Literatur als Quelle des Fremdverstehens. Eine Untersuchung ausgewahlter sudafrikanischer Romane der 70er und 80er Jahre (review)

Literatur als Quelle des Fremdverstehens. Eine Untersuchung ausgewählter südafrikanischer Romane der 70er und 80er Jahre, by Sabine Rauer. Bern: Lang, 1997. 316 pp.

Sabine Rauer's work deals with a selection of prose texts that have been authored by black and white South African writers. The aim of her critical analysis is to show the potential literary texts for intercultural or cross-cultural understanding and appreciation in the classroom work and teaching practices of English as a foreign language. Rauer bases her book on two separate yet interrelated assumptions.

First, within the teaching of English as a foreign language in German secondary schools, the space given to literature, cultures, language varieties of the "English speaking territories outside the UK and the US" is still small. This is particularly so in the case of South Africa, although secondary school students are exposed to various cultural products (pop music, township jazz, films, performance poetry, theater, and the like) outside the classroom. The formal educational system of TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) obviously abstains from interfering. Rauer's second assumption (derivative from premise no. 1) is that if TEFL in general and teaching through literary texts in particular aim at cross-cultural understanding, South African texts would be ideal, since both black and white writers are predominantly concerned with the identity/specificity of the we and us vs. the difference and otherness of them/they. The German foreign language student would relate to the dialogic or antagonistic multicultural debate inside South Africa as an outside observer in a kind of triangular constellation. The position of cultural, historical, and racial neutrality as an uninvolved outside observer, so goes the argument, would enable the student to better understand the issues at stake and the possibilities for mediation and it would also enable the student to relate more competently, more knowledgeably, more sympathetically to the rapidly growing and often politically instrumentalized multiculturalist debate inside Germany.

Rauer's work originates in the academic discipline of education and language acquisition. As such, her approach and her target of scholarly investigation differs from that of the literary critic. Her point of departure is the fundamental question of whether acquisition of foreign language skills can and should be color- and culture-blind. If the purely mechanical (??) Acquisition of language skills represents both an intrusion from the foreign language cultural sphere into the learner's own cultural ambiance and a gateway or instrument for the learner to intrude into the other culture, then the important issue for the educator is how this process can be enhanced, mediated, instrumentalized for achieving "higher educational goals" like perception, understanding, tolerance, as opposed to ordinary goals like listening and reading skills. Xenology as a disciplinary method of studying otherness, alterity, difference has for many years been a key issue in German intercultural studies (GAFL/German as a foreign language) as the discipline that represents the intracultural perspective and the institutions concerned with the teaching of English as a foreign language, representing the intercultural perspective. In this respect, TEFL and GAFL pursue similar or even parallel argumentative strategies, as we know them from the postcolonial theory debate. Rauer presents all the essential issues that have been debated over the years, from the basic epistemological question of whether knowledge/perception/insight is at all possible between two totally unrelated cultures to how the culturally rooted and conditioned mind mediates and engineers perception of culturally different experiences within an ethically neutral and analytical paradigm of "distance," to the more self-reflexive category of "difference" or the hermeneutically oriented value judgment of "otherness." She presents the (universal??) Strategies of handling intercultural influences or intrusions by coopting them into one's own cultural frame of reference, through "incorporation/accommodation," through "idealization/mythification" (e.g., the noble savage). The opposite strategy is that of the distancing, demonization, dehumanization...