TEACHING EUROPEAN CULTURE AND LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION AS HUMANITIES

"When a historian works within the center of the space and time of a culture, he feels that his sub­ject is so immense that the importance of his work can be taken for grnnled. Bui my position is closer to that of the anthropologist. who works al the edge, and for whom the description of another culture is also the search for an alternative civil­ization." William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History1

The Challenge: lsolalion and Invasion Situated on an island in the Pacific, thousands

of miles from the United States and Asian main­lands, the University of Hawaii is confronted with a profound and vital educational challenge. Its unique geographical location suggests cullural isolation of an academic instilulion which, as a university, implies univnrsoJ identity and requires univcrsitas magistorum ct scholorium, a commu­nity of teachers and students whose vision tran­scends this physical confinement.

Although Hawaii continues lo conjure up images of tropical lushness and beauty, this idyll is not without the recent intrusion and encroach­ment of combustion engines, jel exhausts, bull­dozers, land speculators. and concrete boxes which rise high over the sandy beaches and sway­ing coconut palms. Recent campus structures with sealed glass "windows" deny occupants bright, warm sunlight and shut out the cool, gentle trade winds from lhe sea. Hawaii is being pressed hard by the progressive proponents of Western "civil­ization!" As a humanist, it is difficult to remain oblivious lo the battle which is now being waged.

Contemporary mankind, in the advanced cul­tures at least, has an intellectual conception of the world. Our present scientific age traces its

William F. Scherer

origin to such men as Galileo, Copernicus, Kep­ler, Giordano Bruno, and others whose views were first accepted only by a few scienlists. Today, in contrast, our modern life is virtually governed by scientific conceptions. The general curriculum of the University of Hawaii reflects this trend. A new engineering complex, a new bio-medical complex, and new medical and law schools have received enthusiastic legislative and adminislrative sup­port, while almost simultaneously the State legis­lature wielded severe budgetary and personnel cutbacks to the College or Liberal Arts and Sci­ences for 1973-74.

Rapid change since Hawaii attained Statehood has made us all too aware of the imminent danger of reliance upon technology and pure business venture at the expense of a sound humanistic edu­cation as the foundation for life. No real univer­sity may ever be just a job training ground; on lhe contrary, a university serves its community first by educating men toward aesthetic and moral sensitivity, arousing in men a sense of social re­sponsibility, and instilling and nurturing its stu­dents with true human values over those estab­lished superficially and materially in the external world. "It is the business of education to foster the growth of balanced, whole persons," which. according to M. V. C. Jeffreys, involves "authen­ticity, integrity, and depth of feeling .": Perhaps man today is being unconsciously educated Io­wa rd a world-view in which his human impor­tance is diminished. In its stead, we find many instances of the exaggerated importance of busi­ness, industry, or financial gains. "The world significance of modern education is that ii is grad­ually undermining the significance of the world.''3

How can we educators help restore the signifi-

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cance of the world to man, and the significance of man to the world?

It is the unique challenge of every educator to assist in the student's personal growth toward self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment is a direct out­come of an education which helps the sludent to develop freedom; not freedom from oppression or authority, but freedom to make choices in life. Such choices can only be made when the student becomes aware of alternatives. Such alternatives can be discovered by reaching out for ideas be­yond the familiar.4 Foreign language study and culture study are two important complementary subjects which have this outward direction of in­terest and human value.

A Rationale for the Program and Its Establishment

In the spring of 1969 with the aid of a curricu­lum development grant,5 the Department of Euro­pean Languages and Literature laid the founda­tion for a discrete program of courses in English, the purposes of which were to supplement our language courses with broader cultural offerings and to provide a choice of humanistic areas of study for all undergraduates at the University of Hawaii. We now have over thirty courses in this program. Judging from enrollments. the program has been successful. The average number of stu­dents per course is twenty, and some subjects have attracted as many as ninety students in a semester. Each course has been offered at least once within a three-year cycle, and about half are offered regularly on an annual basis.

It is evident that many students in Hawaii feel the need for a deeper understanding of Western civilization, and want to choice of several per­spectives on the prominent Western European cultures: French, Germanic, Hispanic, and Classic (Greek and Roman) as well as the cultures of the Eastern European countries and their languages. Some students want to read recognized master­pieces of Western literature, occasionally in pur­suit of a degree in comparative literature. Others want to explore the great ideas of leading Western thinkers. In the broad view, these new courses deal with formative forces within the literature of a Western country or language-area and the gen­eral underlying moral and spiritual impulses that have shaped the development of Western civiliza­tion and influenced the evolution of human con­sciousness in Western man.

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Our "EL" (European Literature) courses con­centrate on works of art which express creative genius. While the historian is concerned above all with movements that man if est political and social revolution, and scientific and economic reforma­tion through ideological and institutional aspects of cultural development, the teacher of an EL course is concerned primarily with the formal and stylistic revolution of diction and the aesthetic and ethical reformation of ideas. Where generally historians stress external events, we emphasize internal ''events" through selections representa­tive of aesthetic, literary and cultural trends. Many of the EL courses are designed expressly to teach a student the vocabulary of artistic and lil­erary criticism. The content of our courses include the activities of European poets, writers. thinkers, as well as musicians, artists, and craftsmen.

The EL courses are taught by language prof es­sors, specialists in the literature of their respective languages: Classical, Germanic, Romance, or Slavic. Our present EL courses include: Ancient Epic, Early Greek Thought, Greek and Roman Mythology, Greek and Roman Literature, Nine­teenth and Twentieth Century Russian Literature, Latin-American Literature, the Rebel in Spanish Literature, Medieval, Renaissance, Classical and Modern German Literal ure, the Modern French Novel, French-African Literal ure, and German Expressionism.

Teaching Aids and Methods for European Literature in Translation

Reference books, art books, musical recordings, slides of artistic and cultural relevance, and a basic library of available texts of European lit­erature in English were purchased with funds from the original curriculum development grant. During subsequent years, each instructor has aug­mented his audio-visual aids with filmstrips, slides, tapes, and recordings. Such leaching aids are used effectively in the EL courses. For exam­ple, in a course entitled "European Poetry in the Middle Ages," I often utilize recorded selections of Gregorian chants, lyrics of the troubadours and minnesingers, goliardic and vagabond verse, and excerpts from Lalin, Provenyal, and Middle High German songbooks, such as the Carmina Burano, the Glogau and the Lochheim collections, avail­able on Archive recordings. I also show quite a few slides of Carcassone, Avignon, the cathe­drals of Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, Bamberg,

and Cologne, etc., along with the tapestries of the Duke de Berry, illuminations of the Manesse manuscript, and the masterworks of Matthias Grunewald, Lucas Cranach, Stephan Lochner, Tilman Riemenschneider, and other painters and sculptors of the Medieval period. The read­ings cover the heroic poetry of medieval Europe, with good English translations of the Icelandic epics, the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, and the great courtly epics of Tristan (Gottfried von Strassburg's version) and Parzival by Wol­fram von Eschenbach. These masterpieces of medieval literature are readily available in paper­back editions, and some, like the Hatto transla­tion of the Tristan, are almost classics in their own right. In the course on German Expressionism, slides of the "Blaue Reiter" and the "Brilcke" painters have supplemented the poetry of Georg Trakl. Georg Heym, Ernst Stadler, and Gottfried Benn and the drama of August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Ernst Barlach.

Some of the EL courses are taught jointly by the staff of several divisions of our department. For example, "European Tragedy" is a compara­tive study of selected tragedies from ancient and modern European literature, team taught by members of the Classics, Spanish, French, and German divisions. Other courses dealing with genre study are planned for comedy, the novel, and the lyric, while others will treat artistic cate­gories or trends: baroque, romanticism, realism, symbolism, surrealism. Proposals have also been made lo include new courses in European myth­ology, folklore, and children's literature, includ­ing study of fairy tales, fables, and legends. Printed flyers at registration listing the semes­ter's offerings with intriguing course titles have aroused student interest. Interest is maintained with carefully-chosen reading lists, syllabi, varied presentation of materials, discussion of topics, audio-visual aids, group work leading lo group discussion of thought-provoking questions de-

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signed to encourage polarity of ideas and opin­ions, and the utilization of guest lecturers from within and outside of the department.

The EL courses form a spectrum of topics and themes that touch our students' immediate con­cern. For example, a past course was entitled "Literature and Self-Knowledge" and presented literature as a quest for self-knowledge in the in­trospective writings of Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Hesse, and Hammarskjold. The catalogue description for the course on German Expressionism is "Search for the 'new man' and the revival of a humanity gone astray through world wars and technological 'progress'." "Ideology and Literature in the Soviet Society" is concerned with "contemporary Soviet prose, poetry, and plays in conflict with Soviet ideology, and demands of the ideology upon lit­erary art," and "French-African Literature" studies works reflecting "the development of black African literature in French during the twentieth century, with major themes of negri­tude, national political unity, colonialism, and traditional culture." A new course recently pro­posed on European mysticism would study the conflict between inner spiritual perceptions and the world of individual freedom, invention, and discovery as it is revealed in the writings of Euro­pean mystics, and would also consider the con­tributions of these unique men towards an un­derstanding and preservation of humanity for modern man. Further course proposals for the EL program involve Scandinavian, Eastern Euro­pean, Yiddish. and Gypsy literatures in transla­tion.

In Hawaii we have placed special emphasis upon our courses which treat the influence of European culture on the Pacific Basin: Dutch Colonial literature, the Europeans in the Pacific (French in Tahiti, Germans and Russians in Ha­waii, Iberians throughout Asia and the Pacific), the Spanish and Portuguese cullures in the Amer­icas. We have also considered further advance­ment toward India, Japan, and China and their cross-cultural relations and /or contrastive analy­sis with European artistic expression, especially through their literatures.

An Undergraduate Program in Comparative Literature

In the fall of 1972, our department sponsored the foundation of an undergraduate program in

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Comparative Literature with interdepartmental cooperation from East Asian Literature, Euro­pean Languages and Literature, English, Art, Music, Philosophy, and Religion. The broad range of University courses in the literature of both East and West provides a unique opportunity for com­parative studies. Within the existing popular Lib­eral Studies program, imaginative students can develop their own majors, including one new major in Comparative Literature. Twenty-seven professors representing European and Asian Ii terat ures and other fields such as art, philos­ophy, and American studies, presently serve on an advisory board for students with interests in comparative literature and cultures. Well over 150 courses exist in the program with four main areas of emphasis: general courses (backgrounds, masterpieces, and oral literature, taught by the English and Speech departments I, British-Amer­ican literature, Continental European literature (which comprises our EL program and its offer­ings as well as our literature courses in the lan­guage for majors), and Oriental literatures. For­eign language proficiency equivalent to three college years of one language or two years of two languages is required of every undergraduate major in the Comparative Literature program. Individual European Culture Courses

EL courses have become attractive electives for students in English, Oriental literature, art his­tory, philosophy. music, history, and sociology. General cultural courses in divisional languages and language-areas treat both traditional topics and the contemporary topics through team-lec­turing in "Modern Russian Culture," "Hispanic Civilization," "Franco-American Relations in the 18th Century," and "Civilization of the German­Speaking Peoples and Countries." These have drawn large audiences of enthusiastic students. The course of Germanic culture has developed into a year's course with a printed syllabus that deals with aspects of life in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Holland, with heavy emphasis on the artistic heritage of these countries and their peoples. The course is taught by six profes­sors who lecture on subjects varying from the or­igins and history of the early Germanic tribes, the German musical tradition from Bach to Mah­ler, the role of the Dutch Republic in Europe, the image of the Swiss up to the twentieth century. the history of the Germanic languages, the two wars and their impact on Germany, and the po-

litical reality of the l wo Germanies today. Audio­visual materials-slides, filmstrips, movies, tapes, and phonograph recordings-accompany the lectures.

A Team-Taught Interdisciplinary Humanities Course

Besides the individual courses in specific Euro­pean literatures and cultures, we have developed a year-long interdisciplinary course called "Hu­manities and the Forging of Western Civilization," spanning over 2000 years of Western thought from Greco-Roman limes to contemporary Eu­rope. The film series, "Civilization," narrated by Sir Kenneth Clark, is used as a backbone for the course. It is one of few courses al the University of Hawaii which attempts, through films, inter­disciplinary learn-teaching, and guest lectures, to integrate the arts of dominant eras within the mainstream of European cultural development. Political. economic, sociological, and scientific aspects of this development, although by no means overlooked or denied, are not the major points of concern; instead, the arts (literature, music, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and painting) represent the human endeavors studied. During the first semester, the reading includes selections from the Greeks (Homer, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Plato, ct al.) through the medieval fathers of the Church (Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) and great medieval epic writers {Chre­tien and Wolfram von Eschenbach) to the first modern personalities of the Renaissance {Cas­tiglione, Erasmus, Luther, Cervantes, cl. a/.). The music section of the course focuses on those ex­pressive qualities of music which relate to the art, literature, and philosophy of each era in Western European history. Recordings of the great sacred music of the Church, the ceremonial music of the court and city, and the more intimate love lyrics and dance music of the Middle Ages and Renais­sance, and the instrumental and operatic music of the Baroque and 18th century are used along with lhe texts of the poets, minnesingers, and early madrigal and opera composers, etc. The second semester includes the study of Goethe's Faust, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Voltaire's Candide, Mo­liere's Misanthrope, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zara­thustra, Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Freud's Civi/-1zation and Its Discontents, and other works, which open up horizons for our Hawaiian and Asian students.

European Culture os Humanities: 'On-the-Spot' in Europe

The optimum learning experience was achieved during the summer of 1973 when our department offered its first cultural study of Western Civili­zation in Europe. In collaboration with the School of Travel Industry Management, the Department of European Languages and Literature offered "Humanities and the Forging of Western Civili­zation" on-the-spot in Europe. I travelled with twenty-nine students from Hawaii, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and the American mainland, from Honolulu to Europe, in order to experience first-hand many of the highlights of the Clark film series, and many of the great cultural monuments of the European world, from ancient Rome lo the contemporary life of Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich. The purpose of the joint venture between European Languages and Literature and the School of Travel Industry Management was "to show a link bet ween the humanities and European culture, as well as relevance to quality visitor industry development, and to show how the culture and traditions of Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. and France both influence and are influenced by tourism." My personal objectives, however, were more idealistic: to expose this group of young people lo formative elements in the early history of the Occidental world and lo aspects of the evolution of Western thought. Above all, I wanted lo instill my students with an appreciation and devotion for the European tradition and the heritage of Western man.

Focus was not entirely on the past, however, as I was also concerned that every student compre­hend the development of modern Europe and be­come aware of its contemporary ecological and sociological problems. I wanted the students lo see the transition of city planning: cities of anti­quity-Pompeii, Rome: medieval cities-Perugia, Avignon, Heidelberg, Colmar, and Strasbourg; Renaissance cities such as Florence, Venice, and Basel; and the metropolises that have undergone many stages of metamorphosis, for example Paris, Zurich, and Munich. I insisted that the students gain a respect for human civilization, both in and outside of museums. They were kept aware of the confrontation of modern technology with the European tradition, as it is especially evident today in Venice, on the Rhine, at Cologne cathe­dral, and in Florence, Rome, and Paris. The great

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spiritual centers of Ravenna and Assisi, for ex­ample, provided opportunity for intimate confron­tation with past forces which forged the direction of Western thought.

This direct confrontation with European culture for our students in Hawaii is the final touch to our European culture and literature-in-translation program, expressing our pedagogical ideas as well as fulfilling the very challenge of the hu­manities. Besides another European grand tour next summer, a longer study tour of Classical Greece and the Aegean isles is planned. The significance of such an extensive program in and for Hawaii need not be reemphasized. Enrollment in EL courses has expanded, and classes have quadrupled in many cases as interest continues to grow. The teaching of culture in this way will provide its own rewards as the effectiveness of our courses is manifest through the very conduct, way of thinking, and overall changes of attitudes in the students toward various European countries and peoples and their heritages. The comments and enthusiasm expressed by them on the trip bear witness lo the profound impact of the experience.

Our EL program is young, and, like many main­land language departments, we have recently suf­fered the strains of reduction in foreign language requirements and the consequent "leveling off' of students. Yet, if the present attraction of our EL program continues, I predict that our EL courses, although taught in English, might very well reinforce and encourage language study in the long run, and that enrollments in foreign languages, especially European languages, will continue lo increase markedly in Hawaii. More­over, the EL program and the regular language program al the University of Hawaii share an earnest hope and will to educate towards an effective transformation of human values.

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References Cited 1. Thompson, William I. At the Edge of History, Spi:culo·

lions on thu Tran sf armalian of Cult urn, New Ynrk, 1971, p. xi. 2. Jeffreys, M.V.C. "The Education of Feeling," Affjrmotivu

Education, ed. Barry N. Schwartz, Englewood Cliffs, 1972, pp. 74-75.

3. Steiner, Rudolf. Human Values in Education, 1 r. Vera Compton-Burnell, London. 1971, p. 8. [See also Rudolf Steiner, Lectures to Teachers, tr. D. Harwood, London, 1948. for development or the thoughts expressed in this paragraph.

4. Black. Algernon. [Cf.] "What it Takes to be Free," Morality and Anwrican Freedom, ed. Jerome Nathanson, New York, 1972, pp. 16·29.

5. Scherer, William F. and Steven R. Miller. "Cultural Perspectives of Central European Artistic Endeavor and Civilization in Translation," Grant for curriculum development by the University or Hawaii, 1969·1970.

William F. Scherer was educated at the universitius of Maryland, Munich, Colorado (B.A., 1!161/, Soullwrn Golif ornia (M.A., 1!162, PhD., 1!167), and Vienna. Al presunt an t\ssociole Professor of German in the Deportmimt of European Languag1is and Literature al the University of Hawaii, having !ought prnviously al the University of Gal1fornia. Bur~duy, l!/65 · 1968. Dr. Scherer was recipient of a Fulbright rcsuarch grant to Viunna, 1!J64·1!J65, University of Hawaii Hesuard1 Council grants lo Europe, l!J69, and Yale University. 1!171. and a curriculum development grant for the pioneering of tire Euro· peon Culture Program, 1969·1970.