fragmented memory in a global age: the place of storytelling in modern language curricula

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Fragmented Memory in a Global Age: The Place of Storytelling in Modern Language Curricula ANNE FREADMAN University of Melbourne School of Languages and Linguistics Parkville 3010, Victoria Australia Email: [email protected] The article presents a hypothesis that seeks to explain the present difficulties of modern languages as playing out the consequences of the demise of philology and the rise of linguistics in its place. While the founding gesture of the latter as a distinct discipline was to exclude cultural and social considerations, the former is an account of the cultural memory of the language. With the demise of philology, modern languages have lost their disciplinary unity, and hence the principle upon which to construct coherent curricula. As a result, they have lost their intellectual authority. The article proposes a revisionist analysis of the philological tradition, divesting it of its essentialist assumptions, and focusing on its methodological principles. It argues that memory (and with it, the emerging field of memory studies) be adopted as a central term in an account of culture fitted to the teaching of modern languages to foreign learners in a world in which memories, just as much as languages, are what we do not predictably share. It makes some suggestions as to how to shape curricula on these principles, insisting that in order to make good on our belief that culture informs language, those curricula should focus selectively and systematically on the discursive arts. Storytelling, from personal to collective, from explicit to implied in political debate, should take a central place in our studentslearning; as a result, ‘story listening’ should be central in their intercultural encounters. Keywords : philology; culture; language; memory; storytelling IF GLOBALIZATION TRULY HAD ACHIEVED— or could achieve—the free flow of people, goods, and ideas around the globe, then culture itself would be globalized, with no specificities impeding infinite mutual understanding. What it has pro- duced, a contrario, is an array of diasporas, more or less precariously implanted in new habitats, more or less isolated, their sense of home dislocated between the near and the far. Home is no longer where the heart is, nor is it where group or individual memories have their originating set- tings. If we do our job as it must be done, home has to be where memories can be newly heard by those who do not share them. We are teachers of foreign languages who profess to teach ‘culture’ as part of our vocation. What can this mean in practice, under the global dispensation? What is ‘culture’ for these conditions? What is it for learners who are foreign to all other speakers of the language and who must learn the implications of their own foreignness (Pratt et al., 2008)? My modest proposal is to put ‘memory’ at the heart of an answer to these questions. This involves rethinking the relation of ‘language’ with ‘culture,’ and redefining ‘culture’ as the stories we tell in order to establish, however provisionally, who we are. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS We keep asking this question, as Wright (1996) does in his article: “The cultural aims of modern language teaching: Why are they not being met?” The Modern Language Journal, 98, 1, (2014) DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2014.12067.x 0026-7902/14/373–385 $1.50/0 © 2014 The Modern Language Journal

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Page 1: Fragmented Memory in a Global Age: The Place of Storytelling in Modern Language Curricula

Fragmented Memory in a Global Age:The Place of Storytelling in ModernLanguage CurriculaANNE FREADMANUniversity of MelbourneSchool of Languages and LinguisticsParkville 3010, VictoriaAustraliaEmail: [email protected]

The article presents a hypothesis that seeks to explain the present difficulties of modern languages asplaying out the consequences of the demise of philology and the rise of linguistics in its place. While thefounding gesture of the latter as a distinct discipline was to exclude cultural and social considerations, theformer is an account of the cultural memory of the language. With the demise of philology, modernlanguages have lost their disciplinary unity, and hence the principle upon which to construct coherentcurricula. As a result, they have lost their intellectual authority. The article proposes a revisionist analysisof the philological tradition, divesting it of its essentialist assumptions, and focusing on itsmethodological principles. It argues that memory (and with it, the emerging field of memory studies)be adopted as a central term in an account of culture fitted to the teaching of modern languages toforeign learners in a world in whichmemories, just as much as languages, are what we do not predictablyshare. It makes some suggestions as to how to shape curricula on these principles, insisting that in orderto make good on our belief that culture informs language, those curricula should focus selectively andsystematically on the discursive arts. Storytelling, from personal to collective, from explicit to implied inpolitical debate, should take a central place in our students’ learning; as a result, ‘story listening’ shouldbe central in their intercultural encounters.

Keywords: philology; culture; language; memory; storytelling

IF GLOBALIZATION TRULY HAD ACHIEVED—or could achieve—the free flow of people, goods,and ideas around the globe, then culture itselfwould be globalized, with no specificities impedinginfinite mutual understanding. What it has pro-duced, a contrario, is an array of diasporas, more orless precariously implanted in new habitats, moreor less isolated, their sense of home dislocatedbetween the near and the far. Home is no longerwhere the heart is, nor is it where group orindividual memories have their originating set-tings. If we do our job as it must be done, home hasto be wherememories can be newly heard by those

who do not share them. We are teachers of foreignlanguages who profess to teach ‘culture’ as part ofour vocation. What can this mean in practice,under the global dispensation?What is ‘culture’ forthese conditions? What is it for learners who areforeign to all other speakers of the language andwho must learn the implications of their ownforeignness (Pratt et al., 2008)? My modestproposal is to put ‘memory’ at the heart of ananswer to these questions. This involves rethinkingthe relation of ‘language’ with ‘culture,’ andredefining ‘culture’ as the stories we tell in orderto establish, however provisionally, who we are.

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

We keep asking this question, as Wright (1996)does in his article: “The cultural aims of modernlanguage teaching: Why are they not being met?”

The Modern Language Journal, 98, 1, (2014)DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2014.12067.x0026-7902/14/373–385 $1.50/0© 2014 The Modern Language Journal

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or, as Byram and Kramsch (2008) pose thedilemma in their reflections: “Why is it so difficultto teach language as culture?” I write from thesame anxiety, at the same time situating my paperamongst others whose purpose is the integrationof cultural and language acquisition objectiveswithin FL teaching programs. While extremelyvaluable work has been done on the diagnosis ofthe current malaise (Byrnes, 2012; MLA, 2007;Pratt et al., 2008), I wish to addmyobservations onthismatter, since the analysis I outline is necessaryfor understanding the proposal I shall make.Following this introduction, I shall spell out arationale for memory studies as a practicalaccount of culture for our purposes, payingsome attention to the objectives that can beattained.

However, ‘globalization’ pertains not only tothe domains of knowledge that are our business, italso pertains to the institutional and policycontexts in which we conduct that business. Wemust, therefore, take into account the localconditions in which the global turn takes practicaleffect and plays out its consequences. It is for thisreason that I make some preliminary remarks.

I write from Australia, where the structure of alanguage major, and hence the use of teaching/academic staff to deliver it, is rather different fromthose obtaining in other parts of the English-speaking world. The crucial points of differenceare these: (a) the undergraduate degree consistsof only three years of study, not four, with nomandatory year abroad; (b) the major is approxi-mately one third of the degree; (c) beginning andintermediate language courses are part of themajor; (d) research academics teach throughoutthe language and culture courses, with the help oflarge numbers of sessional tutors, most of whomare not graduate students but largely unqualifiednative speakers. Points (a) through (c) accountfor a far more critical situation than thosedescribed for theUnited Kingdom (UK), Canada,and the United States, namely, that a student cangraduate with a major in a language with 5/8 ofthe courses studied in language instructionsubjects, and only 3/8 in specialized optionssuch as film, literature, or translation. There is afurther year of post-major study available, knownas ‘Honours,’ where these deficits are deemed tobe remediated in a course of study consisting of50% course work and 50%minor dissertation (theproportions may vary from institution to institu-tion). Taken together with point (d) above, moststudents graduating with a major have no ideawhat research might be in a language discipline,or what areas are available. There is therefore a

crisis in the recruitment of graduate students,alongside—and feeding into—a crisis in the viewtaken by the university of what we as teachers andresearchers of language acquisition and use do.

The situation set out above means that anintegrated curriculum is no longer an option butan imperative. We cannot afford to have anystudents completing courses where narrowlyconceived language objectives are pursued tothe exclusion of teaching material and objectivesthat can be understood by both students andthe wider university to meet the requirements of“the larger university mission” (Paesani & Allen,2012, p. 55).

THE CURRICULAR PROBLEM:INTEGRATING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The situation sometimes referred to as abifurcation into language instruction on the onehand and literature and culture courses on theother is described in the MLA (2007) report as aself-perpetuating dichotomy recursively rein-forced on several levels of the standard configura-tion of university foreign language departments:

(. . .) a two or three year language sequence feeds intoa set of core courses primarily focused on canonicalliterature (. . .). This configuration (. . .) defines bothcurriculum and the governance structure of languagedepartments, creating a division between languageand literature curricula, and between tenure-trackliterature professors on the one hand and languageinstructors in non-tenure-track positions on theother. (Pratt et al., 2008, p. 289, original emphasis)

It may be tempting to attribute the bifurcation tothis configuration, and therefore, to change theconfiguration. The typical Australian configura-tion, described above, exemplifies a model alongthese lines. Curriculum design, pedagogy, andcourse convenorship are the responsibility of theacademic staff (¼ professors) throughout thecurriculum, and the teaching is delivered byteams made up of the convenor with casual staff.Nevertheless, the bifurcation is equally markedhere as in North America. I suggest, therefore,that the two-tiered configuration is a symptom,rather than a cause of the bifurcation.

The source of our difficulties lies not merely ininstitutional arrangements but in the history ofthe discipline: Its very conceptual core haschanged. What is it, then, that disintegrated?

The discipline, of which present day foreignlanguage (FL) departments are a remnant, wasphilology. Ah, the dread word! Fear strikes the

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heart of those who remember terrible tableaux ofthe language families, hours of the history ofmorphology, the dreary detail of sound change.Yet a brief look at the word in a monolingualdictionary will show that these topics, taught inisolation from one another and sundered fromthe context of historical usage, already repre-sented a sorely impoverished tradition. The Tresorde la langue francaise (TLF, 2002) gives thefollowing definition of “philology”:

Etude, tant en ce qui concerne le contenu que l’expression, dedocuments, surtout ecrits, utilisant telle ou telle langue.

The study, pertaining equally to the content and theexpression, of predominantly written documentsusing a particular language. (my translation)

Note that philology is defined as “the study ofdocuments.” The entry then illustrates thisdefinition with a quotation from Saussure(1916, p. 13):

La langue n’est pas l’unique objet de la philologie, qui veutavant tout fixer, interpreter, commenter les textes; cettepremiere etude l’amene a s’occuper aussi de l’histoirelitteraire, des moeurs, des institutions, etc.; partout elleuse de sa methode propre, qui est la critique.

The language is by no means the only object ofphilology, whose primary aim is to establish, interpret,and comment on texts; this first objective then leadsto a second, the study of literary history and thehistory of mores, institutions, and so on; throughoutthis scope, it deploys its own critical method. (mytranslation)

However, by 1961 it was usual, remarks the samedictionary, to

…oppose[r] (. . .) la philologie aux sciences litteraires qui nerelevent pas de la grammaire ou de la linguistique.

… presume an opposition between philology andliterary study, which is not based on grammar or onlinguistics. (my translation)

http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/affart.exe?26;s¼3593058630;?b¼0; [original emphasis]

What would Roman Jakobson have thought aboutthat? We know the answer: The famous structurallinguist—who insisted on viewing himself as aRussian philologist, requesting this solitary phrasefor his own headstone—spent his whole careercombating it.

Notice in the general definition from the TLFthat philology studies “predominantly writtendocuments,” and in the quotation from Saussure,

that this leads it “also” to study literary history, thehistory of mores, the history of institutions, etc. Itis a striking fact that, in the tradition, the corpuswas the generality of written texts or documents,that this narrowed in the first half of the twentiethcentury to literary texts, and that, by the secondhalf of the century, the scope of philologyexcludes literature and focuses entirely onlanguage. How did this come about?

The obvious answer is the methodologicalpreference for oral expression over writtendocumentation in 20th-century linguistics. I willreturn to this below; it has obvious relevance toour discipline. Beyond this, it would probably takea book to investigate the problem, which involvesthe history of linguistics as well as of formal(university and school) literary study; I will have tobe content with formulating a hypothesis. Before Ido so, however, I point out that the even-handedformulation of the dictionary definition previous-ly referenced—tant en ce qui concerne le contenu quel’expression—presupposes the dichotomy of formvs. content thatmay be one source of our problem(cf. Byrnes, 2005).

I have alluded to Roman Jakobson as anillustrious example of the work of philology. Weare in daily contact with a second example, themost valuable continuing legacy of philology: themonolingual dictionary. The first paragraph ofthe Preface to The New Shorter Oxford EnglishDictionary reads as follows:

The New Shorter Oxford English dictionary is a historicaldictionary of modern English. It sets out the mainmeanings and semantic developments of wordscurrent at any time between 1700 and the presentday: Those which have been in regular literary orcolloquial use at some point in their history; slang ordialect words which are nevertheless likely to begenerally encountered through accessible literatureor the modern mass media; and in addition a widerange of scientific and technical words such as may beof interest to serious amateurs or advanced students.(New SOED, 1993, p. vii)

This statement serves my present purposes inseveral ways. First, the dictionary represents thelanguage in its use and usage. Second, itrepresents the history of those uses, but thathistory is represented as deposits of memory thatcontinue to inform current usage. It answers thequestion: How did such and such a word come tohave the range of acceptation that it does? Third,the sources it draws on in order to document itsanswers are very wide-ranging. Though frequentlyliterary, these might also be political speeches,historical documents or written histories,

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technical treatises such as Saussure’s Course inGeneral Linguistics, or themass media. A language,we might say, is a palimpsest, carrying with it theaccretions of its use by the population of its users.

My third example is Victor Klemperer, aprofessor of Romanistik, specializing in the literaryhistory of the French Enlightenment. A Jew, andtherefore subject to fearsome persecution, henonetheless remained inDresden throughout theNazi years, keeping a remarkable diary of theperiod (Klemperer, 1999, 2002). In that diary, henoted examples of Nazi discourse and, since hewas deprived of all access to books and any meansof pursuing his research, he began to study it inearnest, reading anything from the newspaperswrapped around his vegetables to the writings ofAlfred Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Hitler, listeningattentively to propaganda on the radio, andkeeping detailed notes of his observations. Hepublished these after the war in another remark-able book, The language of the Third Reich: LTI–Lingua tertii imperii: A philologist’s notebook, whichnow counts as a classic in the study of totalitarianrhetoric, and one of the first serious studies ofpolitical language (Klemperer, 2006). Through-out the diary, he refers consistently to the work forLTI as philology: his “handful of phrases andexpressions” (April 2, 1942) becomes a formallyentitled book. “I have,” he writes, “become aphilologist after all in my old age. . .” (Cell 89,June 23–July 1, 1941). The principle ofLTI bears astriking resemblance to the diachronic method ofthe dictionary:

Now I must place in the foreground everything that,in the widest sense, has to do with LTI as a whole, thatis, which relates to the present and its formation. (October16, 1942 [p. 155]; emphasis added)

I have adduced my three examples in order toindicate the ground of our discipline. ForJakobson, literature is made from language; forthe dictionary, language is made by letters in thebroad sense. Philology presupposes this dialectic.For Klemperer, the critical methods of philologyoffer a unique way of understanding the culturaland social distortion of “mores and institutions,”in Saussure’s succinct formulation, which Iprovided earlier on, that was Nazism. We havenot, of course, lost our belief that language andculture belong together and that that is what wedo. In my experience, however, deans and otheradministrators never believe us. More sadly still,our students do not experience the mutualintrication of language with culture in theirlearning.

What we have lost, I think, is a theory of thatmutual intrication and a method of exploring it.That loss occurred as the result of a key event inthe history of linguistics, between approximately1890 and 1920. I refer to the advent of structurallinguistics, and the move from a diachronicconception of language to one based on theconcept of a synchronic system. This distinction,formulated first by Saussure and energeticallycontested by Jakobson throughout his career (seee.g., Jakobson, 1968), became the basis oflinguistics. Whatever modifications in theoriesor schools of linguistics and whatever new topicsor fields have arisen in the course of a century,that general conception is an unshakeablepresupposition. It was a genuine paradigm shift,leading to and reinforced by the institutionalfoundation of a separate discipline in a distinctdepartment. This is the major institutionalparameter for my story, since the autonomizationof linguistics entailed the casting adrift oflanguage departments without a clear disciplinaryrationale. By the 1960s, as I mentioned previously,linguistics no longer involved the study ofliterature, and the study of literature, seeking itsown disciplinary rationale, sought its own theo-ries: Literary structuralism counts in this history asthe rear-guard action of philology, and lastedbarely two decades in the English-speaking world,where aesthetic and moral criticism, then sociallyengaged forms of thematic criticism, took itsplace.

This overriding history is reinforced in our owndiscipline by two major moments in the develop-ment of language teaching methodologies: Thefirst is language taught as a system of rules, whichsimply applies a synchronic model, and thesecond is the development of the communicativemethod, which favors oral interaction of the face-to-face variety. In both, contemporary usage is thenorm. We are left with the present, without anyaccount of its formation.

What we have lost, therefore, is the conceptualcoherence under which language was under-stood as the repository of cultural memory andculture was studied as what language had madeover the centuries. However, language is therepository of cultural memory if, and only if, thefundamental presupposition of the word ‘lan-guage’ is discourse, not system. The currentdispensation has language taught synchronically,while the culture component hovers uneasilybetween topics deriving from the social sciencesnot based in language (see Byrnes, 2008), and aconception of culture deriving from literaturethat cannot disavow its own diachrony. Each is

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dissonant with language learning as currentlyconceived, but each—to parody Tolstoy—isdissonant in its own way. Whatever we do withthe governancemodels of language departments,the deployment of academic expertise, and theintegration of faculty across the curriculum, if‘language’ and ‘culture’ remain conceptuallydissonant at this deep level, nothing much willchange. As Byrnes writes, the challenge is “toarrive at theories of culture AND language thatare intellectually compatible with one another”(Byrnes, 2008, p. 109). Without such conceptualconsonance, the students themselves will under-stand their learning experience in different waysin each: Culture on the social studies modeltypically consists of more or less disparate topics;the materials, from a range of media, are chosento develop these topics, and the language istaught by means of exercises on the linguisticfeatures of this material, to develop mastery ofstructures, discursive techniques, vocabulary,pronunciation, through various class assign-ments and testing formats designed to use thecontent. While the students may well learn aboutthe school system, the integration of migrantgroups, or any number of other interestingmatters, the actual choice of these topics is quiteimmaterial. No matter how painstaking thepedagogy and how thorough the use of thematerials in developing competence, the stu-dents will not emerge from a course devised onthese principles understanding the relation oflanguage and culture. At most, they will learn theuse of ‘content’ to facilitate their own languagelearning. Notwithstanding the valiant attempts tointegrate the two, students think of these aslanguage courses, and they think of culture, if atall, as topics in contemporary social life. It issurely a disciplinary imperative that we attend toproviding anew some conceptual depth—indeedrigor—for the term ‘culture.’

Some social studies syllabi have effectivelyopted for one solution to the problem ofdissonance I point to: They have chosen athoroughgoing synchronic model. This modelcan be further integrated by teaching theinteractional and pragmatic conventions thathelp people get on with one another. It is acrucial part of their learning. However, there aresevere limitations to curricula constructed alongthese lines. These are due, I believe, to anunderlying and often unstated objective: Ourjob, they seem to imply, is to help our students—as a colleague used to say—to “pass the spy test”when they travel to the country of the targetlanguage. This objective is pervaded by the aim to

help our students make themselves understood.But what of understanding the people they talk to,when they and their interlocutors are defined bythe destabilizing experiences afforded by immi-gration and emigration? What of understandingpeople who have been uprooted from the socialsettings to which those topics pertain, in environ-ments in which, we might imagine, they areattempting to interpret their experience in termsof what they have brought with them? This is theproblem of culture—of meaning—in a globalizedworld. In what follows, I have my sights firmlyfixed on understanding what we hear and read (inwhatever media; see Furstenberg, 2010). Mycontention is that understanding—not decoding,but deep intercultural understanding—cannot beachieved without retrieving a systematically dia-chronic perspective in our discipline, and this, Iinsist, without nostalgia and without a clearunderstanding of what has changed in therelation of culture to language in the centurysince the demise of philology. Can philology betaken as a method without adopting its associatedideology of a national language and its ‘essence’or ‘spirit’?

CULTURE AS MEMORY

The times are changing. The era of triumphantmodernity, like the conception of language as asynchronic system, was marked by the will toforget. But oblivion was lethal to our understand-ing of culture, and hence, to our conception ofour discipline.My presupposition in this section isthat culture is collective memory, as language is:an ensemble of habits of representation andinteraction that transforms over time and is yetinformed pervasively by what it will not, cannot,leave behind.

Memory

The marginalization—indeed, the forgetting—of the past in order to set our sights on thepresent and the future is a trope of modernity;in view of this, the shift in paradigm in linguistics,and the consequent disciplinary disintegrationthat I have discussed, is itself a symptom of apeculiarly 20th-century temporality. We knowfrom our reading of the significant figures ofthis modernity—Baudelaire, for example, as wellas Bergson, Colette, Proust, and Freud, to citeonly some canonical examples—that memoryappears as its ghostly companion, its necessaryDoppelganger.

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One of the most surprising cultural and politicalphenomena of recent years has been the emergenceofmemory as a key (. . .) concern inWestern societies,a turning towards the past that stands in stark contrastto the privileging of the future so characteristic ofearlier decades of twentieth-century modernity.(Huyssen, 2003, p. 11)

Huyssen views memory studies as crucial foranalysing the present, using the trope of thepalimpsest as a way of representing the layering oftime. It is a useful metaphor, suggesting analternative to the crippling dichotomy thatopposes the contemporary to the past and forcesus to choose between them. It is the presence ofthe past that establishes the consonance betweenlanguage and culture needed for reinventing thecoherence of our discipline. Indeed, the presenceof past usage in the network of meaningsoperative in the lexicon of a language serves notmerely as a metaphor for the phenomenon ofcultural memory, but as its salient metonym. It ispart, that is to say, of the same phenomenon.

But what is memory for the purposes of thisproposal? If history is the attempt to reconstructthe past as past, memory is in constant evolution,“vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation,susceptible to being long dormant and periodi-cally revived” (Nora, 1989, p. 9; for the field ofmemory studies, see Bal et al., 1999; Olick,Vinitzky–Seroussi, & Levy, 2011; Radstone &Schwarz, 2010; Rossington & Whitehead, 2007).To illustrate memory in this sense, I choose to tellsome stories.

The first identifies memory negatively: I wasteaching a first year subject in French in which wewere reading stories by Maryse Conde (1999) thatfocused on issues of postcolonial, indeed post-slavery, identity. One student objected to thecontent in the following terms: “I’m a commercestudent, and I am learning French so I can get ajob in France. I want to communicate with Frenchpeople when I’m there. I don’t need to know thehistory of the French involvement in the slavetrade for that.” She had not yet understood thatshe would pursue her vocation in a France whosepopulation was irrevocably mixed.

What this student meant by “communicate” wastalk about the things that she always talked about,with the people whose cultural assumptions andexperiences were similar to her own. She wantedto be able to discuss the topics she was alreadyinterested in. Learning French did not, for her,involve the formation of cultural identitiesthrough painful histories whose memory hauntsthe present. It involved a liberal universalistic view

of individuals, with whom one interacts indifferent words and grammatical structures. Ascontrasted with this, intercultural understandinginvolves considering our students as culturalsubjects who are both open to, and resistant to,experiences that challenge their current assump-tions (see Furstenberg, 2010).

The stories by Maryse Conde fall into thecategory of writing now known asmemory writing;it puts the individual person right into the middleof historical events. “Identities, as Stuart Hallwrites, are the names we give to the different wayswe are positioned by, and position ourselves in,the narratives of the past” (Huyssen, 1995, p. 1).Accompanying the texts, we put together a dossierofmaterial for the students to build up a historicalcontext for making sense of them. It included avideo of the first ceremony held in 2006 tomemorialize the abolition of slavery. Such officialmemorializing is also part of the field we nowknow as memory practices. It claims the ethicalduty to remember for the society as a whole.

This range—between the personal and thepublic—gives us a sense of why memory studiesmatter to cultural learning. It demonstrates howsubjectivity is locked into the historical experi-ence of groups, and it also demonstrates thepresentness of memory. “The past is not a foreigncountry” (Palmie, 2010, p. 374), and memory theway it inhabits our present and the ways we have ofdealing with it is a corrective to formal historiog-raphies that seek to keep the past in the past.

My first example concerned the formation ofsubjectivity. My second focuses on the relationbetween personal memory and public archives.This story comes from the memoirs of Jan Karski,who was a prominent member of the PolishUnderground during the Nazi occupation of thatunfortunate country. His memoirs were writtenand published in theUnited States in 1944, beforethe end of the war and the occupation of Polandby the Soviet Union. Having been activelyinvolved in the writing and distribution of theunderground press, he turned his attention toamassing a collection of these materials for amuseum (Karski, 1944/2011).

Karski knew that he was in themiddle of amajorhistorical struggle, and he wanted the materialpractices of that struggle to be available to Polishmemory. His collection forms an archive, and heimagines it being housed in a public institutionwhere it could be used to provide the material forfuture narratives. The memoirs and autobio-graphical stories tell us that, we might say, historyhappens to people, that the big stories are notabstract and separate from the little stories.

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Equally, the big stories told by archives, museums,monuments, and public ceremonials are strate-gies for forging connections across the gener-ations. Alongside school curricula, this is how asociety teaches its citizens, how it involves them inmaintaining collective memory.

The idea of collective memory was the brain-child of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs(1950/1980) in the interwar period, and hisproject was pursued by historian Pierre Nora inthe 1970s. In their conception, collective memoryis above all national memory, and Nora inparticular works on official sites of memorydevised for the construction of the nationalnarrative. For this reason, Halbwachs and Norahave been subject to serious critique in morerecent work onmemory. The debate is significant,because many textbooks and most tourism areconstructed on this basis. It propounds a homo-geneous collectivity that is deemed to own thatmemory, and the memory it owns is oftencelebratory and self-congratulatory. Moreover,there may be things of which a nation does notwish to be reminded: slavery, for example, andcolonial injustices of all sorts. Official memory isdeeply ideological, and it is bound up with theexercise of power. Despite this, I don’t believe it isa good idea just to forget about official memory.On the contrary, we must always ask under whatcircumstances, why, and how, a society chooses toremember some things, and wemust also ask whatit chooses to forget. The relation betweenmemory and forgetting is an important aspectof memory studies. Such things are oftencontested, among groups, between individuals:These contests, too, should be our business.

My third example will demonstrate this. I hadfloated the idea of including theDreyfus affair as atopic in a course in French. One colleaguecountered, symptomatically, that the Dreyfusaffair was entirely forgotten, and not worthdredging up again. Now, forgetting Dreyfus is asignificant fact about the early French 20thcentury; but she was mistaken with respect tomore recent decades: There is considerablerecent work on the affair as well as on itscontemporary relevance (e.g., Duclert & Si-mon–Nahum, 2009), and there is also somepublic memorializing. I suspect that these publicgestures show us a society making efforts to makeup for its own forgetfulness; official commemo-rations happen when such things are safe—orindeed, as a way of making them safe:

Let us not mince words here. Both ‘history’ and‘memory’ ultimately revolve around and in turn aim

to fashion, authorize, and motivate specific defini-tions ofmoral community in the present. (Palmie, 2010,p. 374, original emphasis)

One of the problems with official memorializ-ing is that it has the tendency to attribute asingular meaning to an event. It is homogenizedin retrospect. This is the point of my fourthstory. I recall with amusement the spectacleorganized around ANZAC Day by the Australiangovernment in 1985.2 Seeking to do somethingspecial tomemorialize the battle on its seventiethanniversary, the government gathered togetherall the living veterans of the Gallipoli campaignand took them back to Turkey for a photoshoot. There is an act of appropriation inherentin official memorializing such as this, an actthat has the effect of obliterating the memoryof the lived experience. Aside from this individ-ual variety, the sense of the event itself maybe contested. The old men at Gallipoli thatday were dutifully interviewed by the media;what are your memories, they were asked, andwhat are your feelings as you revisit thisbeach? One tremulous old man hesitated for asecond, then said: “We shouldn’t have beenhere in the first place. Why are they bringingus back?”

He was distinctly unsentimental about thewhole episode; official memory, by contrast, isoften very sentimental indeed. It can be inaccu-rate; it can serve ideological ends and it can workin the service of power. It can empowerminorities, but it can also disempower them,and it can make the past safe when it threatensour complacency. Above all, like sport, it is usedto support the illusion of a national consensus.All these are reasons to work critically withmemory, but they are not reasons to avoidworking with it. These simplified, legendary,nostalgic and sentimental, safe, official accountsof the past are a real and present danger for theculture learning of a student of modern lan-guages. We need to take on the challenges ofmemory studies, with the critical care andanalytical attention they demand; we need toteach our students to think about the issuesraised by cultural memory at the same time asgiving them access to it.

The formation of subjectivities in memorywriting; archives and their relation to individualexperience; public memorializing and contestedmeanings: What stories are told to what audien-ces, under what circumstances, and to what end?These are the questions that can be addressed in acurriculum based on memory.

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Principles

I have suggested that a revision of thephilological paradigm can yield a way of recon-ceiving what we do to lock together language andculture in our students’ experience of theirlearning. If we recall that philology claimed tobe studying the spirit or essence of a languagethrough the study of its significant written docu-ments, then we must ask just how a spirit couldlend itself to study. Of course it could not: Instead,the practice of philology was to assume thegradual enrichment of the resources of thelanguage through its culturally significant uses.We would have to give up on the assumption ofprogress implied in this model, as we would haveto give up, too, on the way a society of ordersarranged its cultural values. Then we couldabstract from the paradigm the followingprinciples:

1. Both culture and language are modifiedthrough time: We can study a history ofdiscursive practices.

2. In practice, this will be a history of use andusage: There is no reason for this to excludeany of the resources used in the compiling ofmonolingual dictionaries. These include allsocial groupings as well as speakers acrossthe full range of sites and histories where thelanguage is spoken. This latter point solvesthe problem raised by traditional philology,that is, the privilege accorded a canonicalliterature and the prestige associated withthe essentialist definition of a people.

3. Since it is a historical method, it entailswritten or otherwise archived sources. Arenewed philology will lend itself to theteaching of literacy, without necessarilyprecluding oral usage.

To build a curriculum on these principles, weneed to adopt a conception of culture that willhelp us refocus our work. In the foregoingsection, I outlined a focus on memory, on thegrounds both that the connotations of words arememories and that cultural identity is formedlargely from the stories in which we take our place.I add to this now the principle that any focus isselective, and hence restrictive: In order to teachlanguage in culture and culture in language, thematerials we select for our syllabi should becentrally based on discursive practices—on lan-guage and the way it works in them, rather than,say, on the visual arts. Film, then, is a limit case,but the stories it tells can be invaluable. I shallreturn to this in due course.

Let us give up if we can on the conjunction“and,” which displays nothing more than acontingent coupling. I propose an alternativephrase for what we are trying to do: language inculture, and culture in language. In practice, thisdelineates two concepts of context and showstheir mutual entailment. For a lexical item or acollocation, the context is determined by itssituational and syntagmatic constraints, but theseare interpreted through the diachronic history ofits uses. Equally, the meaning of a text is itscontexts of interpretation—the story it tells of thepast and the uses to which it is put in the present.

The Narrative Hook

While not intending an exclusive use ofnarrative genres, narrative in a range of genresis central to my proposal. This is because memoryis storytelling, and stories about the past real orimagined

1. are engaging teaching material, lendingthemselves to the discursive skills of para-phrasing and elaboration;

2. are exchanged in intercultural encounters,and hence lend themselves to a discovery ofotherness—the need to make explicit wherewe ourselves are ‘coming from,’ as well as thereciprocal;

3. exist in multiple versions, lending them-selves to retelling and hence to the interpre-tation of point-of-view;

4. lend themselves to contextual research;5. are used, often through allusion or implica-

tion, in public debate, but seldom innocent-ly. Hence, a memory curriculum fosters thedevelopment of analytical skills—the dis-cernment of ideological presuppositions—as well as of debate.

For these reasons, my own practice has been tobase my syllabi in the early years on a narrativehook.

I use the term ‘hook’ as it is used in televisionprogramming. The hook is the program thatcatches the fish, bringing it into the space, time,and posture required for continued viewing. Thisis often the news. In my usage, the narrative hookis the story whose function is to stimulate thestudents’ interest, thus engaging them in thelearning that makes sense of it.

Storytelling is fundamental across the discur-sive arts; who does what to whom and why andwhere, who the heroes and the villains are, andwho the victims, what changed as a result of the

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events, what was lost and what was gained: Thesequestions stimulate curiosity and drive discovery.The personal narratives that are the basis ofmemory studies may fulfill some of what is calledfor by Shanahan (1997), in valorising “the extentto which the affective element is embedded in thenature of symbolic expression—and thus meta-phor, myth, and literature” (p. 164). Likewisefiction. Feature films with their published screen-plays, or the story from which they are adapted,have served me well, to ensure the systematic useof the oral and the written to support under-standing of each other. I compile a list of onlineresources and a print dossier, some for class workand some for homework, and align them with thecontextual problems that need solving in thehook. The narrative hook, selected for bothaccessibility and inherent interest, as well as forthe way it is embedded in a history, or presupposesit, is a ruse that allows the complexities of the topicto emerge as what the students learn by thismeans. At the same time, it is important to keep inmind that what the topic does is to deepen ourunderstanding of the hook. It should engage thestudents’ imagination with the characters, theiremotional investments, and with how the contex-tual circumstances portrayed are germane to whathappens to them. Hence it should not merelyillustrate a topic; nor should it be used in extracts.

The learning principles I adapt are familiarfrom immersion teaching (the medium ofinstruction is learnt as the instrument requiredfor learning something else), but differ from thislatter in crucial respects. For one thing, it deepensthe language/culture nexus, in contrast with, say,the teaching of mathematics in a FL, where theobject of the learning is independent of the targetculture. For another, it can avoid the temptationto teach exclusively for comprehension, withno focus on form. We should bear in mind thatif a student learns all the French used in a featurefilm—interpersonal pragmatics in a variety ofsituations, a variety of syntactic forms, themorphology they govern, diction in a variety ofregisters, and a wide lexical range—she will beextremely competent indeed. Allied with readingmaterial, the moves between registers and writtenand oral genres are handled as a matter of course.These are language instruction objectives; theycan and should be taught in any target languageteaching of cultural material.

The narrative hook needs to be (more or less)contemporary, but the supporting documentsmay be contemporary with the events referred to.This allows cognitive consonance between theFrench the students need for their own purposes,

and the French of the principal source text, at thesame time as learning that words are therepositories of their history, their connotationsare their memories, the construal of key lexicalitems is part of understanding how the cultureinhabits the language. Documents from differentperiods help to raise two valuable issues: (a) thepersistence of certain stories, and (b) the changesover time in their interpretation.

Amongst the documents there should always beat least one media document concerning topicalpolitical or social events or debate. The questionfor class work will be: How does understanding thestory help us to see what is at stake in thisdocument? Or how does it help us to understandthe terms in which the debate or the report iscouched? Note that the relation between explicitnarrative and sociopolitical discourse will changewith the level of instruction, with either the story orthe political discourse used as the hook of amodule or a course. As the characters in a narrativehook have emotional investments, so do contem-porary speakers of the language; so does publicdiscourse have recourse to the range of invest-ments of its audience. The learningmay then focuson the search and selection of stories to serve thepurposes of a burning issue, andon the acquisitionof debating strategies to use in rhetoric.

Whatever we think we know, and know that wedo not know, about the cultural consequences ofmass migration and mixed populations, thismuch is certain: The individuals who make upany community—a classroom, a workplace, amunicipality—are unlikely to share the samememories. This is the dimension of globalizationwith which our discipline is called to engage. Thememories passed on from previous generationsform the cultural imagination for interpretingpersonal experience in the present. If, forexample, countless generations have lived onthe same piece of earth and have now left it forwhatever reason, then themodels of permanence,territory, and community relations (includingenmities) must perforce inform the experience ofimpermanence and isolation and the failure ofinterpersonal expectations. On the other hand, ina situation where many people remain broadly inthe same community, building on intergenera-tional memory, including that which is passed onin school, the presuppositions arising from thatcontinuity, the breaks in it and the way thosebreaks have been handled are probably inscruta-ble for most new arrivals. I take the dispersal ofcollective memory as the problem we need toaddress, not because we can put Humpty togetheragain, but because memory is what underpins the

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assumptions of the full range of social action,from the interpersonal to the governmental, andbecause neither the assumptions nor theirsources in memory are automatically availableor explicit. My proposal for using memory studiesis, therefore, formulated specifically for foreignstudents learning a language at a distance fromthe site or sites where it is used. It involvesharnessing narrative memories as the source ofthe materials we exploit, as the motivation forstudent tellings and retellings, and as the meansof providing a working definition of culturelocked into discursive practices. It is our specialvocation tomake good on the claim that languagemakes culture, and culture language. However,we shortchange that claim unless it is inclusive ofthe plurality of cultural groupings that speak thatlanguage and the histories through which thatlanguage has become theirs. A selective use ofcanonical material necessarily excludes many ofthem, traducing the central principle of philolo-gy, which is that a language evolves through thehistory of its use.

FRAMEWORKS FOR AN INTEGRATEDCURRICULUM

It should be clear from the disciplinary history Ihave sketched above that I do not consider anyframework derived from a synchronic paradigmcapable of integrating culture learning intolanguage learning as we need it to do. This is soirrespective of whatever place is accorded to asociolinguistics or a pragmatics by the linguistictheory we adopt. My proposal is fundamentallydiachronic; it bears on storytelling, and hence onthe processes whereby familiar meanings aremodified by particular needs and new contexts.Let me put this succinctly, if a trifle simplistically:From a linguistic point of view, a story ‘ends up’ inthe connotations of a word; from the point of viewof the study of culture, storytelling does not ‘endup.’

However, it behooves me to ask whether adiachronic framework can accommodate appro-priate language learning exigencies, and if not,whether it results in a consequence just asexclusive as the opposite strategy. I will approachthis question by considering my proposal along-side those made by Heidi Byrnes for usingSystemic Functional Linguistics as a means ofintegrating language and culture. Byrnes andher colleagues have pioneered the adaptation ofSFL from the situations of use for which it wasdeveloped—native language literacy, ESL—to FLcurricula at the tertiary level (see Byrnes &

Sprang, 2004). This adaptation is not without itsdifficulties, however, since the concepts ofcontext, of discourse, and of culture alter in thepedagogical environments in which they aredeployed. Thus, context is primarily “context ofuse” (Halliday, 1994, p. xiii; quoted in Byrnes &Sprang, 2004, p. 49) or “a social use-boundedunderstanding of language competence” (Byrnes,2005, p. 51). Adapting the technical concept ofregister, later expanded into genre, to construe“use-bound,” Byrnes defines genres as “constella-tions of lexicogrammatical features that construea particular situational context” (Byrnes, 2008, p.110): They are ways of getting things done(Martin, 2009, cited in Byrnes, 2012). Thepedagogy involves a focus on the social orienta-tion of a “functional and usage-based socialpractice” (Byrnes & Sprang, 2004, p. 49), in termsof a “wide variety of content and a range ofconstructed relationships and positionalities vis-a-vis other social groups and individuals” (Byrnes &Sprang, 2004, p. 54). I note that “context” isdefined as the functional effectivity of discourse insituation. This functional effectivity appears notto include diachronic context, “the larger systemsof meaning produced and reproduced by speechcommunities” (Kramsch, 2013, p. 24).

Systemic functional linguistics is above allsystemic. Accordingly, it relies centrally on thesocial sciences, rather than on the humanitieswith their intrinsic attachment to a diachronicparadigm. The consequence is that whereHalliday (1994) acknowledges that “the usesof language (. . .) over tens of thousands ofgenerations, have shaped the system” (p. xiii,quoted in Byrnes & Sprang, 2004, p. 49), thishistorical dimension has no place either in theconcept of context, or in the concept of discourseat work in most pedagogical applications of hiswork. This is because cultural history, like itsgeological analogy, is conceived in linguistics asstrata (Saussure’s synchronic cross-sections), oreven as sediment. The consequence is plain whenwe examine the objectives of the teaching: Thefocus is firmly on writing and speaking, onproduction rather than understanding. It isaimed at “competent use of an L2 in a range ofdiscourse environments” (Byrnes, 2005, p. 296,emphasis added); the learner “finds a voice”(Byrnes, 2008, p. 112) in the L2. More strikingstill, the aim is for a learner to “give meaning”(Byrnes & Sprang, 2004, p. 54, emphasis added).Surely not: It is the cultural inheritance built intothe language that gives meaning, transformed, asis its culture, by its speakers. This may be theprecise difference between curricula for second

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language environments where all speakers of thelanguage give meaning, and those devised forlearners in environments where the language isnot generally spoken, and is therefore framed asforeign.

There is some tension between the “context ofsituation” as defined under SFL protocols and the“culturally construed larger context” (Byrnes,2012, p. 5), not in principle, but in practice, asa result of the methodologies used to study them.Byrnes’s own terminology reveals this; sometimesculture is “content,” sometimes it is the pragmaticdeterminants of interaction; sometimes context isinstitutional, sometimes situational, sometimessociocultural (Byrnes, 2008, p. 106). The tensionis revealed in the following juxtaposition: On theone hand, the aim is to “(re-)establish FL study aspart of the humanities with its interest in contentknowledge, competence, interpretive insight andcritical thinking” (Byrnes, 2005, p. 288), while onthe other, we are warned that “conveying culturalinformation may not translate into a functionalsyllabus” (Byrnes, 2008, p. 108). It is at this pointthat the two senses of “discourse” or “context” pullin different directions, coinciding with two quitedistinct foci for the concept of genre (Freadman,1994, 2002, 2012). On the one hand, a genre is aset of functional strategies for getting thingsdone; on the other, it is a set of habits ofrepresentation. The former corresponds approx-imately with the Hallidayan interpersonal dimen-sion, while the latter corresponds approximatelywith the ideational (cf. Halliday, 1994). Thistension returns us to the tension that holdsbetween the synchronic presuppositions of lin-guistics and the diachronic presuppositions ofculture—whether by this latter we mean litera-ture, or the cultural narratives that pervade theconversations which our learners need to under-stand and within which they will need to make aplace. If we understand by culture the wayintergenerational memories pervade presentconversations, if we gloss “worldview” as resultingfrom narratives, and identity as the answer to thequestion “what story or stories am I a part of?,”then traditions of representationmust be broughtinto clear focus. Then we will be able to ask howthe synchronic account of the pragmatics ofinteraction can be aligned with the diachronicdimension of culture.

As a way of tracing a path toward an answer, Imake the following observations:

1. Different stories are told in different set-tings, between different groups of people.Teenagers recounting the latest episode of a

soap opera, or reminding their peers of thefirst film in a series such as Star Wars orHarryPotter, are engaged in a practice of memoryover a diachronic period of, say, twenty-fourhours or five years. They are rehearsing theirculture.

2. Their grandparents telling them the story oftheir settlement in the new country, or ofbread-making in the communal oven in thevillage in the old, are likewise engaged in amemory practice, telling their family foun-dation story, or passing on a lost way of life tothe next generation as a way of ensuringcontinuity across a point of rupture.

3. The press and the media, fixated as they areon the present moment, also have recourseto stories of the past as a way of making senseof current events, and politicians, too, as away of making a pitch for change. Any suchinteraction involves the great art of retelling,of transforming experience into story, andstory into experience. The context of usesituates and shapes the interaction, andstudents need to learn how this is done ina target language; the memories create thecultural context for making sense of presentexperience, including of our intersubjective,our intergenerational, and our socio–politi-cal relationships. Considered as a culturalfact, subjectivity involves both.

In this light, I agree entirely with suggestionsmade by Byrnes, following Gee (1998), that acurriculum be based on a general progressionfrom interpersonal and familial genres at thebeginning, to public genres at advanced stages(Gee’s primary and secondary genres), correlat-ing to a progression from narrative to debate andpolemic, where the public, polemical genresimply but do not always tell a story. If we planour curricula in terms of the progression fromnarrative to versions of stories, through interpre-tation to critique and debate, from personalstorytelling to public or political media discourse,we provide for ourselves and our students a clearview of levels of competence and achievement (cf.the staged writing sequence proposed by Byrnes &Sprang, 2004, Appendix 5). In this way too, we willbe paying due attention to situated storytelling, tostories as they are purveyed in social practices ofinteraction, to the conventions and strategies of“genre as social action” (Miller, 1984/1994, p.151).

It is not enough, as Kramsch writes, “to letlearners tell their own story” (Kramsch, 2013,

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p. 23); they need to learn the place of the past inthe present of any culture and the relation ofpersonal identity with collective identity, throughnarrative, or “individual experience [in] a largersocial and historical framework” (Byram &Kramsch, 2008, p. 21). There is a certain humilityrequired for the enterprise of interculturalunderstanding: One’s own voice may, as in music,harmonize in any cultural environment only oncondition of a well-attuned ear.

NOTES

1 I thank the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne,for support for the project out of which this articlehas grown: Faculty Research Grant, The teaching ofculture, 2009–2011. One section of the article has beenpreviously published in the proceedings of the LCNAUInaugural Colloquium (LCNAU, 2012).

2 ANZAC stands for the Australian and New ZealandArmy Corps that fought with the British during WWI.The legend celebrates soldierly qualities—courage,solidarity, etc.—said to take a particular form in troopswho were sacrificed by British bungling. It commemo-rates this sacrifice at the defeat at Gallipoli, nowrenamed Anzac Cove, which is used as a site ofpilgrimage by thousands of Australian and New Zealandtourists for the commemoration of the battle on itsanniversary. The legend is also the object of serioushistorical and political dispute.

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