Transnationalism and Cosmopolis -- discussion group by Heinz Ickstadt

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Alumni Association symposium
To Honor Emory Elliott: American Literary History in a New Key
Sep. 24-28, 2010


Discussion group: Transnationalism and Cosmopolis
Coordinator: Heinz Ickstadt


Readings: Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World” New German Critique 34(2007):1, 189-207; Andreas Huyssen, “World Cultures, World Cities” In Andreas Huyssen, ed. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Durham: Duke, 2009. pp; Sherry Simon, “Bridge to Babel: The Cosmopolitan City” In Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2006. pp.

We began with a brief dilemma concerning transnational American Studies from a European perspective delineated by Heinz Ickstadt. Heinz used his own personal story to illustrate what America meant for him and his generation in post WW2 Germany: it was a way of life, the only source of democratic institutions, of tolerance, of equality transmitted through literature. The young Heinz duly transferred from German literature to American literature and became personally engaged with and loyal to his idea of America and American values. He felt literature entered his consciousness and changed his life. So his idea of America was a primarily aesthetic experience. Now, the turn to the transnational kills the nationalist from AS, and doing so it deletes exactly that idea of America Heinz has been involved in through his life and does not feel like following. The question, then, from a European perspective is how to incorporate this aestheticized European experience of America into a transnational idea of American literature. In more academic formulation, the question is if we have to reawaken the issue of aesthetics in the age of transnational studies.

More specifically, we were seeking possible new methodologies of reading literature that come from European sources, possibly from outside the discipline of American Studies. We relied on two texts by Andreas Huyssen, a professor of German literature and of comparative literature in which he draws up a new kind of aesthetics for reading Modernist spaces. We asked if we can use Huyssen’s idea as a model to follow in American studies. Huyssen reintroduces the discarded terms high and low into reading urban palimpsests and into tracing the politics of memory. He asserts that Modernism has not ended, but rather is a contemporary development that happens with different speeds at different locations. When you study these developments, you have to compare them but for this you also have to translate them. This is where you can use the aesthetic in an unconventional way if you reintroduce the concepts high and low. You can use high and low not vertically for value judgement but horizontally for comparison. If you use high and lw horizontally, you can use them for cultural translation. For example, when cultures meet, hierarchies might change, and using the terms high and low becomes and instrument for differentiation from one culture to the other, and “low art” in (q marks) can be looked at aesthetically, too.

In the discussion we referred to the volume Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age edited by Emory Elliott in which Elliott argues that multiculturalism and the aesthetic are not enemies, they have to go together otherwise we lose the essence of literature. Non-Americans have to be inclusive in terms of texts/objects used but not forget aesthetics, a bridge between cultural studies and literary studies. This sense of aesthetics is not linked to New Criticism but something different.

Heinz warned that what seems to be the broadening sense of the object often comes with a methodological narrowing, for instance philological means of comparison between transnational texts.

The city has come up repeatedly in the discussion as the site where these issues are represented. America defined the Modern primarily in architectural terms and associated the two. Yet the American city is double, all the major cities are divided, both the city of possibility and of corruption is in them. Modern American architecture, in turn, is present in the Metropolises of the world, so the modern city is also a global phenomenon, so is its double quality possibility/corruption. Also, the city represents the global and the local at the same time.

Eventually, we agreed that that American studies, whilst broadening its subject, need retain its methodological refinement. Using Huyssen’s frame, we might even make the trans-national frame as object for inquiry for American Studies.