Imagology

[Marketta Carucci]

Imagology is a branch of comparative literature. More specifically, it is concerned with "the study of cross-national perceptions and images as expressed in literary discourse".[1] While it adopts a constructivist perspective on national stereotypes and national character, it does emphasize that these stereotypes may have real social effects. It was developed in the 1950s with practitioners in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.[2][3] It never gained much of a foothold in anglophone academia. This may be attributed to imagology's skewed relationship[clarification needed] to Edward Said's influential Orientalism, which is much better known in this context.[3]

National stereotypes were long seen as intrinsic properties of ethnic groups. Hippolyte Taine is a major representative of this positivist view.[4] In his Histoire de la littrature anglaise (1863) he held that cultural artefacts are determined by three factors: "moment", "milieu" and "race".[5] The voluntarist view of what it means to belong to a nation was expressed by Ernest Renan in his lecture "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (What is a nation?) in 1882.[6] Renan argues that citizens may choose to affiliate themselves to a particular nation. Leerssen terms this view proto-imagological, because national identity was still held to be an independently existing entity.[4]

Imagology as the study of literary representations of national stereotypes emerged from the French school of comparative literature.[7] The scholars who founded the Revue de la littrature compare in 1921 (Paul van Tieghem, Fernand Baldensperger, Paul Hazard) had an historical interest in literature and wanted to go beyond the study of national images as if they were historical facts.[7] Marius-Franois Guyard dedicated a whole chapter to the subject, called "L'tranger tel qu'on le voit", in his book La Litterature compare (1951),[8] which analyses novels that represent nations other than the authors' own. As the title already suggests, Guyard did not assume that these images reflected national essences, but rather treated them as representations. This shift from essences to representations turns Guyard into a founding father of imagology, which is premised on the assumption that "the images which one studies are seen as properties of texts, as the intellectual produce of a discourse".[7] His inclusion of the subject in the study of comparative literature was contested by Ren Wellek, a leading figure in US comparative literature, who argued that the study of cross-national images should not become part of comparative literature, for this would turn it into an auxiliary discipline to International relations. A rift between the American and French schools of comparative literature ensued, which limited the international action radius of imagology.[9]

Imagologists call the representation of national stereotypes "ethnotypes". Those ethnotypes are regarded as discursive objects rather than objectively existing phenomena. They are always defined against an "other", generating an opposition between auto-images and hetero-images.[10] An auto-image is the representation of the self, while a hetero-image is the representation of the other. These representations stress difference, in keeping with the assumption that "a nation is most characteristically itself in precisely those aspects in which it is most different from others".[11] In ethnotyping, national character serves as an explanatory factor for the behaviour of the actors in literary representations.[10] Oppositional patterns such as North-South, East-West or Centre-Periphery with their concomitant stereotypes serve to contrast nations, regions or continents to each other. In this multi-scalar logic, the same location can be the Centre to one Other and the Periphery to another Other.[10] These representations are changing over time, depending on multiple factors, such as the political and social climate and literary trends.[10]

Since imagology studies literary representations and not societies as such, it is a methodology for the humanities, not for social sciences. Following the theoretical assumption that ethnotypes are not measurable against an objective reality, the research focus is not on the truth-value of a representation but rather on its representation-value.[4] Concretely, this means that imagological research can never raise the question of whether author A has correctly represented nation B, because national character for imagologists is non-existent outside of the literary construction. Rather, imagological research inquires into the development, construction or effects of auto-images, hetero-images or meta-images an author creates in his work. A meta-image is the image an author writing from nation A about nation B attributes to the view of nation B on nation A.[11] Furthermore, it is of interest to see how ethnotypes influenced each other in comparing nationalities, time periods or genres.[11]

The intertext of an ethnoytpe is established through researching literary representations of the same nation in the same time period.[11] The rationale is to investigate influences of the existing body of literary representations of a nation on the case under study. This can lead to the examination of whether a literary representation of a specific nation has changed over time. For instance, ethnotypes were traditionally often portrayed in sharply contrasting binary terms. In the late-19th century, authors increasingly used ambiguity and irony in their representations, to make them more nuanced. The contextual dimension targets the historical, social, political and economic background in which the text was written, since it is assumed that the author's immediate environment influences his/her representations.[11] War between two countries, for instance, will most probably impart negative connotations to their mutual ethnotypes, while nationalism tends to reinforce the political instrumentalization of auto-images. The textual dimension of imagological analysis examines the text as such, focusing on genre conventions and rhetorical strategies.[11]

In her article "Comparativist Imagology and the Phenomenon of Strangeness" Małgorzata Świderska presents an imagological-hermeneutic conception of the interpretation of national, ethnic, and/or (inter)cultural strangeness in literary works. Świderska develops her concept of comparativist imagology from the work of Paul Ricoeur's concept of multiple tranget and from the work of Jean-Marc Moura. Świderska applies her conceptualization of comparativist imagology to Heimito von Doderer's "Divertimento No I" and Das letzte Abenteuer. Ein Ritter-Roman.

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Many theorists have over time delivered worksthat are pivotal to literary researchers: be they philosophers, like WalterBenjamin or Judith Butler, or psychoanalysts, like Sigmund Freud or JacquesLacan, semioticians like Julia Kristeva or Umberto Eco, or anthropologists,like Claude Lvi-Strauss or Arjun Appadurai, all had a major impact on the newand varied directions literary criticism took over several generations. Theirthinking helped ours to progress, although their approach was not necessarily aliterary one, because they challenged common perceptions and emphasised aspectsthat had been neglected until they brought them to light and we deemed themrelevant to our own discipline.

Theory gives usthe conceptual tools with which to organise our thoughts on subjects underexamination. It allows a refined understanding of the various elementscomposing a given narrative and it provides an argumentative method. Thedefinition of methods in fact goes with the identification of specific theorieshelping to provide goals and standards. Being interdisciplinary, analytical andexploratory, theory indeed has practical effects, allowing us in particular, ascomparatists, to approach literary matters from fresh perspectives, questioningassumptions related to discourse, meaning, identity, etc., and exploring thecircumstances in which texts are produced. As historically defined, theory also reflects on the intellectual progressof its time.

Originating fromlinguistic and disciplinary responses to 19th-century political stresses onnational unity, comparative literature theories truly developed in the 20thcentury after wars had raged not only between European neighbours on a regularbasis, but also on a worldwide scale. Comparisons between different literatureswere then conducted in a spirit of nations better understanding themselves anddiscovering others. Their aims were humanistic. Imagology was born of suchconstructive endeavours. Bringing to the fore the need to achieve a greater appreciationof the dynamics between the Self and the Other, imagology offered newpossibilities for recognising the sources and consequences of preconceivedideas and of poor communication both inside and outside borders. In view of thecurrent context of migratory flows and societal changes, with the recentupsurge of nationalisms and worldwide demands from women and minority groupsfor respect and justice, it seems topical to examine the theories feeding thefield of imagology today.

This study willexamine the nature of the imagological undertaking, highlighting the role oftheory in its development, over time adding new concepts that not only continueto refine its aims and methods, but also allow it to spread geographically,beyond the essentially European framework of its beginnings, making it a trulycosmopolitan field, effectively extending outside its original borders anddisciplinary scope.

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