaginative empathy. That is, to really make sense of textual otherness, students must dislocate themselves and read beyond what they know; they must, in relation to Vetranger, “be in his or her place, which is tantamount to thinking and making oneself other to oneself’ (Kristeva, Étrangers 25, her emphasis).

Because choosing texts for courses or research is an exclusionary act, making the criteria of choice visible helps students and readers themselves participate in demystifying the selection process. That is, studying French culture self-consciously makes palpable the fact that all aesthetic judgments are socially grounded—it was people who chose what was and wasn’t read in France—and that the literary canon is a fact of history as well as of art.⁶ What is written and read depends on access to the tools of cultural production. It also reflects a series of judgments, first on the level of the individual who asserts or censors her or himself, then on the level of the collectivity that accepts, rejects, or tolerates. Reading marginal works exposes those judgments and reveals a society’s desires, hypotheses, and possibilities (Turner, Dramas).⁷ By unveiling the host culture’s values and obsessions, the literature of outsiders engages us in a process, not a reification: the changing dynamic between groups “within” and “without.” Alain Finkielkraut’s evocation of the “febrile and unending process” that has constituted social exclusion in France gets to the heart of the implications of using marginality as intellectual and pedagogical category:

It is not possible to infer a single, all-inclusive binary opposition that would be the ultimate cause of the conflict between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ On the contrary, the more fragmented our world becomes, the more numerous the criteria for exclusion. Racism based on aesthetica and dress; local xenophobias; compartmentalizations by speech; segregation by age, race, social class, and lifestyle: all these intersecting mistrusts are moving toward replacing the notion that only one factor differentiates the Frenchman from his or her Other (Finnkielkraut, 112).

Reading works by outsiders gives access to a point of view different from that of “worldliness,” a fresh optic “from which the world (and its discursive domains) is perceived, entered, and experienced” (Miller, “Men’s Reading,” 45). Rather than merely including marginal works in existing structures, in a static effort to “balance” the curriculum, I think they can be more richly used to dislodge traditional aesthetic criteria, and thus destabilize and problematize the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion themselves.

A powerful example of the elasticity of cultural exclusion Finkielkraut describes—and one whose vividnes strongly affects studenta at the outset of a course—is the historical status of the fou or mad person in Europe. The visual impact of Fellini’s Juliette of the Spirits, of the several film versions of Nosferatu, and of various Renaissance paintings puts in place the haunting image of the nef des fous (poorly translated as “ship of fools”).⁸ Long barges sailing past us in total silence, with their cargo of pale, crazed faces being sent from town to some unknown destination, remind us that the nef des fous is not just a literary or filmic symbol, it is a social fact. Medieval and Renaissance European cities often exiled mad people on such boats, thereby relegating them to a life of permanent wandering on the margins of society. But the “ship of fools,” a phenomenon of real physical and social exclusion, served society’s mythic needs as well. In a culture that viewed body and soul as indissoluble, any abnormality was considered evidence of divine judgment and had to be exiled for the community to regain spiritual unity.⁹ Thus, the heroic literary trope of the nef or navire (“ship”) was applied to the fous’ epic voyage that was to cleanse society as a whole. It was also hoped that the pilgrimage of these “unanchored” individuals, spiritually “lost at sea,” would bring them to the safe harbor of reason.

Further, the tragic figure of the lunatic has been viewed differently by each century and culture. From the magical sacred, but also fear-inspiring and leper-like creatures that medieval society set apart, the fous became relatively integrated into sixteenth-century European cultural imagery. They were symbols of comic derision or veiled truth (visible in the grinning skulls and danse macabre motifs of the time) for an increasingly secularized and reason-centered culture. By the next century, the complete separation of madness from reason brought by Descartes, association of madness with error lead to the harsh exclusion of fous: their detachment from rational thought made them socially unassimilable and, worse, potentially criminal elements that had to be interned in state hospitals. This view of madness in relation to the faculty of judgment continued in the eighteenth century but was accompanied by the first medical definitions of brain illnesses. For example, the entries under folie in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) and in the Encyclopédie (1751–72) distinguish by degree of “fever,” “dementia,” “derangement,” “feeblemindedness,” and “frenzy.” They also point to a disease of the organs of the brain (Voltaire, Dictionnaire). With the subsequent development of animist and mechanistic “sciences,” nineteenth-century positivism gave its full weight to the emerging empirical field, psychiatry. Tlie emphasis on treatment, still in its early stage, is echoed, for example, in Nerval’s Aurélia, in which the author analyzes his descent into schizophrenia and his “cure” at the hands of the famous Dr. Blanche. Finally, modern French thinkers, particularly the absurdists, appropriated the fou as the essence of rational revolt in an insane world. For a society that hypothesized the fragmentation and the incomprehensibility of the human condition, internal dissidence was deemed the most plausible response. The historically changing status of the mad person tells us something about his or her life, yet it tells us far more about the values and obsessions of the host culture. That explains why, at any given time, the condition of the fou was highly ambiguous: the liminal image of the fools’ ship, sailing at the margins of the tragic and the sacred, suggests this dual status.

And, if we go one step further, we could say that mad people seem to be the group most alienated from voicing their own experience, at least in terms we recognize. We have few direct accounts of their stories. Among the texts that give access to the experience of madness in French society are Moi, Pierre Rivière, the stunning confession of a nineteenth-century murderer; Nerval’s apocalyptic quest for psychic unity in Aurélia (1853), as well as his hallucinatory poetry of the 1840s and 1850s; Marc Blanc-Lapierre’s modern account of the nightmare of hospitalization, Suis-je done fou?; and Michel Thévoz’s collection of writing fragments by psychiatric patients, Le langage de la rupture.¹⁰ Thévoz’s analytic framework, which embraces all forms of representation, raises the issue of the relationship between originality and language: “These authors take up writing in an unself-conscious frame of mind, one of gratuitous and disrespectful invention, of jubilant subversion... [but] this attitude is in reality an initial discomfort with all the rules of self-expression, a feeling of not belonging that resolves itself by means of inventive aggression against language.” (11 12). The difficulty of self-expression for these “intruders in their own language, these thieves” (13), has generally succeeded in silencing them.¹¹ In a similar vein, the psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray has argued that the language of schizophrenia is not commensurable with standard socialized discourse. Rather, in its irreducible otherness, this language constitutes, says Irigaray, a form of cultural contestation (“Expression” and Le langage). And, the essays Kristeva collected in Folie vérité posit that the words of the mentally ill expose the basic “malaise” of all language, that of an oscillation between shared communication and distance or altérité. The paucity of direct accounts by fous in part explains their being made the object of the most varied and contradictory societal projections. Mad people have been virtually silent or silenced, and those more able than they to speak and write have told us about madness, not from within, but from without. Through their projections, literary witnesses reveal a good deal more about themselves and their milieu than about what is outside them.

As conceptual category, marginality elicits strong visceral responses. For that reason, the problematics of “otherness” need to some degree to be elaborated at the outset of any course or project and a common vocabulary needs to be developed. One thorny question is that of the origins of social and literary otherness. For purposes of teaching, I have found two works particularly useful, not only because the difference in historical contexts from which they arose is itself an example of the elasticity of cultural definitions, but also because the two texts establish important conceptual tensions. Evoking these tensions throughout the course keeps students self-conscious as readers and works against unitary, authoritative “explanations” of why particular groups were excluded. Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de Vinégalité of 1754 puts forth a classically descriptive enlightenment view of the origins of human inequality. Taking as his premise that, by natural law, equity exists a priori in the universe and that inequality is perforce a human creation, Rousseau studies this transformation from natural justice to social injustice. In his nature/civilization typology, the positive physical, mental and moral qualities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Author Biographies
• Introduction
• Issues in Foreign Language Program Articulation
• Psychological Processes in Foreign and Second Language Learning
• On Paradoxes and Paradigms in Language Education Research
• Elementary School Foreign Languages: What Research Can and Cannot Tell Us
• Dear Wilga, Dear Alice, Dear Tracy, Dear Earl: Four Letters on Methodology and Technology
• Material Concerns: Textbooks and Teachers
• Basic Intercultural Education Needs Breadth and Depth: The Role of a Second Culture
• Expanding the Vision of Foreign Language Education: Enter the Less Commonly Taught Languages
• The Upper-Division Curriculum in Foreign Languages and Literatures: Obstacles to the Realization of Promise
• Resetting the Margins: The Outsider in French Literature and Culture
• Training and Supervision in Foreign Languages: A Diachronic Perspective
• Beyond Language Proficiency: The Construct of Knowledge
• Foreign Language Faculty Renewal: A Case Study
• Index