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Profile
The German Association for the Study of British Cultures aims, as expressed
in its constitution, to promote “academic activity in the field
of British and other English-speaking cultures”. The Association’s
main concern is to bring a scholarly cultural dimension to the subject
matter and perspectives of English Studies at German universities and
schools; and to give this dimension more conceptual depth, thematic differentiation,
and institutional recognition. The list of founding members shows that
the Association grew out of English Studies, but it was established in
the attempt to create a new cross-disciplinary forum outside the traditional
sort of English Studies association. This new development is vulnerable
to dilettantism, however, and it is for this reason particularly that
a British Studies section within English Studies needs dialogue partners
and colleagues from Social and Media Studies, History, Urban Studies,
Social Psychology and other relevant areas. A “unified field of
theory” of culture, something along the lines of the Birmingham
Centre, can easily hide the fact that the inclusion of visual texts and
signifying practices in English teaching demands practical and theoretical
skills that are not automatically possessed by practitioners within English
Studies.
The Association therefore tries, through such channels as its conferences
and publications, to mediate between two sets of people: on the one hand,
British Studies specialists from English Studies, who for the most part
have found and tried out their new concepts of “text”, “meaning”,
“representation”, etc. within their own discipline; and on
the other hand potential partners from neighbouring disciplines, who are
professionally familiar with the evaluation of hegemonic relations or
the semiotics of film or visual art. To be realistic, it must be said
that this interdisciplinary dialogue, to say nothing of intermixture,
will progress only slowly within the Association. The heavy literary bias
at recent conferences has shown that most members are still moving (for
understandably pragmatic reasons) in the borderlands between literary
and cultural studies. Many potential partners regard this somewhat sceptically
as half-heartedness.
It is clear from the foregoing remarks that, as far as theoretical and
conceptual matters are concerned, the Association must remain a “broad
church” (Kastendiek/Berg). It can learn here from the German Association
for American Studies, which brings together not only context-oriented
“philologists” but also literary and cultural sociologists,
arts and media specialists, post-colonial experts, and feminists. Our
Association, too, should avoid tying itself to one cultural concept or
one field of analytical objects or one (e.g. semiotic) method. Instead,
we should be happy to profit from the unfamiliar methods and procedures
of sociologists or historians. If we do not do this, we run the risk of
a sort of inbreeding which could lead, for example, to the Association
leaving it more and more at the literary-studies type of analysis of discursive
representations and not even asking the social scientist’s question
about the “why” of a particular social development (Kastendiek/Berg).
As to its position on theory and method, the Association’s real
task is to protect the field of dialogue from excessive monopolization
and to remain open for encounters as controversial as possible.
