Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity

Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity Jola ·kulj The problem of cultural identity involves the question of the self and of culture . In other words, this means reflecting on the essence of culture itself and the implication that there is a reasonable motive of self-questioning. In turn, we may also ask whether the self-questioning is motivated in the problematic , uncertain, or insufficiently reflected idea of our selves or in a desire to analytically reaffirm the fragility of culture. From the viewpoint of literary studies, the question of cultural identity is primarily with reference to literary identity in the community we are living in. Here, Bakhtin’s argumentation that “Literature is an inseparable part of the totality of culture and cannot be studied outside the total cultural context. It cannot be severed from the rest of culture and related directly (by-passing culture) to socio-economic or other factors. These factors influence culture as a whole and only through it and in conjunction with it do they affect literature. The literary process is a part of the cultural process and cannot be torn away from it” (Bakhtin 1986, 140) is most relevant for my discussion. However, if the very existence of literature can be defined in terms of structuralism (and, in another context, by Heidegger) as a re-examination of the possibilities of language itself (and through it refracted historical consciousness), then the problem of literary identity would logically be reduced to the natural environment of native language, that is, to one’s national culture. Such a view cannot, of course, be a relevant interpretation of literary identity at the end of our century because it reveals a concept of identity implying characteristics unacceptably finite and self-referential. The identification of literary identity with national culture is regression to the idea of identity conceived in the nineteenth century. The literature of Romanticism 142 and Post-Romanticism was acceptable as a factor confirming national entities and as a genuine representation of the cultural self. This understanding of identity was a result of the romantic interpretation of the self as the inner reality of a given subject. It revealed in itself the concept of the subject as an absolute and autonomous being and denied any decisive or obligatory references outside itself. It denied transcendence outside oneself and identified itself only with its immanent reality or with its own immanent validity. The subject of Romanticism defined itself by its own subjectivity, interpreted as being self-aware, selfsuf ficient, and self-referential. In Romanticism, being was recognised to be authentic while comprehensible only as interior consciousness. The insufficiency of such a reductionist view on culture and literature, for example, the “soul of nation” (Herder) was, in fact, already conceptualised by Goethe when he constructed the concept of world literature. But any gesture of openness in the geistesgeschichtliche frame of Romanticism was only understood as self-affirmation of the romantic absolute and autonomous subject. Any notion of an understanding of openness as a feature of transgressing or of the self-revaluation of the romantic self can be found only in the phenomenon of romantic irony. Thus, the problematic of cultural identity undoubtedly refers us to a question of cross-cultural interactions. Considered this way, it is preeminently a concept belonging to the field of comparative literature. Literary works, genres, trends, and periods of artistic orientation in a given nation, as manifested through history, cannot exist as isolated events of the closed national existence of cultural history and cannot be understood without contacts with literary phenomena of other national cultures. No cultural identity can be identi fied or analysed only on its national ground. Any national culture was given form on the borders of other influential cultures. For example, The Freising Manuscript (a Slovenian text from the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century) bears evidence, among others, of Latin and Old High German traces. Clearly, literature cannot be but an intercultural historical phenomenon of mutual artistic and other influences from several cultures, of mutual interactions of artistic expression produced in different cultural circumstances , and thus of mutual reception of Otherness. “Otherness” is, irrevocably , cultural reality. The Other does not necessarily endanger its selfness or its principles of identity: “The reality principle coincides with the principle of otherness” (de Man 103). According to this notion, the validity of cultural identity cannot be an equivalent to the measure of...