Cultural Transfer and Intercultural Communication in Anglophone Literatures WH-KON-U2-ComAngL

Keywords: culture (subcultures, co-cultures, subgroups and microcultures); ethnicity; intercultural communication; literature as a means of cultural interaction; borders and crossings; map-making and notional geographies; postcolonialism; migration; diaspora and diasporic cultures; exophony; Anglophone literatures; cultural translation; cultural identities.

Thematic plan

1. Culture as a context for communication: defining concepts (2hrs)

- Basic cultural concepts and types of culture - subcultures, co-cultures, subgroups, and microcultures;
- Subcultures and ethnicities;
- Subcultures or co-cultures?
- Are subgroups cultural forms of deviation?
- Are microcultures “inferior cultures”?
- Cultural definitions of communication;
- The media of intercultural communication;
- Literature as a form of intercultural communication.
2. Intercultural communication and migrant writing: boundaries and crossings (2hrs)
- Borders: actual and/or constructed?
- Drawing lines: Michel Foucault and the power of discourse;
- Discourses that conduct difference: Edward Said’s Orientalism;
- East, West, Middle East, Orient, Occident as culturally imagined categories.

3. Problems of cultural translation (2hrs)
The lecture focuses on the evolution of translation studies with a particular focus on Susan Bassnett’s perspective on its cultural turn.
- source-oriented and target-oriented translation theories;
- cultural factors in translation;
- global languages versus minor literatures – questions of cultural identity and communicative value.

4. The Middle East in Diaspora (2hrs)
- The concept of diaspora;
- Relational self-location;
- Literary responses;
- Arabesque.

5. Anglophone writers from the Middle East: Elif Shafak. Workshop on Shafak’s TED talk “The Politics of Fiction“. After listening to the talk, a discussion will be held on major issues raised in her speech ( 2hrs).

“The Politics of Fiction“:

https://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction

6. Self-Orientalism. Discussion of Shafak‘s novel Honour (2 hrs)
The narrative follows the transformation of the family from its traditional, local and rigidly protected form into a contemporary open and understanding „meeting ground” of both the source and the target cultures.

7. Diana Abu-Jaber: diasporal self-location of second-generation migrants (2hrs)

• Born in Syracuse, New York, as an Arab-Palestinian member of the Arab diaspora in the US.
• She spent some time in Amman, Jordan (her father’s birthplace)
• She likewise confesses that “my [American] mother [of German, European descent] has taught me […] how to listen to stories. She made a space in our home for my father to invent himself…”
• Diasporal self-location of second-generation migrants is often semi-fictional (through memories, stories, dreams)
• Abu-Jaber works include: Arabian Jazz, Origin, Birds of Paradise, and two memoirs, The Language of Baklava and Life without a Recipe.
• The role of story-telling and cooking: major tools of cross-cultural interaction in the novel.
• Laila Halaby and 09/11/2001 (workshop on Once in a Promised Land) – 2hrs
• Born in Lebanon;
• Arizona-based writer of Palestinian Jordanian and American background;
• Has published two novels: West of the Jordan and Once in a Promised Land (both winning prestigious awards) and a collection of poems My Name on His Tongue;
• Her work examines the social and cultural positions of Palestinians in the US involving issues about Arab American identity, civil liberties, racism and xenophobia, alongside the effects of 9/11.

8. Bulgarian-born Kapka Kassabova’s Anglophone cultural maps (4hrs)

Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s, and educated at the French College in Sofia. Her family emigrated to New Zealand just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and she spent her late teens and twenties there where she published two poetry collections All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997) and the Commonwealth-Writers Prize winner for debut fiction in Asia Pacific Reconnaissance (1999).
In 2004, Kapka moved to Scotland and published Street Without a Name (2008). It is a story of the last Communist childhood and an unsentimental journey across post-communist Bulgaria, and was shortlisted for the Prix Européen du Livre and the Dolman Travel Book Award.
The music memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (2011), a tale of Argentine tango, obsession and the search for home, was shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards. Villa Pacifica (2011), a mystery novel with an equatorial setting, came out at the same time. Her memoir Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017) was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Her essays and articles have appeard in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, The NZ Listener, Grant and on BBC Radio 3 and 4.

9. Native American cultures in the course of constant relocation: Louise Erdrich’s cross-border works. Part 1 (2hrs)

The lecture will discuss the problematic relationship between orality and the written word in a sample of Native American writing. Louise Erdrich’s work partakes of the growing trend in Native American art and literature and, as a whole, Native American Studies, to reconsider the traumatic event of colonization and its aftermath, and in this act of re-membering, to find strategies of self-relocation in the fragmented whereabouts of today’s world. Erdrich and the writers of her generation are extremely sensitive to the condition of unbelonging which is the logical consequence of the state of multiple belonging. For Native American peoples, this sense of severing has even deeper implications as they tend to assert individual identity in a very particular form of kinship within their community, which consists of family members, people, places, animals, the world of the deceased, the world of the Great Spirits. When deprived of the orality that had once provided them with the means to reconnect themselves to mythical reality, and the native language that would operate as the magical password, Native American writers impart intensely performative properties to the language they use and their writing serves to establish new, meaningful connections to the multiple worlds that sustain their community.

10. Louise Erdrich’s cross-border works. Part 2.
Analytical reading of her poem “Fooling God“ (2hrs)

11. Islands and “insularity” in the autobiographical Anglophone writings of Stephanos Stephanides (2 - 4hrs)

The lecture will discuss the work of a less-known island-born writer who writes in English. Born in a Cypriot village, Stephanos Stephanides joined his father who left for England when Stephanides was only eight. In his childhood years he spent time with his mother’s parents back in Cyprus, but finally settled in Bristol and graduated from Cardiff University in 1973. Three years later he left the UK and lived and travelled in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, Guyana and Washington DC where he worked as a professional translator and conference interpreter, researcher, writer and film-maker. In 1991 he returned to Cyprus and presently he reads lectures in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. His works – poetry, fiction and non-fiction – can be read in the context of emerging and well-established crossways in the contemporary cultures of enhanced mobility. The Wind Under My Lips is his recently published memoir in which he remembers his origins in a language that veers between different linguistic identities. We will observe how this ambiguous self-location articulates insularity as a hub of departures and arrivals while raising questions about how much insular forms/languages/cultures transform with growing globalization.

12. Final student presentations (2 – 4 hrs), depending on the number of students