VOLUME 2 2013

JOURNAL FOR ANGLO -AMER ICAN STUD IES

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BORDERLANDS JOURNAL FOR ANGLO-AMERICAN STUDIES Published annually Publisher Association for American Studies in South East Europe Editor-in-chief Aleksandra Izgarjan Editorial Board: Željko Bošković, University of Connecticut, USA Thomas M. Skrtic, University of Kansas, USA Mary Ellen Schmider, University of Maryland-University College, USA Kimberly Engber, Wichita State University, USA Silvia Schultermandl, University of Graz, Austria Ian McLeod , Institut Libre Marie Haps, Belgium Reghina Dascal, University of the West, Romania Stipe Grgas, University of Zagreb, Croatia Jelena Šesnić, University of Zagreb, Croatia Aida Koçi, South East European University, Macedonia Radojka Vukčević, University of Belgrade, Serbia Aleksandra Izgarjan, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Sabina Halupka-Rešetar, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Diana Prodanović-Stankić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Arijana Luburić-Cvijanović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia ISSN: 0317-8471 Address: Branimira Ćosića 12, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia serbianamericanstudies.rs www.aassee.org Cover image: “Inside Outside” by Linda Ellen Phelps (lindaphelps.com)

Editor’s note

The second volume of Borderlands grew out of the Second Regional American

Studies Conference organized by the Association for American studies in South East Europe

with the support of the U.S. Embassy in Macedonia, which took place in Tetovo on August

22, 2012. It provided an opportunity for the scholars to discuss pedagogical practices and

methodologies in the field of American studies as well as the benefits of various American

educational exchange programs (predominantly Fulbright and JFDP). Hence, many of the

presentations dealt with the issues of curriculum building, redesigning of syllabi, teaching

methods and participation in exchange programs and implementation of knowledge gained at

the host institutions. Another important objective of the conference was fostering cooperation

among national associations for American studies in South East Europe through the regional

association (AASSEE) and European association for American studies (EAAS). Given the

fact that American studies as an interdisciplinary field comprise many different sciences, the

speakers came from various backgrounds ranging from economy, political sciences,

American literature, law, and media to environmental studies. The articles in this thematic

issue reflect this diversity of backgrounds and topics.

Thomas Skrtic in his article on civic professionalism perceives it as a particular form

of professionalism which can be used as a strategic resource against injustices of capitalist

culture. He analyzes the characteristics of Dewyan democracy and the concept of justice and

argues for the need for an institutional theory of justice which would be grounded in a model

of deliberative democracy. In such a system, the idea of civic professionalism rests upon the

vision of social institutions as sites of political education which becomes particularly

important nowadays with the increasing debate on civic engagement and economic liberalism

and welfare capitalism. The examination of the tensions between justice, democracy and

capital is also the basis of Stipe Grgas’s article on American studies and canonization of

Thomas Pynchon. It provides an interesting link to Skrtic’s article since it similarly focuses

on the capital and economy as the domains which have been systematically erased from the

agenda of American studies. Grgas traces the logic of capital in his exploration of Thomas

Pynchon’s work, as one of the leading contemporary American authors. He calls for a

revision of the American canon and the hierarchy of the authors that constitute it, drawing

attention to their exploration of the capital as the “structuring core” of U.S. polity. The article

offers a much needed in-depth analysis of the field of American studies, its paradigms and its

work on self-constitution. The insight into the interplay between the capital and master

narratives of American culture becomes even more engaging in the present moment of

economic crises which Grgas addresses. He reconceives the curriculum of American studies

and proposes interventions that need to be made which would reflect the contemporary

moment in the history of the U.S.

Jelena Šesnić’s article situates Thoreau’s Walden within post-exceptionalism

American studies. It provides a valuable re-examination of the key concepts in the field with

a particular focus on exceptionalism. Šesnić’s interpretation of Walden places it in the context

of global literature and delineates new methodologies in American studies. She applies

innovative modes of reading canonical texts, such as Walden, through the concept of scale

and sustainability, which place it in the realm of environmental criticism. The text enters into

a dialogue with the previous two articles through its investigation of U.S. economic practices

(especially capitalist economy) and reflects upon its effects on Thoreau’s work. It casts a

different light on Walden, placing it in the context of postcoloniality (with its tensions

between the local and global) through the application of the world-systems theory. This

repositioning successfully proves the limits and inadequacies of reading Walden only in a

nationalist or exceptionalist key and suggests more innovative approaches to this work.

Zalkida Hadžibegović discusses the benefits gained from international exchange

programs using as an example her stay at the University of Nevada Reno. Her article presents

a detailed survey of the exchange programs available in the region of South East Europe and

the opportunities they provide. As a JFDP alumna, she not only gained knowledge in the field

of Environmental studies, but also improved her teaching skills and methodology and used

the program as an excellent opportunity to learn more about American culture, history and

educational system. Another significant benefit was the creation of a network of JFDP alumni

in the region and connecting it with American colleagues at their host universities. Upon

returning to her home institution, Hadžibegović shared her knowledge with her colleagues

and students and participated in the revision of the curriculum and the creation of new syllabi

content. Through small scale projects for talented students, she continues to improve the

educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Aida Koçi similarly discusses her experience

as a JFDP alumna and the advantages of the exchange programs. In the first part of her article

she focuses on the incorporation of service-learning as a new methodology she became

acquainted with in the U.S. into the curriculum at the South East European University in

Tetovo. By giving various examples from her colleagues’ and her own experience, Aida Koçi

offers a range of possibilities for the use of service-learning in the field of American studies.

The second part of her article deals with the ways the JFDP experience inspired her to

redesign her courses, specifically the one in American studies in order to make the students

more aware of the complexities of American culture and history.

Brunilda Kondi’s article gives a thought-provoking insight into the effects of the U.S.

on Albania. Having in mind the global phenomenon of the export of American culture, Kondi

highlights especially the notion of American dream, the ways it is related to the Albanian

diaspora in the U.S. and its relevance for the import of American culture to Albania. Her

research encompasses different categories of the influence of the U.S. on the Albanian

cultural and political scene, predominantly pop culture, the media and commodities, but

perhaps most curious is her exploration of the signals of the symbolic presence of the U.S. in

the Albanian public and private sphere.

Daniela Stoica analyzes the use of films as a form of practical approach in teaching

literature. Her case study includes teaching the novel The Great Gatsby with the aid of the

film. She provides a theoretical framework for teaching films in literature courses and focuses

on the advantages to be gained through this interdisciplinary approach. The article centers on

the analysis of several scenes from the novel and the film The Great Gatsby, the strategies the

writer and the director employed (especially focalization) and the ways the students’

knowledge not just of the book, but also of the whole Jazz Age, improved thanks to the

integration of the film into the discussion of Fitzgerald’s text. Particularly interesting are

various examples of the student’ projects which allowed them to creatively explore the course

material.

New readings and re-visions of literary works and the canon, restructuring of

curricula and syllabi, integration of different fields such as literature, global studies,

environmental criticism, economy, media and service-learning – all the issues that make up

this volume of Borderlands point to new ways of charting American studies, which reflect an

exciting period of redefinition of identity in the United Stated.

Editor-in-chief

Aleksandra Izgarjan

1

Thomas M. Skrtic

University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

The Civic Professional in Deweyan Democracy1

Article info: UDC 321.7 Dewey J.

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: March, 2013

Abstract: This article is concerned with the contemporary significance of civic professionalism – the particular

form of professionalism essential to Deweyan participatory democracy – as a strategic resource in the struggle

against the expanding injustices of capitalist political culture. After noting the interdependence of liberalism,

democracy and professionalism, and describing the affinities and incongruities among their respective forms, it

argues that addressing these injustices requires an institutional theory of justice grounded in a substantive model

of deliberative democracy. Professionals stand at the intersection of democracy and justice in capitalist

democracies because, in principle, the welfare state institutions they control are to balance the inherent tensions

between democracy and capitalism. Dewey favored civic over technocratic professionalism because, beyond

and ultimately essential to this balancing act, for him all social institutions must be sites of political education

through citizen engagement in deliberative problem solving. Whereas technocratic professionals monopolize

social problem solving, thereby precluding such engagement and education, civic professionals engage citizens

in social inquiry, thereby helping them develop and exert the deliberative skills necessary to master their

conditions, thus cultivating in the public and the professions the sensibilities and capacities of the strong

democrat.

Key words: civic professionalism, liberalism, democracy, Dewey, justice, neoliberalism.

1. Introduction

The modern professions rose to a position of prominence and authority on the basis of

two claims, a practical claim that the professions have exclusive access to knowledge that

society needs to solve its problems, and a political claim that they will apply this knowledge

to society's problems in the interest of their clients and the common good rather than for

personal gain (Haskel, 1984b). Advocates of professionalization in early twentieth-century

America framed it as the victory of science over traditional authority and the

institutionalization of the ethic of service. Moreover, they argued that joining scientific

authority and moral obligation in a culture of professionalism would create a new class of

1 I am indebted to Bob Kent for stimulating my interest in this and related topics and for his generous substantive contributions to my understanding of them over the past two decades.

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citizens whose mental discipline, fierce autonomy, and social commitment would act as a

liberating force in society, a restraint on capitalistic self-interest and a model of democratic

leadership (Bledstein, 1976).

Beginning in the 1960s, however, these claims were called into question by a radical

critique of professional knowledge, practice, and power. Critics pointed to the incongruity

between the convergent, specialized nature of professional knowledge and the complex,

divergent character of social problems (Collins, 1979; Gilb, 1966). Moreover, because

virtually all professionals work in bureaucracies, the application of professional knowledge to

social problems is largely determined by the nature and needs of the organizations themselves

(Scott, 1981), which creates serious ethical problems when the needs of the organization

conflict with those of its clients or of society (Schein, 1972). Indeed, given the contradictions

of specialization and bureaucratization, many of society's most pressing problems are the

result of professional activity itself (Freidson, 1988; Fischer, 1990; Foucault, 1980).

In terms of power, critics rejected the early portrayal of professionalization as "a

grand cultural reform, capable of restoring sanity to a capitalist civilization intoxicated with

self-aggrandizement" (Haskell, 1984b, p. 177; 1984a), casting it instead as merely another

form of self-promotion. Moreover, they argued that the radical idea of professional as

autonomous democrat had produced only conservative and undemocratic consequences. Not

only had professionalizing social problems put "every sphere of life . . . within the power of

the professional to set apart, regulate, and contain" (Bledstein, 1976, p. 92; Foucault, 1983),

but by “monopolizing” social problem-solving itself, professionalization precluded citizen

engagement in collective decision-making, a core element of democracy (Christie, 1977;

Dzur, 2008).

During the same period, however, non-economic and participatory norms had

developed in some professional fields and institutions, which gradually led critics to refocus

their criticism more sharply on the anti-democratic effects of the particular form of

professional identity and practice that came to be known as technocratic professionalism

(Christie, 1977; Illich, 1976). Although technocratic professionalism continues to be

criticized, in the 1990s attention in the U.S. began to shift to the opposing civic (Sullivan,

1995, 2005) or democratic (Dzur, 2008) model of professionalism championed originally by

John Dewey and other American progressives as a means not only to more responsive

professional institutions but also primarily to a stronger, more participatory form of

democracy.

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2. Liberalism, Democracy, and Professionalism

Dewey’s most compelling argument against technocratic professionalism came in his

debates with fellow progressive Walter Lippmann over the question of the role of

professionals in industrial democracies (Dewey 1980/1916, 1988a/1929-30, 1988b/1927;

Lippmann, 1914, 1922, 1925). Lippmann argued in The Phantom Public (1925) that the

social problems of an industrial-era civic environment were too complex for an American

public that he characterized as self-interested and lacking in political wisdom, advocating

instead for the professionalization of social problems and policymaking. Although Dewey

agreed that the era’s social problems were too complex for the public as it was presently

constituted, he argued that Lippmann was wrong to see these conditions as an inherent

feature of democracy rather than the result of the weak, non-participatory form of democracy

that had emerged with industrial capitalism. Dewey believed that, given a strong,

participatory form of democracy, with adequate “methods and conditions of debate,

discussion and persuasion" (1988b/1927, p. 365), the public could cultivate the sensibilities

and deliberative skills of the strong democrat, and thus develop and exert the collective

problem solving and decision making necessary to master social conditions.

At a deeper level, however, the Dewey-Lippmann debate was about what type of

liberal democracy America should become, and thus, more fundamentally, what form of

liberalism should serve as its political philosophy – market liberalism, managerial liberalism,

or developmental liberalism (Kent, 2007; Ryan, 1972; below). Each form of liberalism is an

alternative approach to balancing the basic tension at the core of all liberal democracies, i.e.,

the tension between democracy and capitalism, between the democratic ideal of political

equality and the capitalist reality of social inequality (Labaree, 1997; Macpherson, 1977). As

progressives, Lippmann and Dewey were both criticizing market liberalism, the dominant

political ideology in the West then and today, but they represented different wings of the

progressive movement – the technocratic and civic wings, respectively – and thus advocated

for different strains of liberalism, managerial and developmental, respectively.

3. Liberalism and Democracy

Market liberalism is rooted in nineteenth-century classical political economy. It

argues for minimal government, the expansion of free markets, and laissez faire economic

and social policies, which yields a weak form of democracy in which citizens are conceived

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as individual competitors for political goods, and government is merely a protector of

economic markets and private rights (Macpherson, 1977; Held, 1996). Market liberals

embrace this weak model of democracy, insisting on a restricted role for citizens (and

democracy itself) to prevent government interference in the economy (Foner, 1998; Ryan,

1972). Neoliberalism, the dominant form of liberalism in contemporary Western political

culture (Harvey, 2005; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009), is an extreme form of market liberalism.

The managerial and developmental strains of liberalism arose during the progressive

era in opposition to market liberalism (Foner, 1998). The managerial strain was inspired by

positivism, utilitarianism, and empirical social science. It argues for expanded government

capacity to regulate the economy and distribute social services based on the promise of

technocratic efficiency made possible by science and bureaucratic administration (Price,

1974). Managerial liberals are also weak democrats. Like market liberals, they want limited

citizen participation, not to protect the market but to protect professional bureaucracies from

lay citizen interference.

Conversely, developmental liberals encourage citizen participation because they view

democratic politics itself as a primary good, a source of reciprocal self and social

improvement in which citizens develop and exert their intellectual, moral, and practical

capacities experientially through deliberative problem solving (Macpherson, 1977).

Developmental liberals like Dewey share a commitment to a strong, participatory form of

democracy, one that, especially for Dewey, extends beyond government to all social

institutions, including family, religion, business, art, science, and especially education

(Barber, 1984; Ryan, 1972). As a democratic humanist, Dewey viewed all social institutions

as sites of political education through deliberative problem solving, and in this sense he

considered schools to be doubly educational, sites of democratic training for the young and of

experiential political education for citizens and professionals (Dewey, 1976/1899, 1980/1916,

1991/1937).

4. Democracy and Professionalism

Democracy and professionalism are inherently linked in liberal democracies because

welfare state institutions and their professionals play a key role in balancing the tension

between democracy and capitalism (Labaree, 1997; Sullivan, 1995). The way the tension is

balanced, however, depends on the controlling form of liberalism and associated model of

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democracy, each of which has an affinity for a particular type of professionalism and

organizational form.

Because technocratic professionalism views professional work as a means of personal

satisfaction through individual occupational and economic success, it embraces the ideals of

specialized competence, self-interest, and competition. As such, it has an affinity for the

weak democracy of market and managerial liberalism, which is characterized by self-

interested competition and minimal citizen participation to protect the market and social

institutions, respectively. Bureaucracy is the preferred organizational form for both types of

liberalism, coinciding with the market liberal principles of efficiency and competition, which

guide the work of market-based technocratic professionals, as well as with the managerial

principles of specialization and professionalization, which structure and legitimate the expert

authority of public-sector technocrats (Skrtic, 2005). Because citizens in weak democracies

are encouraged to pursue private interests free from the costs of political participation (Barber,

1984), technocratic professionals tend to maximize their economic and occupational options

while avoiding public obligations. Like most citizens in weak democracies, they assume that

the market will meet the needs of the majority of the population with government providing

minimally for the rest, and that their practices are scientific and objective and thus

unproblematic (Dryzek, 1996; Sullivan, 1995).

Conversely, civic professionalism views professional work as intrinsically valuable to

the professional but also primarily to society. Like technocratic professionalism, it also values

specialized competence, but rather than the ideals of self-interest and competition, it

embraces those of public interest and collaboration, thus giving it an affinity for

developmental liberalism and strong forms of democracy in which citizens and professionals

actively participate in all spheres of social, economic, and political life (Brint, 1994; Skrtic,

2005). In order to accommodate participation and be responsive to the range of citizens’

needs, the organizations of a developmental liberal democracy must be flexible and

innovative, and thus non-bureaucratic “problem solving” or “learning” organizations (Skrtic,

1991). Staffed by civic professionals, such organizations promote social commitment, public

responsibility, and appreciation of diversity and change (Skrtic & Kent, in press), values at

the core of civic professional identity and practice (Sullivan, 2005).

Another key difference between technocratic and civic professionalism is their

respective forms of reasoning, instrumental and practical. If collaborative learning

organizations are the conditions of civic professionalism, practical reasoning is its method of

discourse. Conversely, technocratic professionalism is premised on the instrumental or

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“means-ends” reasoning of positivism, which is best suited to narrowly-gauged problems that

focus on a single aim defined by one criterion. When linked to a particular context of practice,

this kind of thinking can improve effectiveness by indicating which means are best for

achieving specific goals. However, justly resolving the complex moral, social, and political

questions that arise in social institutions requires professionals to develop and implement

equitable policies by balancing and integrating multiple value-laden goals and activities

(Sullivan, 1995). Alone, positivism is ineffective under these conditions because, before

instrumental reasoning can work, ambiguous situations must be turned into solvable problems

by balancing goals, activities, and competing values, and this requires the practical rationality

of the civic professional (Anderson,1993).

Moreover, for precisely this reason practical rationality is the rationality of strong

democracy, under which justice demands the ability to think in terms of complex balances

rather than maximizing effectiveness toward a single objective. The unique freedoms and

possibilities of civic democracy arise from continually reframing social problems and

balancing various social purposes to achieve just outcomes. Professionals contribute

positively to the advancement of civic democracy only when they are part of this ongoing

public discourse on social problems and purposes, and only civic professionals have the

requisite democratic values and corresponding method of discourse (Skrtic, 2005, 2012;

Sullivan, 2005).

But advancing civic democracy requires more than democratic values and methods of

discourse. Civic professionals also must have adequate conditions of discourse in the form of

flexible, responsive learning organizations, conditions that have been notoriously absent in all

types of modern societies, regardless of political regime. Moreover, lacking adequate

methods and conditions of discourse historically, technocratic social institutions have been

implicated in the construction, marginalization, and oppression of difference as deviance,

disadvantage, and disability. And even when marginalized groups have won the legal right to

just treatment, the conferred rights rarely are actualized in these institutions, a persistent

observation that has called into question the rights-based approach to social justice itself

(Skrtic & Kent, in press).

5. Rights, Needs, and Institutions

The disjunction between conferred and actualized rights is the central concern in the

critique of liberal legal consciousness, the foundation of rights-based legislation in liberal

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democracies. As a political strategy, rights discourse is indeterminate and legitimating—

indeterminate because a right’s value is determined by the structure and political

commitments of its institutional context, not the right itself; legitimating because, by

appearing to confer rights, it relieves pressure for reform, in effect continuing and vindicating

the injustices that the right was established to eliminate (Crenshaw,1988).

Today, all rights-based social movements – including those concerned to eliminate

injustices of social class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, and sexuality – are in a

similar position. They have used the rights idiom to establish rights in law, but their

actualization is at best indeterminate, institutionally mediated, and disempowering.

Actualizing indeterminate and legitimating rights requires considering what just institutional

conditions for the realization of rights would entail and how they would be achieved and

sustained. In addition, it requires clarity about what injustice is in these contexts, what it

entails, and how it is enacted and sustained (Skrtic & Kent, in press). Perhaps the most

exemplary American scholarship on these questions is that of political philosophers Iris

Marion Young and Nancy Fraser and legal scholar Martha Minow.

6. Indeterminate Rights and Institutionalized Injustice

In her critique of John Rawls’s (1971) distributive theory of justice, Young (1990)

accepts his position on the distribution of material goods (primarily income and wealth), but

criticizes him for misrepresenting nonmaterial goods as things. Rather, she argues,

nonmaterial goods such as rights, opportunities, and self-respect are relationships based on

processes mediated by social institutions, which implicates them historically in the

construction and oppression of difference. In theorizing the scope and substance of such

“institutionalized injustice” (327), she argues that we can’t know what justice requires in

particular social situations until we understand injustice in these contexts by listening, albeit

critically, to those who suffer various forms of institutionalized injustice in them (Young,

2000).

Minow (1990) criticizes rights discourse for resulting in incremental reforms that

leave institutional sources of injustice intact. As an alternative to an exclusively rights-

focused approach to justice, Minow proposed a “social-relations approach to the legal

treatment of difference” (172) which, like Young's (1990, 2000) relational interpretation of

institutionalized injustice, locates "rights in relationship[s]" (282) and treats social institutions

as a source of the problem of difference rather than as a neutral background. In this regard,

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she links the source of unjust institutional arrangements to the reforms of early 20th-century

technocratic progressives, commending them for advancing policies to care for and protect

dependent and vulnerable citizens, while criticizing the bureaucratic institutions they created

to actualize these policies for failing to give their intended beneficiaries a voice in “decisions

about their collective future” (264). Thus, like Young, Minow argues that we can’t know

what justice requires unless those who are suffering injustice have a voice and role in its

elimination.

7. Indeterminate Rights and Needs Politics

While Young (2000) and Minow (1990) theorize the nature of rights and injustice in

social institutions, Fraser (1989a) shows how injustice is enacted in these organizational

settings, focusing on the political process of making and adjudicating the needs-claims that

rights are established to recognize and satisfy. In doing so, she uses the concept of “needs

talk” (161), a political idiom involving disputes about people's needs and whether and how

government should provide for them. Arguing that needs talk is the dominant form of

political discourse in capitalist welfare state societies, she is concerned with the barriers and

opportunities it poses for social movements that want to make these political cultures more

just and equitable. In her analysis, “needs politics” is the medium of struggle among unequal

social groups (McCall & Skrtic, 2009).

Central to Fraser’s (1989a) analysis of needs politics are two axes of needs struggle.

The first is the struggle between what she calls “oppositional” and “reprivatization”

discourses (171). Oppositional discourses are those of social movements that attempt to

“politicize” their needs by reinterpreting them in ways that make them a matter of public

concern and provision. Moreover, by politicizing their needs, members of oppositional

discourses contest their subordinate identities and invent new discursive forms and vehicles

for interpreting and disseminating their alternative need interpretations. Thus, oppositional

needs talk is “a moment in the self-constitution of new collective [political] agents” (171).

Reprivatization discourses arise in resistance to oppositional discourses. They reflect the

entrenched interpretations of those who oppose state provision for reinterpreted needs and

thus try to keep government from accepting responsibility for them by arguing that they

should be met by the family or through services purchased in the marketplace.

The second axis of struggle pits successful oppositional discourses against expert

technocratic discourses in government service organizations. As the vehicle for translating

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state-recognized needs into objects of state intervention, expert discourses emerge when

politicized needs become candidates for state provision. The central issue here is politics

versus administration. Administratively, expert technocratic discourses translate successfully-

reinterpreted oppositional needs into “administrable needs” (Fraser, 1989a, 174), by recasting

them in terms that tacitly presuppose the prerogatives of the organization and its

professionals. Politically, these discourses simultaneously recast members of successful

oppositional movements as individual cases, thereby turning political activists into

“individualized victims” (p. 176). As such, technocratic professional discourses are

depoliticizing. Those who collectively secured the political status of their needs are atomized

and pathologized, recast as individual victims rather than members of a political movement,

repositioning them as passive recipients of predefined services rather than agents involved in

interpreting their needs and shaping their life chances.

8. Legitimation and Institutional Theory

If social institutions are unjust, and rights analysis only leads to incremental reforms

that leave institutional sources of injustice intact, how have they and their organizations

survived for so long? Institutional theorists have shown that organizations survive by

responding to two opposing institutional pressures – the practical need for stability and the

political need for legitimacy – simultaneously. These are opposing pressures for organizations

because maintaining legitimacy most often involves changing established structures,

functions, and activities in response to external pressure for reform from the state (and its

agencies, regulatory structures, laws, and courts), influential interest groups, and public

opinion generally, whereas maintaining stability requires preserving these structures,

functions and practices in response to internal pressure from the organization’s professionals

(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Thus, regardless of their actual

performance, social institutions survive by appearing to change in response to emergent

regulatory requirements and social expectations while remaining largely the same in the

interest of stability (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). They appear to change by unreflectively

imitating the structures, functions, and activities of similar, apparently responsive

organizations. Moreover, such symbolic change makes meaningful change increasingly

difficult because imitation involves conformity, habit, and ritualized activity rather than

reflective choice, leading to unquestioned acceptance of institutionalized structures,

classifications, and practices (DiMaggio, 1988).

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For example, under the state mandate for universal public education, public schools

in the U.S. came to define and structure their activities around the now institutionalized

functions of general education and special education, which reflect ritual classifications of

students, personnel, and programs rather than reflective consideration of effectiveness and

efficiency (Meyer & Rowan, 1983; Skrtic, 1991). Although ritualization fosters stability in

schools, it also makes it more difficult for them to change in response to new regulatory

requirements and social expectations, and especially to change demands like inclusive

education that require substantially different structures, classifications, and practices (Skrtic,

1995). Schools cope with threats to legitimacy like this by using “ceremonial” activities

(Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 355-57) and "decoupling" devices to signal the state and the

public that they have complied with the change demand when in fact they have not changed

in any meaningful way (Meyer, 1979; Zucker, 1981). The U.S. special education system

generally, and implementation of the U.S. special education law, the Individuals with

Disabilities Education Act, are archetypes of such symbolic change (Skrtic, 2012, 2005).

9. Justice and Democracy

Surveying forms of injustice, Fraser (1997, 2009) differentiates three distinct but

overlapping types. First, the structure of the economy can maldistribute resources necessary

for self-development; second, hierarchies of cultural values and discriminatory practices can

produce demeaning status inequalities; and, finally, these economic and cultural injustices

can result in a political structure that misrepresents individuals and groups with diminished

status by silencing their voices in legislative bodies and civic life. Fraser (2008, 2009) groups

just remedies for these types of injustice under the labels redistribution, recognition, and

representation, and for her and Young (1990, 2000) justice requires transforming (or

eliminating) institutions that produce these types of injustice, with the proviso that the

transformations are the result of fair, deliberative, democratic procedures. For both writers,

justice requires deliberative democracy.

For present purposes, Young’s (2000) treatment is especially important because her

contrast between “deliberative” and “aggregative” models of democracy parallels the

contrasts between managerial and developmental liberalism and between technocratic and

civic professionalism. Whereas the aggregative model views democracy as a market-like

mechanism for aggregating preferences and protecting private rights and interests, the

deliberative model views democracy as more intrinsically valuable because it promotes social

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cooperation and collective problem-solving while contributing to individual self-development

and thus provides “the best political means for confronting injustice” (26). Whereas

aggregative democracy restricts the scope of politics to elections and the public acts of

political elites and experts, the deliberative model views democracy and justice more broadly

as concerning “all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and

habits, and cultural meanings” that are subject to collective evaluation and decision-making

(27), including “struggles over the interpretation of social needs” (Fraser, 1989b, 66)

Although Young (2000) doesn’t make the connection, the aggregative model is the

weak democracy of managerial liberalism, the strain of liberalism that rose to prominence as

the technocratic track of progressivism, whereas the deliberative model is the strong

democracy of developmental liberalism advanced by civic professionalism (Furner, 1993;

Kent, 2007). An institutional theory of justice that includes economic redistribution,

appropriate forms of recognition and representation, and a deliberative model of democracy

is a formula for social democracy. Although such a theory is abhorrent to market liberals,

early and late, managerial liberals can be, and developmental liberals generally are, social

democrats. As such, both strains embrace an egalitarian conception of positive liberty

entailing notions of social and economic rights. Despite a common embrace of social

democracy, however, the differences between managerial and developmental liberalism are

insurmountable with respect to the aim and scope of democracy (see Skrtic & Kent, in press).

For managerial liberals, democracy is a procedural method of preventing tyranny

through periodic elections, but for developmental liberals, democracy is a way of life

requiring the cultivation of skills, habits, judgment, and other character traits necessary for

constructive participation in all spheres of society. For John Dewey – the quintessential

American developmental liberal – democracy so construed rests on a belief in equal

opportunities for self-development “independent of the quantity or range of [an individual’s]

personal endowment” (1939/1991a, 226). Early managerial liberals like Lippmann doubted

the political wisdom of citizens and sought to minimize their influence, placing their faith

instead in bureaucracy and technocratic expertise. But Dewey (1988b/1927) and fellow

developmental or civic progressives sought to create deliberative institutional conditions –

including collaborative learning organizations – for an informed, self-conscious, inclusive,

and participatory public to working partnership with government and a new breed of socially-

committed and community-oriented civic professionals. Premised on the values and practical

reasoning of the strong democrat and the traditional idea of a profession as a calling, civic

professionalism for Dewey was a way to restore a sense of collective social purpose in the

12

professions, one that recognized the professions’ responsibility to the community, and

especially to those suffering cultural, economic, and political injustice (Skrtic, 2012; Skrtic &

Kent, in press).

Although a century later it is difficult to imagine how anything can stop

neoliberalism’s intensification of such injustices, it is easier under these conditions to

understand the new interest in civic professionalism. What social democracy lacks are robust

carriers of its social and political values. Prolonged despotism under neoliberalism is likely to

be a catalyst for such carriers to emerge, and civic professionalism increasingly is seen as a

critically important carrier for the developed liberal democracies. Unfortunately, given the

more fundamental and egregious despotism in some alleged “emerging democracies,” it is an

open question whether civic professionalism can or will play a similar role in those societies.

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Stipe Grgas

University of Zagreb, Croatia

American Studies and the Canonization of Thomas Pynchon

Article info: UDC 811.111(73).09 Pynchon T.

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: February, 2013

Abstract: In the paper the author argues that the discipline of American Studies possesses an archive of

knowledge which has to be acknowledged by all those who purport to work in the field. After a brief description

of what he designates as the extant “paradigms” of the discipline, the author proceeds to explore what the

discipline has elided in its work of self-constitution. After diagnosing capital/the economy as that domain which

has been systematically erased from its agenda, the author proceeds to offer reasons why these elements have

not been foregrounded in the exploration of the United States. He argues that the unfolding economic crisis has

revealed capital as the “structuring core” of the United States polity. On the basis of this development, the

author argues that American Studies, as a discipline which has evinced an ongoing engagement with literary

works, ought to reshuffle the hierarchy of authors it draws upon. In the closing section of his paper, the author

maintains that Thomas Pynchon is the author whose work ought to be in the center of studies that purport to

make sense of the present conjucture.

Key words: American studies, discipline, capital, canon, Thomas Pynchon

Both terms of my title demand an analytic rigour and an expanse and intensity of

textual and theoretical engagement which I can here only gesture to. Arising from a local

occasion and meant to address a problem of the moment1 my aim in what follows is to offer a

number of jottings more than theses regarding the discipline of American Studies, outline

how I believe it needs to be conceived in the curriculum and propose interventions that need

to be made if it is to adequately address the contemporary moment of the United States. As a

preliminary step of my presentation I want to stress the fact that the discipline, its object of

study and its methodologies have never been stable but have been prone to constant self-

questionings, repositionings and revisions. Nevertheless, however unruly and open to change,

however permeable its borders, the discipline of American Studies does exist, has an

institutional setting and an archive of knowledge and people both producing and legitimating

1 A version of this paper was originally delivered at a gathering of members of The Association for American Studies in South East Europe that was held in Tetovo (Macedonia) in August 2012. The agenda of the meeting – the institutionalization and teaching of American studies in this part of the world - provided the framework for the problematic dealt with in the paper.

18

themselves by way of this knowledge. However, having said that, I will add that these

constituent elements of a discipline are more likely to characterize American Studies as they

are practiced in the United States than abroad. Outside the United States the discipline tends

to be diluted, the name applied to scholarly projects which lack its substantiating core.

Remarking on these procedures outside the American setting, Paul Lauter noted how, as a

rule, American Studies abroad are a part of other disciplines such as history or English and

that it is within these latter that American Studies students actually do their work. Lauter adds:

“Thus work in American Studies is less likely to take interdisciplinary form or by itself to

challenge existing structures of knowledge. In many areas one remains not an Americanist

but a historian or an economist who happens to study the United States” (29).

In what follows I will argue that, despite the various guises that American Studies

take, that there is a “substantiating core” within the discipline and that this core has not been

stable but has fluctuated not only in response to intra-disciplinary developemental logic but

also in response to outside events and challenges. Put otherwise, changes in the discipline are

not only endemic to its historicity but they, always seeking to be relevant to the issues of the

moment, register and reflect historically and geopolitically specific contexts. Contending that

we are not doing American Studies if we merely address any aspect of United States reality, I

will argue for the relevance of American Studies as a scholarly endeavor through which we

can diagnose the present conjucture and both delineate and challenge a certain constellation

of knowledge.

When discussing American Studies one should not ignore the fact that, as Julie

Thompson Klein argues, this scholarly field was the originary moment for the later

proliferation of different studies within the American academy. Her contention that studies,

as these have proliferated in various academic settings, designate an interdisciplinary

approach which does not specify what disciplines are involved nor how they are bridged (169)

ought to be kept in mind when looking back on what has been done in the field. In retrospect,

it can be said that the history of the discipline of American Studies is constituted by a number

of paradigms which have been deployed to explain and to legitimate the specificity of a

particular identity. The archive of these paradigms includes such notions as Perry Miller’s

“errand in the wilderness” and his notion of “nature’s nation”, Nash Smith’s “virgin land”,

Leo Marx’s mapping of the “machine in the Garden”, Alan Trachtenberg’s in-depth

reconstruction of the building of “Brooklyn bridge” or his later exploration of the

“incorporation of American”. Generalizing what these pioneering authors intended to do,

later commentators labeled them as the “myth and symbol school”. If one peruses the

19

methodological premises of the texts in which these paradigms were first formulated the

accuracy of this designation is hard to dispute.

I hold that anyone who purports to work within the field of American Studies needs to

recognize the “myth and symbol” school as a point of departure. Without these originary

moments, what Shelley Fisher Fiskin recognized as their aspirations towards “overarching

generalities about the United States”, I cannot see how we can understand the later

transformations of the field when “scholars recovered the voices of women and minorities

and replaced earlier exceptionalist visions of unsullied innocence with a clear-eyed look at

the lust for empire that America shared with other Western powers” (21). Revisionist

readings of the United States regularly engaged the discourse of exceptionalism which

Fishkin alludes to in her assessment. To simplify the matter for the purpose of my argument,

the doctrine of exceptionalism is based on the assumption that the United States is different

from Europe and that, nothwithstanding the heterogeneity of its makeup, there is an

underlying core, defined differently by the various paradigmatic readings, that make it

different from the rest of the world. The point I want to make here is that these revisionist

readings, to a large extent capable of being subsumed under what I would designate as

identity politics, fail to see the structuring core of the United States, paradoxically, the very

core that makes the difference.

On the evidence of the last decade, more precisely, on the evidence of what has been

revealed by the outbreak and persistence of the economic crisis, I have become more and

more convinced that the ideational frameworks relied upon by American Studies evince a

lack and that they have to be supplemented by a knowledge which has been systematically

elided from them. Without prevaricating, I contend that the tectonic transformations brought

about by the economic crisis reveal, more so than in any period since the Great Depression,

that the structuring core of the American project is, however it is conceived, the logic of

capital. In retrospect such a contention seems banal. Countless readings and designations of

the United States have harped on this symbiotic relationship. Meyer Weinberg quotes the

German economist Werner Somabrt who wrote that “America is the Canaan of capitalism, its

promised land”. In the next sentence of his introduction to A Short History of American

Capitalism he cites the American economic historian William N. Parker who maintained that

“the tendencies of western capitalism could find fullest and most uncontrolled expression” in

the United States (Weinberg). Why this self-evident fact did not become the central agenda of

American Studies can in part be intuited from Michael Denning’s exploration of the

“anomalous” position of Marxism in American Studies. Doubtlessly, if viewed as an

20

accomplice in the work of legitimating an identity like no other, American Studies could not

accept the interpellated position which was assigned to it by precisely the Other – Soviet

Marxism -against which it had mustered its conceptual resources. Leaving the thick

description of these imagological projections to others, I will add that this marginalization of

capitalism/the economy had certainly much to do with the investment the humanities and the

social sciences placed in issues of identity, textuality, representation, more generally, in the

dominant constructivist argument that was so prominent in postmodernist discourses.

Before directly addressing these issues I will briefly remark on the maneuvers that as

a rule attend the establishment of a scholarly discipline. In his contribution to the special

issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly entitled “‘Science does not think’: The No-Thought of

the Discipline” Grant Farred offers a Heideggerean critique of assumptions with which we all

too frequently operate in professing interdisciplinarity. His comments are pertinent to

American Studies as supposedly the exemplary interdisciplinary field. Contrary to the notion

that interdisciplinarity ensues after the constitution of disciplinary fields Farred maintains the

opposite:

Before there was the discipline, there was interdisciplinarity because no

discipline emerged except in its distinction, its putative, insistent difference

from other disciplines. Every discipline emerges out of disciplinarily: without

disciplinarily, thought in itself, for itself, there is no discipline. What the

discipline struggles against is not other forms of thought but, in truth, thought

itself. (61-62)

Earlier in the article Farred had argued that the discipline as such “obtains only under

the condition of erasure.” It cannot exist “without exclusion, without the deliberate erasing of

that which apprehends, challenges, or ‘frames’ the discipline” (60). Without rehearsing in full

Farred’s complex argument – his engagement with and his homage to Heidegger - let me cite

a remark he makes that I see as a challenge and a point from which to continue our

engagement with American Studies: “It is this privileging of practice, that we ‘do’

interdisciplinarity rather than think it, which must give us pause” (68). To paraphrase Farred,

let us pause and ask what is it that the discipline of American Studies excludes, what has it

erased in order to frame itself.

Expanding on the strategic maneuver which Denning has perceptively pinpointed in

the positioning of the discipline but incorporating the broader theoretical terrain of the post

bipolar world, I will here rehearse an argument I have expounded upon elsewhere (2011) and

21

propose that the erasure of the economic domain from our research agenda ensues from a

change of priorities. An admonishing reading of what is at stake can be read in Larry Ray’s

and Andrew Sayer’s introduction to a collection of papers exploring the relation between

culture and the economy after the so-called “cultural turn”. There they contend that one of the

most striking characteristics of social science at the end of the last century was the growth in

interest by scholars in culture and their turning away from considerations of the economy.

This turn was marked by a tendency to focus upon discourse and to shun materialism, thusly

bracketing off the relevance of Marxist-influenced political economy. These developments

reshuffled the research agenda and its priorities:

What was previously secondary, namely superstructural, is now

primary, and notions of structure are regarded as suspect in many circles.

Where previously language reflected material being, it is now treated as itself

the house of being’. Where previously radicals were concerned with capitalism,

they now talk of modernity and postmodernity. (1)

I cite an observation they made whose import and relevance have been fully

corroborated by subsequent developments: “The paradox of a turn away from economy to

culture at a time of continuing if not growing economic problems is becoming increasingly

apparent. The silence on these matters cannot continue much longer, and a fresh examination

of the relationships between culture and economy is required” (21). If in 1999 this was

paradoxical, I am convinced that it is even more so in the midst of the severest slump since

the Great Depression of 1929.

American Studies, recognizing this paradox and confronted with the urgency of the

present, needs to retrieve those voices that recognized the tenacity of the economic sphere

and were suspicious of the attenuation of materiality in high theory. In this context, Murray

E.G. Smith’s observations are pertinent to understanding the role of the “turn to culture” in

displacing capital from the dominant theoretical paradigms:

It is hardly accidental that most theorizations of the ‘postmodern

condition’ are so heavily dependent on poststructuralist and Baudrillardian

perspectives that sublate the analysis of the social relations of production while

seeking to overcome the familiar duality of culture and industry by focusing

precisely on that fearsome ‘postmodern’ complex: the culture industry.

Postmodernists assured us throughout most of the 1980s that the ‘new reality’

was one in which the production of knowledge, fashions, simulacra, tastes, and

22

even identities would count for far more than the production of Marx’s ‘value’

and the crises this bred; and they added that it was only upon this essentially

cultural terrain that conflicting visions of the future could be fought out. (234)

An analysis of American studies during the reign of this orthodoxy would easily

detect the erasure of capital in accounts of the United States polity. Although the pioneering

texts of the discipline registered the “haunting” presence of the economy, perhaps even more

so than later revisionist readings, they nevertheless, for “coherence’s sake” as Perry Miller

wrote, marginalized it in formulating a narrative of the American identity. On the evidence of

the last decade and the present state of affairs I maintain that this has to be remedied and that

the issue of capital has to be assigned a central position. In this regard I agree with those who,

such as Gobal Balakrishnan does, maintain that “the age in which we live can be made at

least partly intelligible as a story of the origins and expansion of capitalism. Of all the

classical categories of social thought, only this one has acquired a newfound, indeed

omnipresent actuality” (x). Merely gesturing here to the need to rethink American Studies at

the present conjuncture I propose that we look back into the archive of the discipline and

recuperate those instances or those writers who have registered capital’s “lurking presence”.

This work of recuperation will bring to the fore the tensions and dynamics from which the

discipline grew and will redress its blind spots. On a more local level, this refocusing will

reconfigure the archive on which much of the material with which American Studies,

particularly as they are practiced abroad, operates.

Namely, despite the methodological embrace of interdisciplinarity as the

characteristic positioning of the project of American Studies, it has disproportionally relied

on literary texts for evidence of its readings of the American experience. Overwhelmingly

these texts have been the canonical works of the American literary tradition. One has only to

think of, for example, the countless interpretations of Melville’s Moby Dick to find

corroboration for this observation. At different historical junctures readers have ventured into

Melville’s work to excavate problematiques, the urgent array of issues and challenges that

were pertinent to that juncture. This does not mean that the issue of capital and the economy

has been wholly eclipsed in the interpretative reprocessing of Melville. Thusly William V.

Spanos, whom I consider the most pertinent although not the best known voice in a more

broadly conceived field of American Studies, observes:

No matter how obscured by his attraction to the romance of whaling, in

other words, Melville’s insistent descriptions and analyses of the economics,

23

labor relations, and production and consumption processes of whaling make it

overwhelmingly clear that whaling is an American capitalist industrial

enterprise and the whale ship an American capitalist factory, which convert the

power relations of the “tableaux vivants” of the natural sciences thematized in

the cetological chapters to material practice. (206)

Needless to say, Spanos is not the only scholar who has advanced such materialist

readings. However, despite the fact that a substantial archive of readings that have focused

upon the imbrication of literature and the economy does exist it has not been at the center of

American Studies research. Not only do I believe that these readings have to be given a

hearing at the present moment but that a revalorization of texts that are, as if by default,

incorporated into the project of American Studies has to be undertaken.

Such reshufflings have not only been a constant feature of American Studies but of

other scholarly endeavors as well. Cecelia Tichi is not alone in beckoning to literary critics to

register the need for “canonical relevance” in the face of challenges that have ensued from

developments in the economy. She recalls how literary scholars responded to events such as

the civil rights movement, to feminist and Native American initiatives and the politics of

Vietnam and opines that the same engagement ought to be initiated in the “context of

pressing social problems whose foreground extends at least to the 1980s, when increasing

wealth inequality in the US first came to the attention of social scientists and journalists” (19-

20). Obviously, even more than literary criticism, American Studies, engaged as they are in

conceptualizing not only texts but a polity, have an obligation to rethink the literary canon

since it has frequently provided them the data on which they have constructed their

interpretations. It will turn out that the economic crisis not only impacts upon the canon but

also on the way that we read canonical texts.

I will illustrate this by way of my readings of Thomas Pynchon. My remarks will be

cursory and will be restricted to a number of passages in Gravity’s Rainbow which I have

selected because of the heuristic potential they have for further exploration of how Pynchon

engages his country as a land whose very being rests on the logic of capital. In my earlier

reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have continuously argued is the central text of

American literature in the twentieth century, I focused on its narrative strategies and its

thematization of the anonymous power of the system (2000). But today, when, as I have

argued above, the structuring core of capital has “unconcealed” itself, to use Spanos’s

phrasing, I am convinced that the economic system of capitalism is the determining matrix of

24

the book. In providing support for Pynchon’s canonization I will offer a number of passages

from his novel as corroborating this point.

If the work of excavation of origins has a particular weight in articulating identity – a

chore to which American Studies have assiduously devoted themselves - I consider the

following passage from Gravity’s Rainbow an obligatory addition to the “archeology of

American capitalism” (Matthews 2010):

They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon,

went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers

of marble. Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust,

dust that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments

going up elsewhere across the Republic. Always somewhere. The money

seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any genealogy:

what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing

green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper – toilet paper, banknote

stock, newsprint – a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word. They

were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social Register or the

Somerset Club – they carried on their enterprise in silence, assimilated in life

to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to

churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths,

powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for

good to the country's fate. (Pynchon 1973, 28).

In addition to his critique of some of the founding paradigmas that have been

mentioned above, the reader of Gravity's Raibow finds explicit comments on economic

theory such as the following:

A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now

could create itself – its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the

control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened – that you had

dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful,

illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B.But that was false.

Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are

names for parts that ought to be inseparable... (30).

More to the point of the present conjuncture, Pynchon characterizes Rathanau as a

“prophet and architect of the cartelized state” (164). This character sees the war as world

25

revolution “out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right but a

rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority” (165). I will

conclude with an excerpt from Gravity's Rainbow which has an anticipatory weight and a

particular resonance for the present moment. It appears in the folds of Pynchon's intricate

mapping of what United States's ideology continues to call the “good war”:

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre,

all just to keep the people distracted [….] secretly, it was being dictated

instead by the needs of technology […] by a conspiracy between human

beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war,

crying, “Money be damned, the very life [insert name of Nation] is at stake,”

but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my

funding, funding, ahh more, more. (521)

On this evidence alone it seems to me that Pynchon has engaged the core that I have

tried to foreground as the very essence of the object of American Studies. But the

thematization can easily be unearthed in his whole ouvre up to his last novel Against the Day

(2006) in which he seems to have shed the need to allegorize and where he chose to narrate

the United States during the formative period of the Gilded Age as determined by the stark

antagonism of labor and capital. The vampiric nature of the embodiments of capital in this

last novel are prefigured in the gothic metaphor that I have cited from Gravity's Rainbow (I

need my night's blood, my funding, funding). The fact that he reverts to a gothic motif

positions Pynchon amongst those who recognize the unrepresentable nature of capital. If we

reread his work as an effort to map its intricacies and its all-annihilating power Pynchon

assumes an important position in this tradition. I only mention this as a possible way of

reading the relationship between Pynchon and the economic problematic in a non-reductivist

fashion. Leaving this topic for some future engagement with Pynchon, I will conclude by

saying that to retrieve the haunting presence of capital in Pynchon not only opens his work to

the actuality of the present moment but its canonization within the discipline of American

Studies provides a purchase on the polity of the United States as it was established and as it

exists now. To Pynchon's readers abroad this retrieval provides cues to how it is to live in the

shadow of this polity's hegemony.

26

References

Balakrishnan, Gopal. Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War. London: Verso,

2009. Print.

Denning, Michael. “‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies”,

American Quarterly, 38.3 (1986):356-380. Print.

Farred, Grant. “Science does not think: The No-Thought of the Discipline”. The South

Atlantic Quarterly, 2011, 110.1.: 57-74. Print.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher.“Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American

Sudies”, American Quarterly, 2005, 57.1:17-57. Print.

Grgas, Stipe. Ispisivanje prostora. Zagreb: Naklada MD, 2000. Print.

Grgas, Stipe. “Postmodernity Grounded”, SIC: A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary

Translation, 2/1 (2010). Web. 20 May 2013.

Klein, Julie Thompson. The Changing American Academy: Humanities, Culture, and

Interdisciplinarity. New York: State University of New York, 2005. Print

Lauter, Paul. “Reconfiguring Academic Disciplines: The Emergence of American Studies.”

American Studies, 1999, 40:2: 23-38. Print.

Matthews, Christopher. The Archeology of American Capitalism. Gainesville: University

Press of Florida, 2010. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press, 1973. Print.

Ray, Larry and Andrew Sayer. Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. London: Sage

Publications, 1999. Print.

Smith, Murray E.G. Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism beyond

Postmodernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Print.

Spanos, William V. The Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the

Struggle for American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Print.

Tichi, Cecelia. “Canonizing Economic Crisis: Jack London's The Road”, 19-31 American

Literary History, 2011, 23.1: 19-31. Print.

Weinberg, Meyer. A Short History of American Capitalism. 2003. Web

(http://www.newhistory.org) 11 Feb, 2012.

27

Jelena Šesnić

University of Zagreb, Croatia

Situating H.D. Thoreau's Walden within Post-Exceptionalist American Studies

Exceptionalism reconsidered

Article info: UDC 811.111(73).09 Thoreau H. D.

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: February, 2013

Abstract: Prompted by recent calls for the re-examination of one of the key concepts in American studies,

American exceptionalism, the article offers a reading of the American classic, H.D. Thoreau’s Walden (1854)

that situates the text in the ambit of world-systems theory and environmentalist criticism. The application of

these new modes of reading, pursued through the concepts of “scale,” “scaling” and “sustainability,” is meant to

demonstrate that the text should be pulled away from its “hypercanonized” (J. Arac) status and placed in the

context of world/ global literature instead, as the concept is developed by Moretti, Buell and Dimock, among

others. In the process the text not only begins to signify as more than just a canonical work of national literature

but suggests new methodologies in the discipline of American studies moving beyond exceptionalist

assumptions.

Key words: H.D. Thoreau, Walden, exceptionalism, world literature, world-systems theory

We could say that a new practice is in the offing for American studies, a reckoning

which aims at taking stock of the previous overinvestment of the discipline in the idea of

American exceptionalism, and which, in the next instance, allows the discipline to move

beyond such an uncritical stance. This is certainly welcomed by a cohort of European

Americanists, most of whom have insisted all along that both the discipline, the scholarship,

methodologies and sources, should disentangle themselves from Amerocentrism and bring in

other perspectives, studies and scholars, ranging from Europe, Asia, Latin America and

elsewhere. As two exemplary positions I will briefly present the views recently aired by the

French Americanist Marc Chenetier and his German colleague Winfried Fluck. Chenetier

warns that sincere and well-articulated moves aimed at reforming American studies might

still remain mired in residual exceptionalist tendencies. He insists that even “the version of

cultural studies and of the ‘internationalization of American Studies’ currently prevailing in

American-initiated endeavors” (Chenetier) doesn’t imply the indisputable change of course,

nor does it, in the next instance, mean a change for the better, but rather “a gesture to avoid

facing the problems posed by an apparently unassailable center” (Chenetier). Fluck, for his

28

part, registers a change of dominant underlying assumptions in the discipline, and makes a

strong argument to the effect that even the latest models of analysis are perhaps inevitably

and due to the internal logic of the discipline beholden to some idea of exceptionalism. These

“romances with America” that the discipline has continuously engaged in, understood as

“underlying premises” and “prior assumptions” (Fluck 1, 2), have always relied on some or

other exceptionalist premise, allowing for a wide-ranging reading of the term. In one version

the central premise would be provided by politics, in another—religion, in yet another—

geography in an on-going attempt to revitalize the discipline and reassure it of its ultimate

goal of apprehending the nation. It would seem that the point, at least for presumably more

objective since outside observers and participants in the field, should be not so much to insist

on shedding exceptionalism altogether as to rethink what degree of exceptionalism is needed

or tolerable for a valid scholarly outcome.

Their thinly veiled criticism and insistence that US scholars should have done and still

could do more on breaking away from shackles of exceptionalism, is to some extent echoed

by one of the leading US-Americanists, Donald E. Pease. Pease has recently contributed

considerably to a tendency towards actively countering exceptionalist practices in literary and

cultural American studies, and has been actively pursuing the agenda of opening up the

discipline and lessening the impact of exceptionalism in his capacity as a co-founder and co-

director of the Institute of American Studies taking place annually at Dartmouth College,

New Hampshire. He has moreover done his utmost to promote the catchy heading of “new

American studies” that now graces a cachet of titles in a publishing series by Duke University

Press, while the anthology which he co-edited with Robyn Wiegman in 2002 helped set the

stage for the kinds of transformations entailed in this historical shift towards new, thus post-

exceptionalist and post-national(ist) American studies (Pease and Wiegman 2002).

Indeed, it is in his article dedicated to the consideration of post-exceptionalist

American studies and how they came about, which was published not long after a historical

breakthrough for Barack Obama, that Pease seems optimistic that American studies will find

internal resources, in addition pushed by external favorable factors, to deal a death blow to its

previous nationalistic presumptions. He bases his prediction, of course, not solely on the

extraordinary fact of the election of the first ever black president, but also on a number and

convergence of other factors, some of them quite long in the making and hatching outside of

the confines of the USA, and unleashed by the latest stage of globalization appropriately

termed by Pease as “US global interdependencies” (2009b: 20).

29

In the ensuing study, The New American Exceptionalism (2009a), Pease's assessment

of the lay of the land has changed somewhat. Even if, as he contends, the state of collective

fantasy that was needed to undergird the idea of American exceptionalism has dimmed and

has been shifting and looking for new objects to fixate on, it doesn't follow that the need for

such a collective and complex fantastic investment has faded. He therefore proposes in his

book to look for instances in recent American history and culture of the workings of a new

machinery of American exceptionalist investments.

The historian David Noble (2002), in his comprehensive study of the ideological and

political underpinnings for American studies as an institutionalized endeavor especially in its

reliance on the notion of American exceptionalism, offers some clues as to the tenacity and

complexity of the term, which indicates how difficult it is to shed it even if and when a

growing number of Americanists has expressed their caution of or exasperation with its

impact. For Noble, one of the main links to be pursued is in the changing idea of a nation that

undergoes serious revision implicating in its wake the redefinition of the roots of the

exceptionalist idea. Unless we are able to locate specific sources feeding the idea of an

exceptionalist society, argues Noble as an Americanist and a historian, we shall lack both the

conceptual tools to comprehend the idea or more practical means to counteract its obsolescent

workings (xxv). One of the links that is most pertinent to my overall argument concerning

Walden and its implication in and distancing from an exceptionalist ethos, is Noble's

emphasis on the idea of America as a “nature's nation,” set down from earliest extant

documents and then reiterated and monumentalized in a number of descriptions of the

American nation (43). In short, it transpires that from Puritans to Walden to agrarians and

countercultural movements, the idea of a “natural” template could be summoned to foster and

sustain America's self-image. However, it might be the case that recently these systems are in

need of further revision and scrutiny, as will be my argument forthwith.

So, to go back to my initial query: can we even claim that as Americanists, both

within and outside the United States, we have entered the age of post-exceptionalist

American studies? The answer is only tentatively – yes, we can (with a nod towards Obama,

who has proved a lot less exceptional than he was made out to be). I would like to show how

this as yet tentative and oblique but still palpable mode of thinking about and reading key

American texts pushes us beyond the constraints of an exceptionalist perspective. In order to

do that I will use one of the canonical texts of American literature, a text that, as few others,

encapsulates some of the principal traits of the American national character while also

30

capturing its immanent contradictions, namely, Henry David Thoreau's journal, treatise,

environmental tract, and other things besides, entitled Walden and published in 1854.

Since the text enjoys an indisputable status as one of the milestones of American

literature, it is thus illustrative of a sequence of changes occurring in the discipline and its

methods of analysis since its inception in the twentieth century. Jonathan Arac (1992) claims

in connection with another unassailable classic, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), that

the text has undergone the process of hypercanonization, and the same could be said of

Walden. Still, there was obviously a reason, or reasons, for early cohort of Americanists to

seize upon H.D. Thoreau as a poster boy and in particular to embrace the text of Walden.

At this point, an outline of tentatively designated exceptionalist uses of Walden should

indicate the specific uses to which the text was put as an indication of the discipline's

orientations. Representative readings are certainly offered by critics who were deeply

involved in the efforts culminating in the institutionalization of American studies in the

challenging times of a worldwide military conflict and in its wake, as apparent in the

scholarly work done by Francis Otto Matthiessen (American Renaissance, 1941) and, not

incidentally, one of the disciples in a direct line of succession, Leo Marx (The Machine in the

Garden, 1964). If we would for the moment reactivate the aforementioned notions of key

master narratives in the discipline, we would have to acknowledge how Matthiessen employs

the notion of a democratic political logic, while Leo Marx ties precisely this democratic

potential with its modes of materializing in specific thus nationally representative spaces.

Therefore, it was necessary for a critic to identify, if not openly announce, some underlying

premises indicative more than any others of his object of study (America and its society), and

from there to find ways to detect and pursue means by which some artifacts, rather than

others, contain and employ these premises. It was felt that Thoreau’s Walden poses as an

exemplary mode of conjoining the deductive and the inductive approaches required by such

an argumentation in which the starting premise inevitably preconditions the scope and results

of one’s critical inquiry.

Arguably, this shell is cracked somewhat with the textual (deconstructivist) approach

coming to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s where, as shown by Walter Benn Michaels’

magisterial reading, the text is seen as a depoliticized and a-historical arena, a battling ground

not for ideologies but for the layers of other texts, allowing in the end the vast apparatus of

language to triumph even over nature. For Michaels (405-21), namely, it is Thoreau’s

discourse that predetermines even his view or representation of Walden Pond, and not the

31

other way around. On the other hand, the nationalist argument loses some of its urgency if a

critic looks at Walden primarily as a superb textual construct.

At this point I should, however, return to my main argument and try to account for my

proposal that new readings of Walden are circulated of a kind that indicates some novel

tendencies in the intersecting systems to which the text belongs, that is, American literature

and American studies. The first important intervention that still furthered the exceptionalist

vein even as it looked into its cracks was a set of readings offered by Sacvan Bercovitch from

the late 1970s and early 1980s, and profiting from poststructuralist turn, while leaning on new

historicist practices in particular. In short, while Bercovitch proposed in one of his landmark

studies to interrogate the boundaries and the content of the American identity (The Puritan

Origins of the American Self, 1975), and so foregrounded its constructedness, he still didn't

doubt (and, in my view, rightly so) that New England Puritanism was a major pivot for that

identity position.

The New Historicism, especially as introduced by Bercovitch to the reading of

American classics, disturbs the field of American (literary) studies, disrupts the idea of a

“classic” in a literary system, and upends the notion of a nation as a natural development that

is merely rendered transparent in paradigmatic works of art, Walden included. This valid and

well motivated de-centering has left deep traces especially since it has admitted the notion of

ideology and ideologically inflected readings in the case of texts until then sealed against the

encroachments of such interests. This has certainly meant enormous advancements in terms

of a pedagogical and ethical impact of new American studies, but still cannot be read as their

total disentanglement from the discipline’s previous blind spots. Nor should it mean,

conversely, that this appropriation of a vantage point of critical historical consciousness

should be cynically dismissed as yet another scholarly vogue. Rather, it should be recognized

as an inevitable step towards articulating the exposed discrepancies between the object of

study (the American scene) and its extant descriptions that were losing legitimacy and

currency (to mention but one such approach, the myth and symbol school).

Walden in a new key

In his journal entry of Wednesday, August 9th, 1854 Thoreau writes somewhat

cryptically: “Walden published. Elder berries. Waxwork yellowing” (307). It would seem as

if the author himself considers his own text unexceptional, merely part of the natural cycle of

things, compatible with the organic structure of plants rather than with elaborate textual

32

constructions. What contradicts somewhat this assumption is the amount of care and time

invested precisely into the process of converting the mass of journal material into a

publishable manuscript, which process of transposition lies at the heart of Walden. This is a

formal observation but bears relevance to the text's unobtrusive artifice that could be held up

as a mirror to each generation of writers and critics laboring in the field of national literature.

It was this, to use Lawrence Buell's (2005) wonderfully understated term, “voluntary

simplicity,” that would launch Walden, and by extension his author, on the path of national

glory and recognition.

Another observation goes to address the content of the text infused by Thoreau's

specific and individualist intentionality, such as when he declares: “I went to the woods

because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could

not learn what it had to teach...” (61); or, when he observes somewhat self-consciously

assessing the scope of his experiment at the end of his text: “I fear chiefly lest my expression

may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my

daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced” (216;

italics in the original).

The question for us to address is, how come that in order to “live deliberately” and to

search out “the truth” which he paradoxically already knows, Thoreau finds himself

programmatically leaving the human-made world and retreating into the natural world? Why

is the impulse so imperative even as the social space around him has been changing in a way

dramatized by Leo Marx (4) as the intrusion of the machine into the garden? The answers lie

further back in the past, but I will try to give some indication of their tenuousness and allure

by referring to two moments, one evoked by Thomas Jefferson in the early national days, the

other treated by Alexis de Tocqueville, the anointed patron saint of American studies.

Jefferson exposes in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-2), one of his key but in American

studies still understudied documents, in a query dedicated to “Manufactures” the following

view of political economy of the new country, suggesting that “the difference of

circumstance” between Europe and America, such as “an immensity of land” in America, as

opposed to “the surplus of ... people” in Europe (Jefferson) means that the American

economy should be agriculture-based. His motifs, however, are not merely economical as the

following rationale makes clear: “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of

God ... whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”

(Jefferson). Unlike all the other economical players, such as merchants and manufacturers,

not to mention “[t]he mobs of great cities” (Jefferson), the cultivators of land are the true

33

democratic subjects and the repository of republican virtues. The rest are prone to corruption

entailed in an economy of industrial production and free-market exchange.

This idea is certainly echoed by Thoreau, if not in word then in spirit, as he articulates

one of his key notions in Walden, “the curse of trade” (47) that contaminates every aspect of

the social world. It is important to situate his insight not primarily or only in the ambit of a

Marxist articulated criticism, as aptly shown by Michael Gilmore (293-310), but to follow a

genealogy of a liberal, republican and agrarian-based criticism of what Jefferson terms the

canker of manufactures, and articulates as an incipient threat of capitalism to democracy and

republicanism. Still, it is interesting to observe the telling differences between the two texts.

The drift of Jefferson's text moves from natural factors to population to end with social and

economic factors. The drift of Thoreau's text is quite opposite and takes us from the economy

to his personal philosophy, which in the latter part of the text transmutes into his increasing

communion and identity with nature.

The other difference refers to an implied contrast between the commonwealth of

Virginia and New England as an exemplary form of polity for the new nation, where

Jefferson's regional bias is countered by de Tocqueville’s, and Thoreau’s, endorsement of

New England. However, both localities carry certain liabilities. Virginia is hardly a place for

Jefferson's virtuous husbandman, since it is in the query “Manners” that he deplores the

pernicious influence of slavery due to the man's “imitative” nature (Jefferson). Slavery makes

the parties “depraved” whether by turning them into idle despots or submissive but

embittered subjects. It is remarkable how the notion of the self-sufficient cultivator recedes

before historically more accurate image of the southern slaveholder whose lands are worked

by slaves. Given the entanglement of slavery and capitalism from Virginia's inception, it is

not surprising that Thoreau casts his lot with his native New England, more precisely his

birthplace of Concord, the seat of the Revolution beginning his experiment on the 4th July,

1845, as specifies Thoreau (57).

Already with de Tocqueville, we find realignment in favor of New England and its

form of socio-economic ordering, that is wonderfully subsumed by the Mayflower compact, a

far-reaching wording for a new capitalist democracy (29). However, by the time we get to

Thoreau's Concord in the 1840s and 1850s, the sheen of New England and the allure of self-

sufficient land cultivator have irremediably passed. What Thoreau enacts is a counter-

agriculture, the kind of subsistence farming that alienates him from the rank-and-file of a

New England village. His farming has more to do with sustaining Jefferson’s vision than with

34

a feasible economic practice, as he avers: “if my house had been burned or my crops had

failed, I should have been nearly as well as before” (38).

It is also worth noting with some surprise the way de Tocqueville handles the

questions of capitalist economy, which in Jefferson are muffled and unduly marginalized. For

one, Jefferson covers up the fact, which de Tocqueville duly observers, that it is the

plantation-based agriculture dependent on large scale crops grown in the South (tobacco,

cotton and sugar-cane) that demands the employment of mass, and non-waged, labor force of

slaves (223). As for manufactures, he also and inevitably deplores their breeding of inequality

as they give rise to manufacturers as a “new aristocracy” (452-3), on one side, and, on the

other, to the working class (452). Thoreau interestingly obviates the discussion of a specific

type of manufactures, the textile mills that had originally blazed the trail for industrialization

in New England. However, when extensively applying his new economic practice of

simplifying and promoting a stringently abstemious economy, as I will show below, he

pointedly includes clothes on his list of necessities (14-18).

To take the possibility of new readings of Thoreau to a yet different level, let me

consider the two terms that arise in recent considerations of Thoreau, namely, (1) the question

of scale, and (2) the notion of sustainability. The remainder of my discussion will go to

elucidate such a shift in focus, which will be cast also as new orientations in the discipline.

The question of scale has been raised not only with respect to American literature but

also as an expression of discontent with standard taxonomies proffered by national literary

histories and bound by nation-state, political, periodical and linguistic standards. Lately, the

concept of scaling has come to rely principally on the world-systems theory with its specific

implications for the study of literature as a world phenomenon or a planetary structure (these

approaches have been promoted, for example, by Moretti, Palumbo Liu, Buell, Dimock,

needless to say with slightly different emphases). Some phenomena that can be “scaled”

irrespective of a narrow national context are, for instance, the ideas of local and global; the

notion of postcoloniality; nature and the environment; the exchange or movement of people,

capital, labor, and goods and their uneven distribution, as stipulated by the core world-

systems theory (Palumbo Liu et al. 15-17; Lee 27-8). All of these are found in Walden, but

you will permit me to limit myself to a few basic observations.

The idea of scaling is perhaps best contained in the way Thoreau treats the idea of

economy, by endowing it precisely with those kinds of meanings abandoned in the process of

expanding it to reach first the national and then the international scope. Thoreau’s keen

regard for classics serves him well in this endeavor, since it is clear that he reaches back to

35

the original meaning of oikonomia, i.e. managing the household (Hann and Hart 18; Thoreau

40-41). For Aristotle, however, the house wouldn’t be reduced only to family members but

would have to include all the other participants in a small but complex conglomerate of

production, distribution, consumption and exchange, such as the family, their “slaves,

retainers, craftsmen,” their lands and cattle (Hann and Hart 19-20).

Let me provide further examples where we see Thoreau's use of the notion of scale. In

“Bean field” chapter his interest is ostensibly to continue to espouse his pastoral and squatter-

style agriculture in the face of the prevailing norms, while showing how non-intrusive and

small scale cultivation of land may secure subsistence (at least for a single, able-bodied male).

In the scope of the whole chapter, however, and not long after his materialist grounding,

Thoreau proceeds with his method of expanding the scale, in fact enlarging it to the extent

that temporally it ranges from his classical readings to contemporary models, and spatially so

that it begins to contain, as in layers or dug-up remnants, both human and non-human history

of the place. The place is never just a plain bean field but quickly becomes a metaphor

expressing a wide range of ideas.

The other example where scaling underlies Thoreau's wayward authorial intention is

in the chapter on “Former inhabitants.” Initially, the extent to which nature permeates the

human and envelopes it in its own scalar system is simply amazing. However, once we have

reached that notion, we are in for a surprise since it turns out that natural traces are indexical

to a haunting and transient but historical human presence on the spot. An inventory

accompanied by brief narratives of each of the former short or long term residents on the spot

now occupied by Thoreau belies his interest exclusively for the present and his ambitious

undertaking, while it reasserts the duration and historicity of his environment, such that is

infused by human presence (even if it is harmful). The array of his ghostly predecessors

contains in brief the history of the entire county incorporating the dead and the living, slaves,

free blacks, migrant whites and stationary figures.

The scalar nature of Thoreau’s thought is also evident in other metaphors and conceits

that he uses in order to place himself in a specific spatio-temporal configuration suspended

amongst other sub- or supra-configurations (from a solitary and self-sufficient farmstead to

the village to the nation, or, if going in a different direction, from a community to a solitary

human to overlap between human and non-human agents ending in a total immersion in

nature). The famous example of the latter is one of the scenes of Thoreau’s bird watching,

which ends by his being stared down by an owl (177).

36

As we have said, even as Thoreau chastises the corrupt and irreparably devastating

system of agricultural, and other, production permeated as it is with the notion of trade (or,

should we say, the profit-making proposition), in the next instance his critical outlook takes

off and easily transmutes into a conceit, an elaborate symbolic experiment that confuses the

reader as to the real intention of the author: is he sounding a thoroughly materialist, economic

and environmentalist grounded, criticism of life and economic practices in mid-nineteenth-

century America, or is he, to paraphrase him, keeping his own rhythm (217)? Or, even, is his

exasperation at the human condition going beyond just the American sphere? In other words,

what is the room and limits of home that Thoreau has built for himself on the Pond? It is

quite clear that his notion of home should be conceived in terms much closer to late

twentieth-century ecological thought, as summed up by Vittorio Hösle, who reminds us that

ecology is ultimately a science of the home, beginning with hearth and expanding from there

to encompass our mutual home, the Earth (12). However, as continues Hösle, if man

desecrates his earthly abode, it doesn’t bode well to the seat of his own essence either, his

ideal home, a development noted with alarm by Thoreau (Hösle 12). This conceit therefore

suffuses Thoreau’s concrete efforts at constructing, section by section, from cellar to chimney,

his home, ostensibly a log cabin on the lake shore but in the reality created by his text, an

ideal residence corresponding, in classical terms, to the core of man’s nature.

In addition, what does it mean to rescale the entire idea of American literature by way

of situating, for instance, the notion of postcoloniality in the ambit of world-systems theory?

An explicit argument to that effect, but still outside the overt planetary and systemic reach,

was made by Lawrence Buell (1992). He has enumerated ways in which, from the

vernacularization of language to the rise of “American” pastoralism, Thoreau's text clings to

the tenets of postcolonial writing, without being explicitly labeled as such until that point. In

the world-systems perspective, however, and by laying out the underlying structure of core,

periphery and semi-periphery, we can easily see how this kind of mobility is entailed in the

logic of Walden, so much so that it indeed becomes a record of inhabiting the semi-periphery

that is itself being transmuted into the outer fringe of the core (see my aforementioned

discussion of New England and the implications of incipient industrialization for the new

nation) (Palumbo-Liu et al. 2). Moretti sums it up perhaps too sketchily but it will have to

suffice, when he urges us to consider writers from specific locations, the Americas included,

as “writers from the semi-periphery, who were probably encouraged by their intermediate

and dynamic position to grapple with the world as a whole” (68).

37

If we wanted to pursue the way postcoloniality sustains Thoreau’s both economic and

in extension his political project, we would have to acknowledge in the text Thoreau’s

continuing engagement with, what from a postcolonial perspective would amount to a pre-

colonial, indigenous socialty. Its exemplary adaptability to the natural environment in which

it has evolved for millennia and specific cultural forms that such an accommodation has

generated serve as very concrete, and perhaps attainable models, as suggests Thoreau.

Remaining within the provisionally drawn model of scaling, we could say that here Thoreau

scales back the notion of the economic system, not simply on the basis of some kind of

utopian and absolute retreat from it, but in showing how its alternative, as a different

economic model, was successfully implemented in an altogether distinct system unduly swept

aside by colonialist intervention. He therefore decides not to grow the “colonial” crops but to

use as much as possible “Indian,” aboriginal seeds. The soil, according to him, remembers its

old crops and will revert to them if given a choice, so to speak (160).

The ethos of postcoloniality, as a critique and an invigorating stance, permeates the

text not only on the level of general themes it develops, but shows itself also in the domain of

the text’s structural and formal features, as shown by both Buell and Dimock. In Moretti’s apt

phrase, there are specific ways and devices Thoreau uses in order to argue for the transition

from the periphery to the centre, most of them strategically designated as minor, fringe, or,

here, postcolonial. One of these is certainly his tendency to laud American things and places

especially in comparison to the European ones, a trait of his that his friends and reviewers

will unfailingly mention after his death (Emerson 323). This tendency is also bolstered by

Thoreau’s frequent references to indigenous anthropological practices that have remained in

the landscape, in immaterial memory or in written documents (20). Thoreau, after all, might

be a typical Yankee tinkerer, pragmatic and experience-minded even when prompted by lofty

ideas, as tersely mentioned by some of his contemporaries.

Let us briefly consider the use of nature in Thoreau’s text in the ambit of the

Romantic ideas emanating from European centers and finding its deferred, belated

applications in as yet underdeveloped American literature. In retrospect, Thoreau is credited

together with other New England luminaries literally with creating an American literature.

But it is this postcolonial effort that proceeds precisely as a fringe reflex to the metropolitan

developments that is grounded in an “essence” indisputably American, nature itself. Its

location and manifestations are locally situated, as presented by Thoreau when he

meticulously records the process of thawing of the Pond come spring-time but is in the next

instance yet another case of deep-seated correspondences in nature that belie all boundaries:

38

“The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I

walk,” records Thoreau, only to raise this specific observation at the level of a law of nature:

“The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale” (201).

To approach my second term, sustainability, let me again draw from Buell's recent

insight into Walden as espousing a counterculture of “simplicity” and voluntary downscaling

and downward mobility, a direction against the American grain, as reminds Buell: “the

formation arguably has special pertinence to US culture, which is stereotypically a culture of

capitalism, of consumption, of plenty, and of individual upward mobility, relative to most of

the rest of the world. Under such conditions the mere existence of countercultures of restraint

take on a special interest” (2005: 653). Thoreau in Walden famously proclaims his four-part

gospel of simplicity consisting of food, shelter, fuel and clothes, and proceeds to recount his

own attempts not only to economize but to invent a whole new personal economy. In the

process he turns quite literally into Jefferson's ideal husbandman. As warns Buell, and as

evident from Walden's structure, where the opening chapter centers precisely on economy

only in subsequent sections to open onto more spiritual/ mental and naturalist themes, ranging

from reading to visitors, from sounds to the pond in the spring, this life of conscious

“restraint,” economic prudence and “abstemiousness,” or the project of “relinquishment” (all

Buell's terms) is not an end in itself but a way to self-reform and then social reform. In the

end, we could say that the subject, in an act of exercising control over his personal economy,

asserts his supreme individuality to the highest degree and so re-confirms the notion of a

powerful liberal agent. However, this politicized argument is not exactly on Thoreau's mind

as he scales down through the text the degree and intensity of his interactions with the social

world, and so exercises utmost restraint even in his communal aptitudes. So it is not quite

clear how the experiment in a self-sustainable economy is likely to improve Thoreau as a

social agent, while it simultaneously lessens if not even obviates the social volume of his

existence by driving him into nature and away from the society. Namely, if that is the

experiment's ultimate goal, what then are its intersubjective underpinnings? Of course, this is

answered in part by the fact that Thoreau did see fit to publish the book and so present it to

society, no matter what he thought of his compatriots' capacity to appreciate the book's intent.

Still, this reduction of the social and the turn to the natural raises a host of other

questions that are nowadays more acute than ever and are being articulated most notably by

environmental humanities. Some of my students have raised precisely the kinds of concerns

that are central to the discussions articulated thanks to eco-criticism and environmental

studies. While they have expressed their admiration for the way Thoreau invests his own vital

39

resources into what he believes is a good life, and irrespective of the indifference or hostility

of others, still most have retained a healthy dose of skepticism as to the ultimate reach of his

model at a time when the economy seems to be more systematized than ever, and getting

away from it more challenging than before. Let me echo Buell's foregoing warning about the

narrative of voluntary simplicity as a counter strain. This is more than applicable to the logic

of sustainability given the aforementioned Jeffersonian boasts as to the immense,

inexhaustible amount of land, a truism at the time and well into the nineteenth century,

officially at least up to the closing of the frontier, as famously proclaimed by Frederick

Jackson Turner (1921). If there is a land and resources aplenty, then, of course, why bother

with sustainability? But that was not Thoreau's idea.

His idea, rather, is best encapsulated by an interlocking synergy suggested in

Philippon’s definition of sustainability bringing together ecology, economy and society (163).

All three of these, we shall do well to notice, are “collectivist” rather than individualist

endeavors entailing participation and interaction by a number of individuals over a course of

time. Philippon adduces to this trinity a set of social values connoting and entangling

solidarity, equity and responsibility. It is here that the question of scale interferes, now as a

corrective to Thoreau's supposed arch individualism, and also in terms of more systemic and

long-term developments displacing an individual, the nation-state, and, even more so,

humans from the centre stage. It should be a welcome rerouting as suggested by a number of

recent Americanists, comparatists and social scientists (Buell 2007: 227; Dimock 1;

Philippon 166).

We should also note how deeply ironic it is for a discourse of sustainability to arise

amidst the excesses of plenty and unrestrained consumption and circulation of goods, such as

when Thoreau feels compelled to extricate himself from the circuit: at other places at the

periphery it is not an alternative or a philosophy but a stern reality. Needless to say,

sustainability can only be practiced as the obverse of wasteful economy; if it is the only

option then it is merely subsistence economy. Still, the idea of the American national

character is informed by enactments of certain key socio-economic activities taking place in a

capitalist society, contends Paul Smith (ix-xv). For Thoreau to inveigh against the excesses of

plenty and to demand a more strenuous economic practice is indeed nothing short of being

un-American. However, Paul Smith’s model makes room also for “hot” national traits

(meaning, “the dynamic and progressive aspects of a society” [ix]), which in this case might

mean that Thoreau is as American as it gets, since his experimental living takes place in a

pastoral setting of as yet peripheral, emerging nation. It is the pull of pastoralism as an

40

ideological model of conceptualizing nature, according to Lawrence Buell, that enables

Thoreau to make the Pond into “subject, symbol and theater in which to act out rituals of

maturity and purification” (1992: 430).

In addition, Hösle recapitulates changes in the meaning of economy locating in the

course of the 18th century a momentous shift from its small-scale meaning (focusing on the

household) to its present-day implications of a national system born of the logic of

development of capitalism demanding ever more complex structures for handling its

activities (Hösle 87). Thoreau’s vision is thus hardly utopian, since firmly based in centuries

old economic practices, both pre-capitalist and pre-industrial, but it certainly registers a tide

of change that might be irreversible. As outlined by Hann and Hart, it is debatable if even

Aristotle’s early division into production taking place on land and commerce, a lamentable

necessity to be conducted with a household’s wider, urban environment, was ever all that

stable. It seems more likely that from the start agriculture was tainted or simply supplemented

by commerce (Hann and Hart 20-21). If that is the case, Thoreau is then correct when he

withdraws as much as possible from the circuit of exchange, and shrinks his economy back to

the confines of his modest farmstead, cultivating only as much as he needs to subsist on (37).

Still, he cannot quite evacuate himself from the demands of labor in exchange for money,

even though he keeps that to a minimum and takes up only day jobs (40, 48).

His diet during his “two years’ experience” (41) was also subsistence food, “as simple

a diet as the animals,” leaving out sugar (in favor of molasses which he himself extracts from

“pumpkins or beets” or even “a few maples” [43]), baking unleavened bread, and making do

without coffee or alcohol (41). Such “abstemiousness” (42) is tested and proven as an

efficient way of bypassing “all trade and barter” (43), and refusing to “depend on distant and

fluctuating markets” for his foodstuffs (43).

Reduction, simplification and getting down to the bottom of things are Thoreau’s

injunctions throughout the text and he loses no time to impress on the reader not only the

necessity but also the feasibility of such mottos in life. In the first part of Walden, that is, he

sets down to reverse the machine of time, industry, and development hastening forward and

grinding everything in its way. His intention is to show that a scaled-down economy,

returning to its beginnings, must be a viable project, as testified in his case. The nation,

suffering a wasteful economy, “is ruined by luxury and heedless expense,” while “the only

cure for it … is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and

elevation of purpose” (62). Thoreau, obviously, isn’t a prophet of latter-day austerity but a

self-aware idealistic “squatter” and “surveyor” trying to strike a balance between himself and

41

both his social and natural environments thus realizing the necessity of a reduced, simple,

rigid and manageable economy. This requires, as warns Thoreau, only that we endeavor to

train ourselves and to live “deliberately and reservedly” (68). This message isn’t meant to

echo only through Walden Pond or the nearby village of Concord but to travel globally.

So it is that in the end we might rightfully take down a few notches off Walden's

exceptionalist status, and state, alongside our new Americanists and comparative literature

scholars that the text exhibits strong traces of world system consciousness, or that it is

primarily driven by ecological/ naturalist ethos and so little concerned with humanist

ideology that the claims especially of any kind of national or nationalist strain seem

misplaced. Indeed, these might be non-spectacular instances of learning to read Walden and

other hyper-canonized US-American texts in a new, presumably non-exceptionalist vein. If

no one else, nature at least will be thankful for that.

References

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New Americanists 2: National Identities and Postnational Narratives. (1992): 14-33.

Print.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Print.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, and Myra Jehlen, eds. Ideology and Classic American Literature.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.

Buell, Lawrence. “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon.” American

Literary History 4.3 (Autumn 1992): 411-42. Print.

--- . “Downwardly Mobile for Conscience's Sake: Voluntary Simplicity from Thoreau to Lily

Barth.” American Literary History 17.4 (2005): 653-65. Print.

--- . “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmentalist Imagination on a

Planetary Scale.” Dimock and Buell 227-48.

Chenetier, Marc. “'New American Studies': Exceptionalism Redux?” European Journal of

American Studies 2008-2. Dec. 17, 2008. Web. Feb. 26, 2009.

Dimock, Wai Chee. “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset.” Dimock and Buell

1-16.

Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as

World Literature. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.

42

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Thoreau.” Thoreau 320-33.

Fluck, Winfried. “American Literary History and the Romance with America.” American

Literary History 21.1 (Spring 2009): 1-18. Print.

Gilmore, Michael. “Walden and the ‘Curse of Trade’.” Bercovitch and Jehlen 293-310.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique.

Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Print.

Hösle, Vittorio. Filozofija ekološke krize. Prev. Darija Domić. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1996.

Print.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1781-82. Web. E-text Center, U of

Virginia Library.

Lee, Richard E. “The Modern World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and

Transformation.” Palumbo-Liu et al. 27-40.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Print.

Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and

Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1954. Print.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “Walden’s False Bottoms.” Thoreau 405-21.

Moretti, Franco. “World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur.” Palumbo-

Liu et al. 67-77.

Noble, David. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print.

Palumbo-Liu, David, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and

the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2011.

Print.

Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis, London: U of Minnesota

P, 2009a. Print.

--- . “Re-thinking 'American Studies after US Exceptionalism.'” American Literary History

21.2 (Spring 2009b): 19-27. Print.

Pease, Donald E., and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham:

Duke UP, 2002. Print.

Philippon, Daniel. “Sustainability and the Humanities: An Extensive Pleasure.” American

Literary History 24.1 (2012): 163-79. Print.

Smith, Paul. Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. Minneapolis,

London: The U Minnesota P, 2007. Print.

43

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Norton Critical Edition.

Ed. William Rossi. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. 1835. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

Print.

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http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/home.

44

Zalkida Hadžibegović

University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Teaching Staff Benefits of the International Exchange Programs: a State Alumna

Experience

Article info: UDC 316.42:37.014

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: March, 2013

Abstract: International exchange programs are important for creating links among program participants and their

home and host universities. In the era of globalization in education any study or research abroad has significant

experience at cultural, scientific, social and personal levels. Participations in the Junior Faculty Development

Program brought me benefits both on institutional and personal level. Invaluable experience and knowledge

gained and accepted wisdom is shared in this paper with readers and especially with potential participants in this

or similar international exchange programs.

Key words: exchange program experience, globalization of education, fellowship, JFDP, State Alumni.

1. Introduction

Modern civilization is characterized by globalization. The concept of globalization

considers both social and cultural aspects of globalization (Brodin, 569). Education integrates

social and cultural dimensions of a society and plays an important role in the processes of

globalization. Education is also a key for achieving essentials goals of globalization. For each

society and its individuals who follow their goals and strategies for obtaining the best level of

knowledgeable generations there are different pathways to be taken in a global socio-cultural

environment. Brux and Blake (p. 511) legitimately raised question of the need of more

participants in exchange programs, in the time of the current globalization process, which

characterizes modern civilization. Studies and research visits are important factors in the

global citizenship, giving priority to different standards of behavior towards the environment

in which citizens work through a system of ‘sustainable transformative learning’ (Galijasevic

& Hadzibegovic, 48).

Bologna Process (BP) was introduced by the European Union and other European

countries in order to develop their educational systems to meet main goals of the

globalization process in higher education. BP allowed improvement of many mobility

45

programs for both students and faculty members. In Bologna, the oldest university in Europe,

in 1988 the idea of globalization in education was established and its fundamental principles

were laid down in the Magna Charta Universitatum. The Europe of Knowledge was a widely

recognized “factor for social and human growth and as an indispensable component to

consolidate and enrich the European citizenship, capable of giving its citizens the necessary

competencies to face the challenges” for developing common space in higher education (The

Bologna Declaration, 7). Educational systems in Europe according to the BP promote a

teaching strategy as the student-centered teaching/learning process. Most EU countries

support mobility, especially in research and education throughout different programs. The

most widely used and known exchange programs are two European programs:

(1) ERASMUS Programme was established in 1987 and is sponsored by European

Commission (EC). Its goal is to enhance the quality in higher education through

scholarships and academic cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world.

(2) Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst/German Academic Exchange Service/

DAAD is the oldest exchange program founded in 1925, as the largest funding

organization in the world supporting the international exchange of students and

scholars. One of the DAAD strategy goals, among the top five, is a mission to

promote internationality among the institutions of higher education.

On the other hand, the United States educational system still differs from the

European educational system undergoing Bologna reform process. These differences are not

the result of a variation in curriculum or developed standards; they are mainly caused by the

methodology of teaching and learning focused on the students and the needs of society to

develop individuals who learn how to solve development problems and sustainability of the

society. A well known exchange program in the USA is The Fulbright program, established

in 1946 under legislation introduced by late Arkansas Senator, J. William Fulbright. This

program is sponsored by the United States Department of State's Bureau of Educational and

Cultural Affairs and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the

United States and the people of other countries. Another exchange program sponsored by the

US Department of State/ Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is the Junior Faculty

Development Program (JFDP) initiated in 1994. JFDP is administrated by American Councils

and implemented “to foster opportunities for Eurasian and Southeastern European higher

educational systems to increase access to academic resources and new educational

perspectives and to promote the development of a growing network of academics among

those regions and the United States (www.americancouncils.org/program/1n/JFDP). JFDP is

46

a non-degree program of the visiting scholars at the U.S. host universities. Both the Fulbright

and JFDP are exchange programs with the missions that allow participants to gain life

changing experiences with strong influences to their personal and professional endeavors. It

is important to note that time spent abroad for both students and faculty members on any

exchange program enriches their lives in the academic and professional dimensions. Major

benefits of participants of any the international exchange program are the opportunities to

improve language learning, intercultural skills, self-reliance and self-awareness.

2. JFDP Fellowship description

Any instructor and teaching assistant (TA) holding a full-time university position in

one of following countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B-H),

Croatia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,

Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is eligible to apply for the JFDP Fellowship. After

the inception of the program exchange participants had an opportunity to stay at a host

university for the entire academic year, but after 2005 the duration of the program was

shortened to a semester long stay in the United States. They can expand knowledge and skills

in a chosen field of study by attending classes and working with hosting faculty members.

JFDP fellow has the opportunities to work on development of curriculum, new teaching

materials and resources, forging different relationships between faculty members at host and

home university. JFDP Fellows do not earn academic degrees, credits or transcripts during

their class participations. On the other hand, they have possibilities to attend academic

conferences and may teach or co-teach classes at a U.S. host university.

My personal application and participation in JFDP Program described in this paper

were completed in 2003-2004 academic year. JFDP was my preferable mobility program as it

offered several goals important in my academic career:

(i) to gain new knowledge in the field of Environmental Studies, particularly

Environmental Physics as my focal point because I have never had the opportunity

to study that subject matter. My main goal was to expand my own knowledge in

order to introduce new environmental courses in the Physics Department that B-H

physics teachers could implement in their regular school physics curriculum.

(ii) to improve my teaching skills and teaching methodology within the frame of

university education reform as part of the BP that has been accepted by B-H

Government in 2003.

47

(iii) to become familiarized with the U.S. educational system based on the credit

system with which I have not been acquainted previously.

(iv) to discover American culture and American studies, and to be enriched by such

experience that I have never before experienced.

(v) to make new and real connections and collaborations with colleagues in order to

establish cooperation between both the host and home university.

(vi) to make new connections with other JFDP Fellows, especially those from the

Balkans.

(vii) to present my culture, education system and other recognized elements of my

home country’s history and culture.

Receiving the JFDP Fellowship and my placement at University of Nevada Reno

(UNR), and its Desert Research Institute presented me with a completely new situation.

University of Nevada Reno is one of the nation’s top public universities founded in 1874 as

the Nevada State’s first university. Visiting scholars and international students from around

70 countries participated at UNR in 2003 fall semester. UNR capacities for teaching and

learning, its modern equipment for doing scientific research in many laboratories, a great

number of projects, numerous implemented seminars where prominent experts and scholars

have given many lectures and research reports, and very rich library together with other

facilities for sports and cultural activities are situated all in one place – on the UNR campus.

Basic thing that one can benefit from at UNR is a very well-organized recruitment of many

new students and visiting scholars. UNR organizes access in several forms of university

infrastructure as well as assistance to the individual on-campus life within two-three days.

This is a picture of American typical convenience and its practical approach in order to save

time of new students and scholars, and to give them hosting that they deserve. The first new

thing that I found at academic level was the role of academic advisor assigned for supporting

me to meet my personal expectations and to realize the exchange program’s requirements.

Collaboration and cooperation with my academic advisor was a possibility to bypass many

problems. A fellows’ important task is to be successfully involved in everyday life at the host

university. At the same time, academic advisors have their JFDP roles to fulfill, primarily

helping JFDP fellows to choose courses in the field of studies and take some elective classes.

They can also help the exchange program participants in teaching or co-teaching activities or

other varieties of university participations.

48

3. Academic experience

UNR has similar profile as my home university, with similar number of students and

study curricula but with different approach to the established standards, strategy and

teaching/learning methodology and research conditions for both students and scholars.

Among many of JFDP experiences I gained at host university discussed in this paper, several

aspects are presented based on my own experience that were implemented after returning to

my home university. Syllabus preparation was my first academic task at UNR. Without any

course syllabus creation in my own academic practice it was an occasion to learn from my

academic advisor how to create course syllabus content and how to be familiar with the

structure and method of its implementation in my co-teaching course. The main role of a

course syllabus is its importance in establishing contract with students by course policies,

requirements and procedures. Such practice does not exist at B-H universities. The syllabus

developments were important results of my learning. This support of my progressive work to

bring the ideas, interpretation and techniques drawn from several intellectual sources resulted

in creation of a plan and learning materials which were then introduced as a topic of

educational seminar for young B-H faculty members.

Other different educational practice I learned about at UNR was the students’ course

evaluation. Measuring of teaching-learning quality was a totally new experience for me. State

universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not implement any course evaluation by students

at that time. It was an opportunity to learn how students evaluate a course structure, course

implementation and the instructor’s role to assess the quality of teaching and learning in a

course as a common procedure at an institutional level at American universities. At the same

time, it was an occasion to learn that the subjects of the students’ evaluations, beside quality

of teaching and learning, could be many other aspects of educational practice (e.g.

educational goals and standards, curriculum content, appropriate workload and assessment,

students’ self efficacy beliefs). Numerous studies about the relationships between the

students’ evaluations of teaching and their learning outcomes have become the subject of my

interest to learn how to introduce the students' evaluation in my own practice at least. The

students’ evaluations of the institutions provide supportive and useful information about the

student’s approaches to learning, motivation, students’ engagement, students’ achievement

and satisfaction (Ramsden, 129-130).

The most impressive experience at UNR was students’ behavior in a variety of

situations in the classroom and other activities on campus. It was common to see students

49

who were preparing for exams or solving different assignments not only in the library and

classroom space, but also in the parks located on campus. The fact that every student owned

university textbooks and other learning materials was very different from the B-H universities

where the students mainly use copied textbooks or lecture notes only. I have also discovered

that students whom I have been co-teaching did not show any kind of academic misconduct.

They showed very high moral qualities that were a bit in contrast with my teaching

experiences in my country where some forms of academic misconduct are considered to be

acceptable. Differences between American and B-H students could appear as result of

different types of restrictions or punishments of students who cheat on the exams or

assignments. B-H universities do not implement any clear rules to treat this phenomenon, and

significance of cheating among students is not considered as it should be. Data quantifiable

about academic cheating as cases of nonacademic students’ behavior are not based on

research results or institutional ethical authorities’ data sources because of the lack of such

data source collections. I gained certain insights about cheating of B-H students as result of

my experience based on many interviews with students who were caught in such immoral

activities. One could find that main reasons for academic misconduct of B-H students are

stereotypical. They cheat to help their friends or to attain higher grades as means to gain a

prestigious position in study or future job position (Jensen et al., 209).

4. Benefits of the completed JFDP

Two semesters spent at UNR brought me many benefits and new experiences related

to academic activities lacking in my own educational practice. New knowledge I gained in

teaching methodology, astronomy and especially in environmental physics answered my need

to know how to create several new courses included in the official physics curriculum.

Among numerous different sequences of educational practice which I met at UNR, definitely

the most important outcome of gained knowledge was organization of five courses introduced

in the Physics Department. I created syllabus for each of mentioned subject matters with

defined homework compositions and other assignment’s contents for the students.

Methodology of the instructor’s and students’ evaluation questionnaires was adopted to

assess the instructor’s engagement and contribution in a certain course implementation, and

to intensify awareness of the importance of quality of student learning outcomes. The number

of students attending courses at UNR was more than was required (eleven courses in total per

semester) and it gave me the opportunity to transfer knowledge from American colleagues’

50

courses into my own teaching at home university. Through observations of classes of

American colleagues and their organization of teaching and students’ learning, I was able to

model my own change of traditional lecturing as one-way communication to the large

undergraduate classes in student-faculty and student-student interaction that could enhance

the students’ active role in the teaching/learning process.

As another unique value of the JFDP participation may be pointed out an advantage of

building many friendships with students and scholars, primarily from the host university as

well as with visiting scholars from other countries (Egypt, Turkey, Argentina, Morocco,

Oman, Bulgaria, Mexico, Poland, etc.) in the framework of future collaborations.

5. Importance of becoming a permanent member of the State Alumni

By completing the JFDP each Fellow becomes a permanent member of the State

Alumni with various opportunities to share knowledge and ideas with different cultures by

implementing them at home university. When I had returned to my university with different

attitudes, new experience and new knowledge, it augmented my willingness to make a

change at my own professional occupation levels. It was not an easy step. People around me

were not opened to accept my new ideas and changes, especially in the traditional teaching

process. Because I perceived students differently, they became my partners who were guided

by their changed instructor who has learned how to help them to accept and implement new

ideas and methods of learning physics more successfully. Firstly, I introduced several course

syllabi in the new established Bologna model of study in the Physics Department at my home

university. All offered courses were also included in our reformed Physics curriculum which

the students elect in every academic year after their introduction in 2005 as the official

Physics Study Curriculum content.

State Alumna position brings other opportunities in the homeland and regional

countries for organizing conferences, seminars and workshops for students, faculty members,

including collaboration and cooperation with B-H or regional State Alumni through the

granted projects by the Department of State. Implementations of numerous small projects for

talented physics students, organization of the Educational Workshops for B-H Teaching

Assistants and Faculty members, and publishing a useful publication prepared by a group of

51

the State Alumni containing the educational papers’ collection, are some of benefits that the

JFDP completed brought to me and my academic community.1

6. Conclusions and Visions

The global education scene is our reality and every international exchange program

has a strong supportive role to this dimension of globalization. About importance of study

abroad Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Joseph R. Biden, Jr. said:

“Study abroad is not merely a life-changing experience for those who pursue it; as the world becomes

smaller, it is essential that our citizens understand other nations. To maintain our global leadership,

we must give our students greater international educational opportunities” (AIFS, 2010, 1). These

sentences describe a strong benefit of gained knowledge at professional, cultural and personal

level of each international exchange participants. Study, teaching, and research exchange

programs are a large component of cultural missions and present opportunities to meet local

people and their living and working environments. Study and visit abroad can aid each

Fellow, host and home university in improving their contacts, collaboration and other

outcomes based on gained knowledge and scientific-cultural and social dimensions. The most

important side of any exchange program is to explore the establishment of the link between

universities and their faculty members and students. American studies, culture and education

bring many benefits and put participants in a position to realize some new ideas, but also

bring obligations to share their experience with young people who are in the process of

making a decision to be involved in the international exchange programs.

Participation in the JFDP helped me to understand differences in academic culture and

higher education among two countries: B-H and USA. Ever since then, my professional

development has been on the pathway of improvement and gaining new knowledge in

Environmental Physics, Astronomy and Teaching Methodology. Benefits of the international

exchange programs for both students and faculty members need to be recognized by

educational institutions for giving them a priority of their participations (Brux & Blake, 523).

Participation in the international exchange programs should engage members of academic

communities to be the most progressive factors for changing norms, behaviors, educational

goals and strategies toward a new worldview to bring a prosperous environment of global

citizenship and individuals who could be trained as future global leaders (Tarrant, 447; Wang

1 See the web-contents from www.ac-see.org/alumni/HFDP/spw.

52

et al., 19). Cooperation and collaboration among JFDP Alumni at regional and wider level are

elements of strategic options in higher education for faculty members, their students and their

country authorities in the internationalization process (van der Wende, 281). All of them have

the opportunities to increase quality assurance of cross-border education to be imperative for

defining learning outcomes at an international level.

References

AIFS: American Institute for Foreign Study. Future of AIFS, a new global village” from

http://www.aifs.com/future.asp. Retrieved on 2012-12-12. Print.

Brodin, Jane. “Education for Global Competencies An EU–Canada Exchange Programme in

Higher Education and Training.” Journal of Studies in International Education,

Vol.1.5, pp. 569-584 (2010). Print.

Brux, M. Jacqueline, Fry, Blake. “Multicultural students in study abroad: Their interests,

their issues, and their constraints.” Journal of Studies in International Education,

Vol.14.5, pp. 508-527 (2010). Print.

DAAD (2012). “About us-Brief Description”. DAAD from http://www.daad.de/portrait/wer-

wir-sind/kurzportrait/08940.en.html. Retrieved on 2012-12-8. European Commission

“Education & Training”. EC from http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-

programme/erasmus_en.htm. Retrieved on 2012-12-8.

European Commission. “Bologna Declaration on the European space for higher education: an

explanation.” from http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna.pdf.

Retrieved on 2012-12-11.

Galijasevic, Semira. & Hadzibegovic, Zalkida. “Question of Mobility Pilot Study: Students'

Competency, Capacity and Reality.” International Journal of Education, Vol. 4.1,

pp. 47-59 (2012). Print.

Hadžibegović, Zalkida, Tanović, Lamija, Babić-Avdispahić, Jasminka, Mavrak, Mirjana,

Muminović Hašim, Pušina, Amir, Jajatović, Azra, Doubt, Keith, Jaganjac, Azra &

Šoljan, Dubravka. Prilozi za pedagoško-andragošku praksu na

univerzitetu/Appendices for University Pedagogic-Adult Education Practice. Sarajevo:

DES, 2005: 90-96. Print.

International Exchange Alumni. „Benefits of Joining.“ State Alumni from

https://alumni.state.gov/about-international-exchange-alumni/benefits-joining.

Retrieved on 2012-12-10.

53

Jensen Arnett, Lene, Arnett Jensen, Jeffrey, Feldman, Shirley & Cauffman, Elizabeth. “It’s

wrong, but everybody does it: Academic dishonesty among high school and college

students.” Contemporary Educational Psychology, 27, pp. 209 -228 (2002). Print.

Ramsden, Paul. “A performance indicator of teaching quality in higher education: the course

experience questionnaire”. Studies in Higher Education, Vol. 16, pp. 129-150 (1991).

Tarrant, Michael Andrew. “A Conceptual Framework for Exploring the Role of Studies

Abroad in Nurturing Global Citizenship.” Journal of Studies in International

Education, Vol. 14.5, pp. 433-451 (2010). Print.

The Bologna Declaration on the European space for higher education: an explanation from

http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna.pdf. Retrieved on 2012-

12-8.

United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. “Junior

Faculty development program”. JFDP from http://www.jfdp.org/index.php. Retrieved

on 2012-12-8.

United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs . “The

Fulbright Program.” Fulbright from http://eca.state.gov/fulbright/about-fulbright.

Retrieved on 2012-12-8.

Wende van der, Marijk. “Internationalization of Higher Education in the OECD Countries:

Challenges and Opportunities for the Coming Decade.” Journal of Studies in

International Education, Vol. 11.3/4, pp. 274-289 (2007). Print.

Wang, Jia, Peyvandi, Ali & Moghaddam, J.M. “An American Investigation of the Factors

Influencing the Effectiveness of Short Study Abroad programs.” International

Journal of Education Research, Vol. 6.2, pp. 10-22 (2011). Print.

54

Aida Koçi

South East European University, Tetovo, R. Macedonia

My American Experience: Theoretical and Practical Issues of

Teaching/Learning

Article info: UDC 371.3:930.85(73)

Received: November, 2012

Accepted: March, 2013

Abstract: In this paper I will discuss what I have accomplished as a JFDP Alumna, especially with regard to

innovations in the American Studies curriculum. The Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) is a

program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the U.S. Department of State. JFDP is

administered by American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS. My time spent at Kansas

University has proved to be extremely valuable. The benefits I gained while in America are many: academic,

professional and personal. Academically, I learned a range of valuable skills and greatly enhanced my

knowledge of American culture. I also came to consider new ways of approaching curriculum theory and

practice in the light of influential categorizations of knowledge and informal education as well.

Key words: curriculum, innovation, topics, American studies

In 2003 and 2004 I spent 15 months at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas

as a recipient of a JFDP Fellowship. During this time, I attended classes in the American

Studies Program, which is a graduate program of the University. I also did 3 months

internship, assisted Dr. Norman R. Yetman and Dr. David Katzman, co-Editors of American

Studies, an interdisciplinary journal co-sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies

Association and KU. My work with them, and their assistant and managing editors, involved

learning the operations and workings of a major academic journal. Specific tasks included:

receiving and logging in manuscripts, coordinating with authors and journal reviewers

concerning the receipt and status of manuscripts, working with the editors in assigning

readers for manuscripts, coordinating manuscript reviews with the editors and corresponding

with the authors concerning submissions, reviewing and proofreading accepted manuscripts

and working with the Managing Editor to coordinate subscription lists, inquiries from

subscribers and advertisers, and book reviews; proofreading book reviews.

Working with American professors at KU taught me crucial skills in critical thinking,

how to tackle problems from a variety of different angles and how to have diligence and

persistence in my work. Additionally, I made valuable and long-lasting contacts developing

55

my network. Academically, I learned many valuable skills that have enhanced my knowledge

of American culture and language teaching. My knowledge of the English language and

English teaching improved tremendously while I was there. While in America I gained

invaluable professional experience in how to organize my time, how to have a student/

teacher relationship, and how to develop and implement plans. I was amazed at the diverse

make-up of the academic body at KU. There were people representing every continent and

this was a very special thing for me to experience. That is why I cherish my relationships

with friends and faculty there. My academic advisor, Norman Yetman, for example, was very

helpful during my time in America, and also a good friend.

Upon my return from the U.S.A, I successfully integrated service learning component

into the curriculum at my home university. Service learning is a new methodology that

attempts to incorporate learning in the classroom with activities in the broader community by

engaging students in well-organized projects where they apply skills and knowledge, critical

thinking and reflection in order to meet an identify needs in their community. (Anderson,

Swick & Yff, 2001; Rehling 2000; Russell, 2007; Wells & Graber, 2004;). This is an

example of an extra-curricular activity that I have included in my classes. The aim of the

service learning project that my students worked on was to teach them how to accommodate

the students with special needs in the classroom. As part of their instruction for this

assignment they were told to imagine they are teaching a general education TEFL class.

Within the class there were three students with three different disabilities. All students were

asked to develop specific case studies for each of the students with special needs, as well as

develop a basic TEFL lesson plan (on a topic of their choice) including modifications and

alternative assessments for the students with special needs. Another option they had was to

create 3 or 4 fold brochure in English using Microsoft Publisher highlighting an issue related

to Special Needs. For example, it could be on “What is Autism” directed towards teachers, or

it could be about “Sports and the Physically Disabled” directed towards coaches. The basic

components of a service-learning project are that the project should meet a need of the

broader community and that the project should be integrated with the knowledge and skills

taught in the classroom (Learn & Serve America, 2008).

Starting from 2005, the students that took the course on “Needs Analysis and Course

Design”1 actively worked on a service learning project “How to Accommodate People with

1 The NACD course was designed by French psychologist Prof. Sandra Bruno with whom I co-taught the course in 2006. This course is offered to undergraduate and graduate students at South Eastern European University, Tetovo, R.Macedonia.

56

Special Needs” and “Service and Inclusion in Teacher Training.” This was the first time that

a service learning project had been used in the higher education curriculum as an innovative

methodology in R. Macedonia.2 Successful implementation of the service learning project in

the NACD course provided many benefits not only to the communities in Macedonia, but to

other professionals in the region. For example, Marjan Gjurovski, professor at the Computer

Science and Engineering Department, the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje

designed a service learning project as part of his Human-Computer Interaction course aimed

at improving the community of deaf and hard of hearing people (DaHHp) by creating a

“collection of modules and games dedicated to ease the learning of the Macedonian Sign

Language”(Lazarevska, Bilic and Koçi 2012). Professor Angela Cingovska at the Institute of

Special Education and Rehabilitation worked on a service learning project that aimed at

identifying the difficulties that students with special needs meet in accomplishing their

academic activities and duties. In the conclusion Professor Cingovska states that: “In 2010/11

at the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius […] students with disabilities face physical

barriers as well as difficulties related to learning materials and the opportunity to choose the

desired faculty.” (qtd. in Lazarevska, Bilic and Koçi 2012, 91) Similarly, professor Ivana

Bilic and her students at the Faculty of Economics, University of Split, Croatia carried out a

service learning project aimed at identifying and removing the barriers that the students with

special needs meet in higher education. After I presented a paper on Service learning at a

conference organized by two JFDP Alumni, the participants concluded that it would be useful

to continue this positive experience and try to expand the service learning in their home

institutions. Following the initiatives in the NACD class, the interest for integrating service

learning as a positive outcome of the students’ participation increased.

Several projects were undertaken by the US State Department Alumni to improve the

conditions of the people with special needs. One of these projects is in particular aimed at

improving the accessibility of higher education for disabled people.3 This project is led by

professor Ana Lazarevska, at the Mechanical Engineering Department, and I am the co-

manager. We have both participated in JFDP program. Service learning provides many

networking opportunities for the professionals in the region. The synergy that develops

between the professionals from different fields gives each of the collaborating partners a new

perspective. This year we are working on a project on Accessibility for People with Special

2 For further information see: http://www.acee.org/alumni/servicelearning/improvingenvironmentforspecialneeds. htm. 3 For further information, see http://www.equalaccess4pwds.org.

57

Needs in Croatia as well. As Skrtic notes, civic professionalism recognizes the professions

responsibility to the community, especially to those most negatively affected by social

problems, “including the inequalities inherent in certain social institutions such as public

education” (Skrtic, Horn, Clark 2009, 415). The students' participation in the service learning

project helped them in learning to learn by themselves: to search for information, listen to

others, and to better understand a situation by taking into account various points of view,

learning by explaining to others, or getting to know their communities, etc. With the service

learning approach the students improve many competencies that will be useful throughout

their lives (so called transferable competencies). Moreover, as Roehlkepartain has shown,

young people who participate in service learning tend to have higher grades, better problem-

solving skills and more positive civic attitudes and behaviors (Roehlkepartain, 2007).

Character, high ethical sense and sense of citizenship, commitment to reason, time to

learn deeply as opposed to shallowly, are important values to have. The students' involvement

in service-learning projects may be an important condition to support deep learning in formal

learning. By being involved in projects they improve their engagement level and with that

higher engagement level deeper learning is happening – both on a basic skills level and on a

higher order skills level such as critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication

and collaboration. Improvisation, service learning project work and learning a different

language are very important skills that learners need to attain. There is no such thing as one-

size-fits-all solution, which is why it is important to have a range of different activities in the

schools: project based activities; teacher centered learning, just to name two. We as educators

need to provide more opportunities for the students. As Abraham Maslow said: “If the only

tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail” (Maslow, 1987:22). All

students have the same kind of self-actualization need, which is to complete their studies. The

requirements must be the same. Only the conditions needed to meet these requirements

should be adapted. Finding the match for a particular person at a particular age increases their

ability to communicate, to share a vision, and to work with others. Therefore, by dealing with

different important issues, analyzing them, consulting and developing solutions to community

problems, awareness of the relations between personal, regional, national and global effects

or consequences are being promoted.

The importance of service learning projects in general, but particularly for our country,

shouldn’t be underestimated, not least because Macedonia is seeking admission to the

European Union. To advance our country in these times of globalization, it is essential to

examine current politics and the issues that our communities face: cooperation with and

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inclusion of minority groups are essential for this. On a personal level, service learning

increases the applicability and decreases the compartmentalization of the students’

knowledge. By using service-learning projects, the professor imitates innovative business

practices by promoting altruistic behaviors within the context of course activities. The more

the students are prepared for and know about business practices, the greater their competitive

advantage will be in the workplace (Tucker 1998, 88-99).

The students in our region do not have many opportunities for this. It was only in

2011 that a service learning internship was introduced by law into the higher education

system. Although an opportunity for service learning has many potential benefits – including

making students better citizens – one very clear and measurable impact is that it will make

them more attractive employees. When young people get involved in their communities,

people in these communities have more positive relationships with them and view them as

resources and not as problems. It also teaches them about diversity and, most importantly,

enables the students to empathize with the people who live in their communities and the

issues faced by those people, and it produces better problem-solving skills and more positive

civic attitudes and behaviors (Roehlkepartain, 2007). It is important to understand that feeling

sorry and empathizing are not the same; empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in another’s

place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas and action.

Over half a century ago, Russian scholar Lev Vygotsky made an unforgettable

contribution to the field of developmental and cognitive psychology which influenced not

only the field of education, but events in the classrooms every day. Unlike Piaget's theory of

cognitive development where intellectual development drives knowledge, Vygotsky

contended that knowledge drives intellectual development. In order to go from mastered

knowledge to new knowledge, one must go through what Vygotsky calls a Zone of Proximal

Development (ZPD), which he defines as "the distance between the actual developmental

level as determined by independent problem solving, without guided instruction, and the level

of potential development as determined by problem solving under adult guidance or in

collaboration with more capable peers” (Wells, 2001, 52). For Vygotsky, learning is a social

process that does not happen by itself, but is instead facilitated through interaction with

others. In the Zone of Proximal Development it is the other—an individual skilled in a certain

discipline – who pulls the learner along in the search for higher order knowledge. The other

can be a teacher or a peer who acts as a guide through the ZPD of the learner until new

knowledge has been mastered and the learner becomes his or her own teacher.

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Another important aspect of the ZPD is called scaffolding, which refers to actions

taken by the “guide” to ensure that the learner can properly navigate through the ZPD. Once a

problem is given to students, the teacher must be sure that enough guidance is provided at the

start of the task, so that students understand in which direction they should proceed. The

teacher has to be very aware of what is happening with the students, so s/he can start fading

away and let the students finish problem solving independently. In the classroom, the teacher

has to make sure that enough scaffolding is done to assure successful knowledge growth. By

using the ZPD, the classroom is no longer teacher-centered, instead it becomes student-

centered. The students help each other navigate through their ZPD by cooperative and

collaborative learning and reciprocal teaching. Similarly, service learning is a great learning

experience during which educators and students work together for the purpose of exchanging

experiences through learning about ourselves, others and the rest of the world. While doing

this, we develop personally and professionally by advancing our skills to a new degree which

will meet the needs of the society.

Adding the inclusion element to the traditional education or blending the teacher-

driven with the student-driven education should be as multifaceted as the students that we are

educating are. It is important to have a range of activities in the schools: both project-based

activities and teacher-centered learning. Finding the match for any specific person at any age

increases their ability to communicate, to share a vision and to work with others. Inclusive

education is the best preparation for an integrated life. A teacher should always set high, but

attainable, goals for every student, modify instructions for students with different needs,

develop alternative assessments when necessary, include respect for differences in his/her

pedagogy, and thus foster interest in and curiosity about diversity.

I moved away from the traditional textbook approach to syllabus design where I

would simply list the topics chronologically or in order of contents. Thus, an approach to

curriculum theory and practice which focuses on syllabus is only really concerned with

content. The goal of these changes in curriculum was to increase students/teachers’

awareness of the reason why their learners would have better results with one or some other

learning activity, taking into account cognitive, social and affective aspects involved in the

various particular learning environments. Indeed, the methods are applied with relevance

when they are understood in the light of operational theoretical explanations. This means that

the theory is introduced with the aim of serving as a conceptual tool to better choose, decide,

and behave. Another important pedagogical value of a service learning project is that it

promotes team work, group negotiation, and group sharing. This idea of group interaction

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establishes a valuable framework in which individual learning processes can develop.

Moreover, the sharing of learning processes in teams not only strengthens the language skills

that students are to learn, it also exposes them to important social skills.

We, the U.S.A. State Department Alumni, disseminate information on the culture of

the foreign language classroom and the emphasis on self-direction within group learning.

This approach encourages the learners to bring their own experiences to the classroom, and in

doing so to take control of their own learning. The teacher's role in the classroom then shifts

from the classical teacher/textbook model to the more innovative language/facilitator model.

In this situation, the teacher sets the tasks around the learners' experiences, he/she conducts

continuous evaluations of learners to guide them in the learning process, and develops

acceptable criteria of performance for the collective whole. In our attempts to make the

learners more responsible for their learning, we do not take them by the hand through

grammar exercises and verb tenses.

South East European University (SEEU) was established in 2001 and has seen

tremendous growth in its twelve years of existence. The first class accepted to SEEU

consisted of 800 students, and the number of students now studying at SEEU is more than

9000. This rapid growth is a testament to the stature and reputation the university has earned

in its short existence. Furthermore, the university was established with a specific goal of

being a multicultural and multilingual educational institution. In line with this goal, SEEU

has three official languages – English, Albanian, and Macedonian. Because of this “flexible

use of languages” policy, instructors from many Western countries are common in

classrooms at SEEU, and a substantial portion of international staff come from America. The

American Studies program and graduate degree program are natural extensions of current

activities at SEEU, and due to this, have a high probability of successful implementation. In

the department of Language, Culture and Communication as well as other departments of the

South East European University (SEEU), there has been a major American contribution. The

aid we have received from the U.S. government and teachers has been particularly great. I

can highlight some key areas, which attest to the dramatic improvements achieved thanks to

the American assistance: development of practical, personal skills, and talents as well as the

students’ autonomy. Following the principles of John Dewey, as part of their approach in

education, majority of Americans who have worked in our schools encouraged the

development of scientific thought, free research mentality, tolerance towards different views

and free communication, implementation of new methods of work (such as community

service learning aimed at improving or resolving the problems in communities), change of the

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teaching methodology by making learning happen in a discussion space of exchange (i.e. one

hour interactive participation of students), development of the syllabus for the subjects and

curriculum as a central based management structure and stability of the learning process, or

as flexible character (according to John Dewey, the great pragmatist).

In this way I think that orientation towards American education model requires a

commitment and, above all, work done by the teachers, school administrators and students, as

a condition for preparing more and better quality students, advancement of students through

such forms as conference publications, membership in professional associations, participation

in professional conferences and programs contributing to the consolidation of the democratic

spirit and content of the school in accordance with the requirements of society.

I have put together course outlines for five undergraduate and over sixteen graduate

courses, and also created a Course Booklet4 for our American Studies introductory course. At

present, there are no American Studies programs in the region, leaving a vital sector of the

study unfilled. Also, this provides a substantial pool of potential students for the program.

The United States is an obvious and significant factor in global politics, economics, and many

other sectors. The students in the field of American studies will be better equipped to deal

with the world impacted by the US companies and governmental and non-governmental

organizations. The program’s focus is on geo-cultural and political history and contemporary

economic and political issues.

First and foremost, the aim is for the students to become more knowledgeable about

and sensitive to the enormous complexity of American society and culture. Since its very

inception, the United States has been a society characterized by diversity—especially of race,

ethnicity, religion, gender, region, and class. The course examines the experiences of five

broad ethnic categories that comprise what has been termed the American “ethnoracial

pentagon”: American Indians (i.e., Native Americans), European Americans, African

Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. We focus primarily (although not exclusively) on

the previous century – the period from the close of the nineteenth century to the present,

during which American society changed dramatically and most of the present conceptions of

race and ethnicity were formed. We examine how broad social, demographic, and cultural

changes in American life in the past century have affected the identities of the American

4 The primary objective of the Course Booklet is to advance the study of American culture, politics, economy, history and media within Macedonian academic institutions and Macedonian society. It is also explains the U.S. perspective on the transatlantic relations in the context of the challenges in the post Cold War era and a counter-balance to the numerous courses of study on EU issues that are currently taught in Macedonia. ASP lectures are conducted using Language Culture and Communication Department facilities at SEEU.

62

people. Above all, the course seeks to increase awareness of the realities of an increasingly

diverse, multicultural society that the United States has been and will continue to be in a

rapidly shrinking and increasingly globalized world in the twenty-first century.

I have also changed the sequence of topics so that there is better coherence and

continuity between them. The following paragraphs set out these topics in their rearranged

sequence. We begin with American geography. This is a description of the basic physical and

climatic features, national parks, etc. As Luedkte in his book Making America: The Society

and Culture of the United States contends: “Just as Americans have reshaped the face of their

land, the people themselves have been shaped and reshaped by constant intimate encounters

with the land” (3).

We deal next with the “M” factor (mobility, migration, and movement) which is such

an important feature of American life, including not only immigration from abroad, but also

the four basic internal migratory movements of the American people: 1) East-west, 2) South-

North (including, especially, the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South), 3)

Rural-urban and 4) the counter-migrations of North-South and urban-suburban recently.

The American political and economic system is the next topic. This covers

industrialization and the role of America's physical abundance (as described in David Potter's

People of Plenty), which relates to the first theme that I have mentioned above. We then

proceed to discuss American diversity, which includes Native Americans, European

Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other minority groups; it is of course still

constantly evolving. The next topic covered is “Voluntary Associations in America” which

refers to Tocqueville’s famous characterization (Democracy in America) of the U.S. as being

a nation with an abundance of voluntary associations, which he felt was a characteristic of a

democratic society.

I have focused more intensively on several critical issues and scaled back extensively

on many of the topics that I used to cover previously for each of the several sessions. This is

because in the course of time I have shifted away from my original chronological approach to

a more thematic approach. There are three critical topics that I’ve now added. First, social

inequality. Tocqueville in the l830s was struck by what he termed the “equality of condition”

(3) among the American people (although he was extremely critical of slavery co-existing

simultaneously with it). That notion of equality has been a powerful value at the same time

that inequalities have grown in the U.S. at different periods, especially in the last three

decades. Notions of equality have been integral to the “American dream” and have

undergirded much of the attraction of the U.S. for peoples abroad. Second topic refers to the

63

role of the U.S. in the global political economy (especially since World War II) and the third

topic is immigration. Here we discuss the changing contexts of immigration to the United

States today and its implications for the political, economic, social, and cultural future of the

American people and the American nation, especially in the context of the debate over

immigration reform that has become one of the most complex and heated political issues

today. Simply said, what may seem to be an obvious proposition: that what has been called

the “M” factor of human migration, movement, and mobility is a cultural universal, “a

fundamental human activity” (Daniels 1991, 3). To fully understand the processes of

migration, we focus on three things, as follows. The contexts of exit (the reasons and

conditions under which people leave and the characteristics they bring with them from the old

country) and the contexts of reception (the characteristics –economic, educational, political,

social, and cultural) in the new transnational processes – that is, the ways in which

immigrants do not immediately shed their old identities and adopt those of the new culture

but rather continually negotiate between the old and the new.

In today’s world, dramatic changes in communication and transportation have

transformed the nature and meaning of “immigrant” and “emigrant.” Given the extraordinary

explosion of use of IT – e-mail, cell phones, and the ability to send remittances back home –

it is becoming increasingly characteristic of all immigrant groups that their traditional cultural

patterns are much more strongly reinforced than they were in the past. This reinforcement is

likely to persist because of the continual infusions of compatriots and the aforementioned

much easier means of maintaining contact thanks to the revolution in air transport costs and

communication.

Given these economic and technological realities, the prospects for the kind of

optimistic “new face of America” in which ethnic differences are simply celebrated as

sources of identity and their material consequences ignored – as projected already twenty

years ago by a special issue of Time magazine – seem naively improbable, which is a major

factor providing a strong rationale and justification for developing and strengthening

American Studies Programs along the lines explained in this paper. To conclude this article

on a personal note emphasizing the great benefits of JDFP experience for exactly this goal, I

wish to highlight one particular aspect of the many things I learned: namely, that the

professors in the USA are not so formal as those in Macedonia, which is one reason why I

learned so much from them. I was impressed with their willingness to help and support you

almost anytime. Norman Yetman who was my academic advisor at KU came on a trip with

his wife to give a presentation at a conference on American Studies that I organized at SEEU,

64

Tetovo, Macedonia. This was of course long after I had left the school. This was very

momentous for me. I think back to my first encounters with American language teachers in

Gostivar some years back and I can honestly say that there is a common thread of willingness

and earnestness shared by American educators. One of the impressions that I got while in

America is that American society is truly individualistic. People understand individualistic

concepts and they respect individuality.

References

Anderson, J.B, Swick K.J, Yff J. Service-Learning in Teacher Education. American

Association of Colleagues for Teacher Education. New York, 2001. Print.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American

Life Perennial Harper Collins Publisher, 1991. Print.

Dewey, John. “The school and society.”In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle

works, 1899-1924 (Vol. 1, pp. 1-109). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,

1976. Print.

--. “Democracy and education.” In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works,

1899-1924 (Vol. 9, pp. 1-370). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

Print.

Frank, Thomas. “Lie Down for America: How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great

Plains,” Harpers Magazine (April 2004). Print.

Gutman, Herbert G. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America. New York:

Vintage Books, 1977. Print.

Lazarevska Ana, Bilic Ivana & Koçi, Aida. Book of Case Studies: Service Learning Success

Stories in Croatia and Macedonia. Skopje: National and University Library

“St.Kliment Ohridski” Skopje. 2012. Print.

Hall, Edward. Beyond culture. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977.

Hand, S. (ed.) The Levinas Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.1989. Print.

Joe R. Feagin. “The Continuing Significance of Race,” American Sociological Review.

Vol.56, No.1 (February 1991), pp.101-116 (1991). Print.

Koçi, Aida, Lazareska, A., Stankosky, Micheal. Guidelines for Effective Introduction and

Implementation of Service-Learning in Higher Education. Macedonian National

Library Skopje 2012. Print.

Kirkpatrick, David. “Best-Selling Series Reaches Climax: Jesus’ Return.” New York

Times, 29 March 2004. Print.

65

Kirkpatrick, David, “The Return of the Warrior Jesus.” New York Times 4 April 2004. Print.

LeVasseur, L. Michal, Prentice Hall World Geography: Building a Global Perspective.

Prentice Hall School Division, 2000. Print.

Luther S. Luedtke. Making America: The Society and Culture of the United States Oxford

University Press, 1982. Print.

Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. HarperCollins Publishers; 3 Sub edition

(January 1987). Print.

Rehling, Louise., “Doing good while doing well: Service learning internships,” Business

Communication Quarterly, 63 (1), 2000, p.77-89. Print.

Skrtic, Thomas M, Horn, Eva M., Clark, Gary M. Taking Stock of Special Education Policy

& Practice. Love Publishing Company, Denver, 2009. Print.

Time, November 18, 1993. See: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html

Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. The University of Chicago Press, London 2000.

Print.

Tucker, Mary L., McCarthy, Anne M., Hoxmeier, John A., and Lenk, Margarita M.

“Community service learning increases communication skills across the business

curriculum,” Business Communication Quarterly, 61 (2), 1998, pp. 88-99. Print.

Yetman, Norman R. Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in

American Life. Allyn & Bacon, Inc., 1998. Print.

66

Brunilda Kondi

University of Tirana, Albania

Importing American Pop Culture: The Case of Tirana, Albania

Article info: UDC 316.7(73):930.85(496.5)

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: February, 2013

Abstract: The export of American popular culture to the rest of the world especially in the second half of the

twentieth century has affected Albania. Although there are no franchises of McDonald’s and Starbuck’s, their

images together with many others contribute to the American Dream nourished among many Albanians. This

contribution takes a note of some of the most common images, with the aim of exploring how they have been

established among the American-loving Albanians and what messages and/or ideas they bring along.

Key words: American popular culture, images, messages, principles and ideals.

1. Introduction

It is October in Tirana and law offices and internet cafes everywhere display the sign:

“Assistance with the American Lottery”, “We help with American Lottery Applications” or

other forms of offering their services. The American Lottery is the term Albanians use widely

for the United States Diversity Visa Program which only last year gave – or is supposed to

have given – a lucky break to the lives of about 1,600 Albanian citizens (out of 55,000 who

applied) (DV-2012 Results and Statistics, 2012).

Recently, Albanian media announced the visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to

happen on November 1st, and it got them counting: “She will be the fourth Secretary of State

to visit Albania.” It remains to be seen if there will be a boom of babies named after her as it

happened years ago when her husband endorsed the Kosovo case and visited the country

(1999), or a statue like the one her husband might relish in Pristina (2009.) However, we do

not have any similar outpourings following George W. Bush’s visit to Albania. That said,

there is a statue of him on George Bush square in the small town (Fushë-Krujë) where he met

the people and a street in the capital city named after him.

One does not need to be very attentive and perceptive to see and be influenced by the

wide wave of foreign images and sounds in the (small to the world but big to our country)

habitat of Tirana. As we open our eyes in the morning, we are accompanied by “Wake Up”, a

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morning program on one of the most popular TV channels and radio stations. The songs

played on the program are hits in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world.

Albanians cannot get down to work without the morning cup of coffee (although, unlike

Americans who either grab it on the way to work or enjoy it homemade, we want to sit and

chat over it in the plethora of bars that our city offers), we have a choice to sit at a bar nearby

“Bar Kafe New Amsterdam” or go to a more fancy place “The Twin Towers” or the “Sky

Tower”. There is an even more alluring array of choice for lunch, if we happen to have it out,

starting from something quick (the version of ‘fast’ in Albanian terms) at “Fast Food Take-

Away Landi”, “Subway”, “Big Bite”, “McKolonat”, etc. For the weekend, the trade centers

(organized on the model of American malls but teeny tiny when compared to them) offer all

kinds of shopping (the same word is used by show-off or ‘fancy’ Albanians) we might need

as well as entertainment over a bowling alley. The list could go on and on depending on the

kinds of activities each one does every day.

The phenomenon detailed and analyzed in this article is the outcome of observation,

with the aid of approximately 100 pairs of eyes ‘lent’ by my industrious students, of the

extent in which American popular culture images have made their way to the small country

of Albania. The aim is to analyze how they have come, what they mean to the people that see

and use them, and especially what they bring with them in terms of messages and ideas. It all

started as an assignment to warm up my American Culture students for the job ahead of a full

academic year, and it gets more and more exciting every year with new examples or new

interpretations of the same images from different perspectives. For example, this year a

student mentioned a protest that took place in Albania in January 2011 as an example of

something that reminded him of America and illustrated it with photos both from the

Albanian protest and a comparable protest in the United States.

2. Popular Culture

What once was unique is not (necessarily) anymore. What once was private (or

national) is not anymore. What people did in a specific country a little more than a century

ago remained there; what they do now anywhere in the world is or may be spread everywhere.

In the introduction to The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, Professor M.

Thomas Inge states that popular culture studies became subject of analysis and research in the

United States in the middle of the third decade of the 20th century with the view of Gilbert

Seldes that America had a culture of its own different from that of Europe. Following that

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view there were a lot of discussions about what then mass media was doing with that culture,

ranging from making it available to all the people to causing it to become insignificant.

However, serious and systematic study of popular culture and the way it affects people,

especially as it was being defined as mass culture appealing to broad masses, belongs to the

second half of the 20th century when it became apparent that: “Few people can deny the

pervasiveness of popular culture.” (Grossberg 69). Grossberg points out what it is in popular

culture that makes it lend itself to massive and convenient consumption: “Popular culture is

more than ideological; it provides sites of relaxation, privacy, pleasure, enjoyment, feeling

good, fun, passion and emotion.” (79) Thus, the impact of the dissemination of popular

culture is important to study because besides providing fulfillment of desire, popular culture

affects people and reinforces their views of the world. (Inge xv).

The way in which popular culture has spread nationally as well as internationally has

also been studied thoroughly: through print, media, electronic media and especially

advertising, which itself is considered a form of popular culture. International dissemination

has been particularly given attention to after WW II with movements of globalization. Recent

research findings prove that people continue to embrace American popular culture throughout

the world (Pew Research, 2012) and writers and bloggers emphasize the fact that America’s

greatest export is specifically its culture. (Crowder, Landphair).

While people around the world are now living with globalization, either accepting the

global fully or lamenting loss of the local, in Albania as we struggle with transition from one

system to another and ‘assignments’ to complete to make it to the EU successfully, culture

and popular culture analysis and discussions are not a priority. Thus, it was thought that

awareness of what is around the people and analysis of how it affects them would be useful in

helping Albanian people make sense of themselves and in a broader view of the globalized

world represented to some extent by the images present in their everyday life.

3. Categorizing the images

After collecting images from the streets of Tirana, an attempt was made to select and

place them into categories. This analysis is limited for at least two reasons: first, it cannot be

claimed that the collection process has been exhausted. Second, because the phenomenon is

so sporadic, i.e., there are no regulations in place and images can be found both in private and

public places without any particular order, trend or purpose, it is difficult to trace how the

images were brought in and what they mean to every single person who notices them.

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Categorization though helps in trying to understand how and why Albanians use bits and

pieces of American popular culture and what these images mean to people watching them.

Names of people and places: Following a long period of limited choice for their

children’s names (during the years of communism the choice was limited to names coming

from countries we were on good terms with, from Russia to China, and indoctrinated

Albanian names), Albanian parents have in the last 20 years enjoyed the luxury of being able

to choose any name (there still is a ‘black list’ of 64 names that cannot be chosen, which,

however, is much better than the previous list of 6,000 names that could only be chosen)

(Djali im, 2012). As a result, there has recently been a tendency among young Albanian

parents to give ‘fashionable’ and ‘special’ names to their children. Although most of the new

“trendy” names come from sports, formula one, art, music, movies, there is a group of

children’s names that bring America to mind. In most cases these names undergo changes in

spelling to fit Albanian pronunciation, but there are also cases when parents decide to keep

the original spelling (as if there aren’t enough problems with our civil registry). Some

examples of such names that remind Albanians of America vary from religious names:

Samuel, Rebeka, Rakela, Abigeil, Xhon, Isaia, Hana, Mateo, etc. or typically American

names from popular name lists: Greg, Sindi, Brendly, Ian, Xhoana, Mishel, etc. to names that

carry meaning in English, but which in Albanian do not mean a thing except that they sound

nice: Greis (Hir, hijeshi), Xhoi (Gëzim), Melodi (Melodi), Gloria (Lavdi).

What seems to be the most widespread category of images is that of names used for

places that offer a wide range of services. These places can be educational institutions, for

example University of New York Tirana YNUT (it is not a branch of NYU in New York City),

Instituti Arsimor Wilson (the owner of the school apparently has deep respect for the

American president Woodrow Wilson, who used his voice to support the Albanian case in

1913), The Abraham Lincoln Foundation known as The Lincoln Center, The American

University, Harry Fultz (Technical School of Tirana). However, most of the names go with

the business sector, in naming bars (Bar Kafe Obama, Bar Kafe New Amsterdam, Eden Park,

Bar Of Life, Steel Wings – A Harley Davidson Fans’ Club, Jazz Club Take 5 ), restaurants

and fast food places (Fas Foot Byrek, Mc.Donald’s Byrekë të Çastit, Take Out Fast Food

Landi, Route 66, MKolonat, Fast Food Subway, Big Bite, Mr. Chicken, Piceri Restorant

Manhattan), outfit stores (Jakovo Miami, Butik USA, American Style, Levi Strauss & Co,

Buffalo, Madison Avenue) and others (McDowall Hotel, Coca-Cola Company, Marlboro,

Regency Casino, Casino Vegas, Spitali Amerikan, Tregu Amerikan, Microsoft, Sheraton). In

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a more formal setting, there are streets and squares that are named after influential American

people due to historical reasons (Rruga Presidenti George W. Bush, Sheshi Wilson).

Television is the domain which influences a lot providing images from the ‘Promised

Land’. The effect can be seen in action either through Albanian programs based on models of

American ones (The Voice of Albania, Nga e para – Extreme Makeover, Big Brother Albania,

Albanian’s Got Talent, The X-factor Albania) or American sitcoms, series, reality shows

(Friends, The Flintstones, Family Guy, Desperate Housewives, CSI, Doctor House, Grey’s

Anatomy, America’s Next Top Model). In addition, based on observations more than ninety

percent of the movies Albanians watch on television and in the movie theaters are American

productions.

Everyday elements in the life of Albanians also display some influence of the

American popular culture. It starts with music which includes all kinds of American trends

such as pop, rap, hip-hop, jazz, and country in listening as well as producing in Albanian by

young Albanian musicians. The Clothes young people wear are very similar to the casual

style worn around the world: T-shirts, jeans, trainers, sneakers, ballerinas, converse shoes.

Albanian people eat popcorn when at the Movie Theater. There is a lot of graffiti around, in

the form of vandalism, art, property spotting, etc. Albanians like to play bowling in the few

bowling alleys the city offers. Most taxi cabs in Tirana are yellow and, as some students

pointed out, remind them of America based on what they have seen in the movies which

feature yellow taxi cabs in New York City. Those very few who can afford it, may hire a

limousine for special occasions, mostly wedding day to pick up the bride. Finally, there are

American cars (huge and powerful) in the streets of Tirana, which stand out because of size

and plate characteristics (name of state and state motto).

Symbolic and public reminders: Although the images in fast food places, names of

stores, and clothes people wear stand out daily as ‘modern’ forms of American life, for my

American Culture students the most powerful reminders of the United States are the

institutional representatives.

The American Flag stands by the Albanian flag in almost all offices, be they public or

private, representatives of mutual cooperation or not. It can also be seen in buildings under

construction. The symbolism could be that of appreciation for the support the United States

has continually given Albania or admiration for what America represents as a democratic

country, which is what Albania has been aspiring to in the last two decades. In the last spring-

summer fashion, this symbol was further applied to T-shirts, bags, scarves or other clothes

items.

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Embassy of the United States – When walking past it, one cannot help thinking what

the grass/land looks like on the other side of the fence (more like Albanian or American type).

The representation is powerful not only because of the location it has in a very important

street in Tirana, but more as a result of the programs it organizes for spreading the

understanding of American culture. Its cultural diplomacy helps to set straight some of the

wrong stereotypes created by the images and media, such as the fast food mania and obesity,

lack of respect for elderly parents, violence in mass shootings, etc.

American Corner Tirana – For book/knowledge lovers and national library visitors

(as well as Facebook fans) The American Corner in Tirana offers an idea of what a library

room might look like in the United States. Hosted by the National Library in Tirana, it stands

out from the other rooms of the very same institution with the ambiance and the variety of

information sources and cultural activities it organizes. Students mention this difference as a

result of influence from the American culture it represents.

Albanian Twin Towers – Built on the model of the Twin Towers in New York City,

although not as tall and powerful, they still remind people in Tirana of America. It is not that

we tried to imitate the original Twin Towers. However, the symbolism they bring is apparent:

they represent the economic power of Albania being the host of many business offices and

banks. In addition, like the ones in New York City, the twin towers in Tirana are located in an

important area of the city, the main boulevard. (And, fortunately, ours are still standing!)

More complicated examples: Very few students, as representatives of a young age

population, have mentioned some more complicated examples of American culture in

Albanian life in Tirana. These examples have to do with civil society and civil society

movements as well as volunteer groups. Mjaft is a non-governmental organization that started

out with campaigns to raise awareness among the people of political and social problems in

Albania. ACT (Albanians Coming Together) Now is a community outreach initiative by the

US Embassy in Tirana that encourages citizens to get involved, get informed and act. G-99, a

political party created in 2008 in Albania by activists in the above-mentioned Mjaft

organization, copied the model of Barack Obama’s use of Facebook for the 2008 electoral

campaign. However, that did not turn out as successful here. These movements and other

groups especially volunteer groups and/or individuals make an impression on the people

because they are almost nonexistent or very rare in our culture.

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4. Where from and why

One might rightfully wonder how these images of American popular culture have

come to Tirana. In fact, based on observations and on the students’ reaction, most people in

everyday life take images and symbols around them for granted and do not get concerned

about what they are and what they mean. The method we used to find out how our specific

images were established in their environments involved research and interviewing people, i.e.

questioning those who used or displayed these images in one form or another. The most

common and measurable forms of import include the influence of television, internet, and

books, and some form of interaction with the United States.

Albania is not an exception when it comes to discussing the influence of television,

and the way television makes things popular, especially when considering the fact that there

is no restriction based on kinds and origin of movies or programs broadcast on TV in Albania.

As a result, almost all Albanian kids know Mickey Mouse and all of his Clubhouse friends,

Tom and Jerry, Batman, Spiderman and all the other superheroes, while young adults and

adults are familiar with the Desperate Housewives, Doctor House, Bay Watch, to mention but

a few. Internet is another source that brings images of American culture, i.e. of things

Americans do every day and the kinds of concerns they have. More and more educated young

Albanians get the news from the internet, read blogs, get information about their favorite stars

and consult many American sources of information for their daily concerns, for example,

self-help ideas, choosing children’s names or buying clothes. In addition, English textbooks

contribute with the cultural information they provide about English-speaking countries, thus

including the USA. This influence could be significant if we consider the fact that in public

schools English is taught from grade 3 (elementary school) to grade 12 (high school). In

private schools it starts even earlier, in first grade, while all universities have a required one-

to-two-year course of English as a foreign language.

Most of the clothes stores and bar/restaurant owners that we contacted to inquire why

they have used American names for their businesses have one thing in common: they have

had some form of interaction with the Unites States. Some of them had either been

immigrants in America or had some ties or contacts in the United States. A few others

imported products from there. All of them believed that an American name would add to the

prestige of their business and would thus attract more customers and increase sales. In most

cases, American products and names were immediately connected with better quality.

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5. As a Conclusion

While countries around the world are distinguished by the way they receive and

respond to the influence of American popular culture – ranging from those that try to keep

away the popular culture influence by banning or limiting fast food, putting restrictions on

American movies or cleaning up their language from American words, to those which enjoy

the popular culture but disapprove of American policies worldwide – Albania loves both the

culture and the policies of the USA. The reception of both is very enthusiastic throughout the

country, which can be illustrated by the way Albanian people choose American names and

indicators to make their businesses more attractive and successful, by the way Albanian

people have welcomed all American leaders that have visited Albania and shown gratitude to

the support received by them, and by the fact that Albania always stands as a potential alley

to all American initiatives that are applicable.

Although the phenomenon explored in this article belongs to recent developments in

Albania (the country’s transition from an isolated communist system to a democratic one),

the people’s admiration for the United States is as old as the country itself. (Kadija, 1994). In

his article American Studies in Albania in the Past and the Future Professor Kadija explains

that even before the country opened up to the world, there was an indirect way in which

American popular culture sent its signals to the isolated communist community, especially

from Italian TV channels whose waves could reach the few TV sets available. As we

celebrate the 100th anniversary of our independence, we are reminded of the role America has

played in Albania’s history. Among the many events organized for the occasion, one was

very significant and received a lot of attention: the inauguration of a statue of former US

president Woodrow Wilson set up on a square in Tirana that has borne his name for many

years. That was an unmistakable sign of gratitude and appreciation to a country Albania loves

and admires. Albanian-American relations originate in the early decades of the twentieth

century. From that beginning, some culture appreciation can be witnessed by the

establishment of two American schools in Albania, one in Tirana and one in a smaller town,

Kavaja. Then, following a break of 52 years due to political reasons, relations were

reestablished in 1991. However, the enthusiasm of the original relationship was never

forgotten in the 52 years by the many thousands Americans of Albanian origin living in the

United States and apparently by many Albanians living in Albania. When speaking about first

impressions of the Albanian people, the current American ambassador to Albania, Alexander

Arvizu, says that all Albanians he has met have a special attraction for the United States.

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Another thing that can be stated as a conclusion is the fact that all these cultural

images have been adopted voluntarily in Albania; which is perhaps stating the obvious fact

having mentioned the positive reception and admiration for the United States by Albanians.

However, although the streets in Tirana abound with images that remind one of America, we

still need to see how and what principles and ideals entailed in the American culture

Albanians know or think they know make their way into the people’s collective mindset.

While American students wear jeans and like fast food, they also work hard in order to earn a

degree. On top of that, they hold jobs and take on a financial burden that translates into

responsibility. Albanian students, on the other hand, have yet to learn what independence,

responsibility and hard work mean. Also, Albanian politics has yet to learn the messages and

recognize ideals that are carried out by the politics represented by Woodrow Wilson, Bill

Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and other American political figures touted by their

Albanian counterparts. Among those messages, the most important ones were said out loud

and clear by Hillary Clinton during the few hours she spent in Tirana on November 1, 2012:

“Free and fair elections… commitment to democracy… hard work to achieve the goals of

free and fair elections for a healthy democracy… a culture of cooperation…” (Remarks,

2012). And finally, all the people need to learn from the American way of respecting the (rule

of) law and one another, keeping the country clean (by at least joining American Peace

Course volunteers who clean up our beaches and other landscapes) and leaving behind a

better country for their children.

References

“Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas.” Pew Research Center. 13 June 2012.

Accessed 10 November 2012 <http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/chapter-2-

attitudes-toward-american-culture-and-ideas/>

Crowder, Steven. “American Culture – Our Greatest Export.” Fox News. 19 July 2010.

Accessed 4 October 2012. <http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/07/19/steven-

crowder-proud-american-culture-influence-worldwide/#ixzz2D57ubVeq>

“Exporting Popular Culture”, Accessed 4 October 2012 http://aboutusa. japan. usembassy.

gov/ e/jusa-portrait-usa11.html>

Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and

Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992

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Inge, M. Thomas, Hall. Dennis, ed. The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture.

Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.

Kadija, Refik. “American Studies in Albania in the Past and the Future.” John F. Kennedy

Institute for North American Studies. No. 68/1994. Accessed 3 December 2012.

<http://edocs.fuberlin.de/docs/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/FUDOCS_derivate_000

000001159/workingpaper068.pdf?hosts=>

Landphair, Ted. “Exporting American Culture.” Ted Landphairs’s America. Voice of

America 14 April 2012. Accessed 30 October 2012. http://blogs.voanews.

com/tedlandphairsamerica /2011/04/14/exporting-american-culture/>

“Remarks Commemorating 100 Years of Albanian Independence from Hillary Rodham

Clinton, Secretary of State, Parliament” (November 1, 2012). Accessed November 30,

2012 http:// tirana.usembassy.gov/press-releases2/2012-press-releases/remarks-

commemorating-100-years-of-albanian-independence-from-hillary-rodham-clinton-

secretary-of-state-parli-ament-november-1-2012.html>

“Some Countries Remain Resistant to American Cultural Exports.” The New York Times

Accessed 10 November 2012 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/business/22

scene.html>

Tema. “Djali im quhet Benz!” Tema Online. 31 January 2012. Accessed 27 November 2012

<http://www.gazetatema.net/web/2012/01/31/djali-im-quhet-benz/>

“The Return of the Cultural Diplomacy.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek 30 December 2008.

Accessed 27 November 2012

<http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/12/31/the-return-of-cultural-

diplomacy.html>

“U.S.- Albanian Relations.” voa.gov. Voice of America <http://editorials.voa.gov/content/us-

albanian-relations-112943954/1482252.html>

76

Daniela Stoica

Fan S. Noli University, Korce, Albania

Movies as a Practical Approach to Teaching Literature. The Great Gatsby: the

Novel and the Movie

Article info: UDC 81:791.3

Received: December, 2012

Accepted: March, 2013

Abstract: In the present paper we argue that movies may be looked upon as a practical approach to teaching

literature, as a new teaching and learning paradigm, having several advantages such as: promoting critical

thinking and writing, helping students to make connections between concepts and real world, developing

students’ skills of analyzing films as visual texts, by making use of the technique of scene analysis. Finally, the

second part of the article proposes several scene analyses from the movie The Great Gatsby, as compared to

their corresponding textual passages. This part highlights how these scenes, as well as the issues raised during

the class discussions, have enhanced the students’ understanding of the novel with the same title by Scott

Fitzgerald, enabling them to write original research papers and to undertake challenging research projects.

Key words: active teaching-learning, films, literature, texts.

1. Introduction

If the 1960s mark the beginnings of the academic study of movies, only recently has

film pedagogy begun to receive the same attention as film theory, especially in the USA and

UK. Using movies as a practical approach to literature is quite a recent innovation in the

pedagogy field, which aims at turning the process of teaching and learning into an active one,

thus contributing greatly to enhancing teaching effectiveness in the classroom. It may also be

understood as a commitment on the part of the instructors and students to enliven the

educational process. This way, instructors are able to encourage and establish a permanent

dialogue among students and empower them in the learning enterprise. This is why today

more and more teachers and instructors are using film-based syllabi at secondary and post-

secondary levels, as well as at undergraduate and graduate levels. Films can be very valuable

resources for many disciplines such as philosophy, cultural studies, English and American

literature, academic writing etc, enabling instructors to make use of them in various ways,

according to their educational objectives. For example, a composition teacher at a college has

designed a syllabus which teaches English composition and introduction to film in the same

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course (Hoche, 2). Of course, teachers' work today is facilitated by the existence of many

resources offering advice about film selection, AV technology, on line resources etc.

On the other hand, instructors cannot ignore the fact that films allow students to make

conceptual linkages between theories, conceptual frameworks and real world examples. Some

academic instructors use films such as Blade Runner and The Thirteen Floor to examine

philosophical themes; in a history or a cultural studies course, movies may provide insight

into a different culture or time period. For example, in this article, we are going to

demonstrate how the film The Great Gatsby, used in the American Literature course taught

by the author of this article, has enhanced the students’ understanding of a controversial

epoch in the history of the USA- “the roaring twenties”. Uncomfortable themes, such as

political rebellion or socio-economic, racial, ethnic, or gender-motivated marginalization,

may be dealt with in a syllabus organized in themed units (Featheringill, 23, Herbeck, 106).

Of course, questions raised in class discussion become the basis for research papers; and

since the students were writing about topics that interested them, their research became more

an adventure than a burden. (Hoche, 3)

Having taken all these things into consideration, we may very well conclude that

using movies into the classroom develops students’ critical thinking and writing skills, in

general. In addition, other film-based courses aim at developing even more specific critical

thinking skills by introducing students to film theory (which has been influenced in the

course of time by theoretical movements such as structuralism, semiotics, feminism, Marxism,

psycho-analysis, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, queer theory etc), and by making them

aware of the constructedness of the cinematic world (Klein, 86), of the male gaze (Mulvey,

1975), or of the dominant ideology or bias underlying the process of filmmaking (Klein, 95).

Drawing on their experience in the classroom, film-based course instructors usually provide

students with a reader of primary theoretical texts which they discuss in class and draw upon

when writing their responses. These discussions may also be extended outside classrooms,

making use creatively of Blackboard (or also known as b-space), an on-line platform using

several collaboration tools that enhance student engagement and provide opportunities for

social learning. (Klein, 97)

More than that, movies also address the issue of students’ retention (Hoche, 3). This

type of active teaching can promote students’ learning and knowledge retention (a

combination of approaches – both visual and verbal – will promote a greater retention of

knowledge). According to the statistics, students retain 10% of what they read, 20% of what

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they hear and 30% of what they see. Combining methods for presentation in the classroom

may boost retention rates to around 50%. (Cisco, 4)

Finally, teaching literature through movies may be seen as a move from a traditional,

lecture oriented “instructional paradigm” to a “new learning paradigm”, as a way of luring

students out of their passivity The new learning paradigm sees learning as a process of

discovery and places students in a position of generators of knowledge in an active classroom.

Thus, some film based courses may be designed as a series of hands-on projects that make

students responsible for presenting key concepts from their readers (sometimes even

challenging them) or for writing their own scripts, or taking the story from the written page to

the screen, keeping in mind the key issues encountered in the theoretical texts.

Last but not least, students need to be taught “to see film as communication” and “to

place film communication within a wider system for generating meaning – that of the culture

itself.” (Turner, 52) In other words, students should be encouraged to see films as visual texts,

where several systems of signification are at work. As compared to literature, film is not a

discrete system of signification; on the contrary, film incorporates several separate

technologies such as camera, lighting, editing, set design, sound which contribute to the

construction of meaning. To conclude, according to Turner “film is a complex system of

signification and its meanings are the product of the combination of these systems.” (73)

Consequently, students will find themselves being exposed to several signifying systems

working at the same time and enhancing their understanding of elements they come across in

literary works of fiction, such as main themes and symbols, characters, setting, narrative

techniques, focalization etc. In this respect, some course instructors consider scene analysis,

the cinematic equivalent of a close reading, as a very effective pedagogical tool. (Hurlburt,

18). Scene analysis requires students to be familiar with film vocabulary, as well as to

describe composition, shot angles, transition of sequences, and to show how these technical

aspects combine to create meaning. Scene analysis is thus an excellent means of familiarizing

students with basic vocabulary of shot construction. However, as Hurlburt remarks, this

process has its limitations, because it does not always succeed in creating the illusion of

reality created by classical cinema: “In other words, the process of analyzing a single scene

teaches the ‘how’ of scene construction more effectively than it teaches the ‘why.’” (19)

Hurrell brings into discussion the theme of multiliteracies, which he describes as “a new

approach to literacy pedagogy based on a much broader conception of literacy than that of

traditional, language-focused approaches.” (2) Featheringill argues that students are already

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visually literate and it is important for teachers to exploit that; according to him, literary

techniques can be taught through films. (27)

The last part of the present article will put in practice the theoretical framework

presented above, which represents at the same time the basis of our methodology, with an

application to the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (included in the syllabus of

the American Literature Survey Course taught by the author to the junior students majoring in

English) and the movie with the same title, from 1976, directed by Jay Clayton, the

screenplay was written by Francis Ford Coppola. The purpose of this exemplification is to

highlight how the movie has enhanced the students’ comprehension of the literary text, in

general. The discussion also gave them a better insight into the epoch that Fitzgerald himself

labeled as “the roaring twenties.” But before proceeding with our presentation of how this

movie was used as a teaching tool for the literary text, we would like to highlight the

following principles we have adhered to when deciding to introduce this new paradigm of

teaching and learning into the classroom:

• Films should be used as a supplement to the text reading in the classroom; they do

not replace the reading. So, the reading of the literary text is still compulsory,

even though sometimes students hope that viewing the film will be enough in

order to get by during the assessment sessions scheduled by the instructor.

• A film gives students the chance to draw comparisons between the text and the

film (understood as a visual text); this is why the analysis of the two texts in a

comparative way becomes even more challenging and develops students’ critical

thinking.

This is how we have planned the reading and film classes and how we have measured the

outcome:

• The story/novel will be read and discussed.

• Students will be tested to gauge their comprehension of the literary text.

• The film will be viewed and discussed in blocks (not from the beginning to the

end because students tend to forget details); also using special software to focus

on details (close ups, lighting, sound, editing, mis-en-scene, camera focus etc).

• Students will be retested.

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2. Historical, Social and Cultural Background: ‘the Roaring Twenties’

Going back to our discussion regarding the way the film The Great Gatsby

contributed to enhancing the students’ understanding of the novel by Scott Fitzgerald, we

would like to mention that the American Literature survey course has as one of its main

objectives teaching students how various historical, social and cultural events have influenced

the further development of the U. S. American literature up to the present time. Such a

moment, which provides the discussed novel with a historical background, is that of “the

roaring twenties”.

The traditional lecturing combined with the presentation on slides of various pictures

from that particular period showing, for example, images of flappers on the cover of fashion

magazines, having their hair bobbed and wearing their typical “flapper” dresses in order to

highlight the idea of women’s liberation and emancipation, the images of cars drawing up to

the speakeasies where flappers, accompanied by men elegantly dressed, enjoy themselves

drinking prohibited alcoholic drinks, dancing or listening to jazz music, have not been quite

as effective in helping the students reconstruct such a tumultuous epoch (with its

exaggerations, paradoxes and decadence) as the passages from the novel and the images from

the movie presenting the parties that Jay Gatsby gives at his mansion in West Egg. In other

words, dancing, wild drinking, fascination with automobiles (the characters drive into New

York and if they are in New York they drive to Long Island. They seem to be in a continuous,

frenetic movement, while everybody is trying really hard to have a good time) that

characterize this epoch are very well described and portrayed both by the novel and the

movie, the written and the visual text complementing each other very well. But let us have a

look at the way these parties are described in the novel:

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the

whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I

watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the

hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats slit the water of the Sound,

drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends, his Rolls-Royce

became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the

morning and long past midnight, while his station-wagon scampered like a

brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. [...] The bar is in full swing, and floating

rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with

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chatter of laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the

spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's

names. [...] There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men

pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples

holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners and a

great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the

orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the

hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious

contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing

‘stunts’ all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose

toward the summer sky’’ (Fitzgerald, 39, 47)

The movie appears to be quite faithful to the novel, especially when it comes to these

descriptions, which, in the movie, are replaced by long shots of the camera, insisting on

details, some of them inexistent in the novel: e.g. the image of the two dancing women whose

underwear suddenly becomes very visible. It is as if the film, through the camera’s

focalization and the close ups, goes even deeper into scrutinizing this epoch, enabling us to

see such details that the novel does not grasp. Consequently, this decade appears to be

depicted as a long and extravagant party - one of Jay Gatsby’s decadent parties and this is the

image that the students appear to remain with, which is quite powerful.

3. Setting and its Symbolism

Toolan contends that

In many modern novels, however, where the humane cohesion between

members of society of a similar rank is displaced by a widespread atmosphere

of alienation, anomie, and interpersonal relations made more complex by

industrial and technological developments that have depopulated the country

while turning cities into monstrous battlefields, the situation is different.

Setting here may be much more than backcloth; it may be instrumental-like

another character-in leading a character to act in a certain way. […] In simple

terms the relation between setting on the one hand, and character and events

on the other, may be causal or analogical: features of the setting may be (in

part at least) either cause or effect of how characters are and behave; or, more

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by way of reinforcement and symbolic congruence, a setting be like a

character or characters in some respects. (103-104)

Indeed, the novel seems to be illustrative of these types of relations between the

setting and the characters. In terms of the setting (the modern City of New York and its

environments), while reading the novel, students are faced with two different worlds existing

at the same time: one of careless wealth (represented by East Egg, West Egg, Gatsby’s and

the Buchanans’ house) and the other, of ashen poverty (represented by the Valley of Ashes,

Wilson’s garage). These two worlds are set in contrast in the novel, watched over by the

absent God (the signifier without a signified) - the sightless eyes of Dr. Eckleburg:

About half a way between West Egg and New York the motor road

hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to

shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes- a

fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque

gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising

smoke… Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls an invisible track, gives out a

ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up

with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their

operations from our sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak

dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive after a moment the eyes of

Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and

gigantic-their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead,

from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.

Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in

the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or

forgot them and moved away.’’ (Fitzgerald, 23)

Most of the action is set in New York City and its environments (Long Island, West

Egg, East Egg). In the above descriptions, as well as in other passages, there is a big amount

of detail thrown up in instants, in moments of action, as well as in images, such as the

shifting fashions in clothes and music, the decoration of the apartments and hotel rooms in

New York City, the movements of the traffic, of the cars and trains, the ash heaps. The

representation of these two alternative worlds would be much poorer without the film, in

which, through the process of editing, we are presented with sequences of scenes containing

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images from these two worlds, quickly following one after the other (e.g. Nick Carraway and

Jordan Baker inside a luxurious car stopping at Wilson’s garage to refuel their car, having on

the background the ash heaps and the banner with Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes; Wilson returning

into his gray colored, poor house, is looking for his wife Myrtle, a scene which is

immediately followed by the one in which Myrtle is with Tom in their luxurious apartment in

New York City, happily unwrapping his gift for her). Consequently, within approximately

one minute, students are exposed to quite an overwhelming number of visual signifiers, each

carrying its complex meanings, without once hearing a narrative voice.

At a symbolical level, the students had no difficulty identifying in the novel two other

conflicting worlds: the world of time arrested, of love and dream, “the world of modern

history invested with a timeless myth, where the clock is tilted back like the clock on

Gatsby’s mantelpiece, as he kisses Daisy.” (Bradbury, 80) This world appears both in the

environments of East and West Egg, where Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby have their

romantic encounters, as well as in the flashbacks taking us back in time, when Daisy and Jay

met for the first time, before his leaving for the war:

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the

street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were

no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and

turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious

excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights

in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and

bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks

of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above

the trees. He could climb to it, if he climbed alone and once there, he could

suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart

beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that

when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her

perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So,

he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been

struck upon a star. Then, he kissed her. At his lips’ touch, she blossomed for

him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (Fitzgerald, 123)

The movie reconstructs this realm at its best through the same technique of flashbacks

or by taking the viewers inside the hotels, the Buchanans’ and Gatsby’s houses, where the

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predominant colors (of the sofas, armchairs, the floating curtains, the marble, the swimming

pool, the hotel rooms, Daisy’s and Jordan Baker’s dresses and hats, as well as Tom

Buchanan’s and Jay Gatsby’s shirts and suits) are white and blue – the colors of the clouds

and the sky. White and blue become signifiers for this dream world, just like the flying shirts

in Gatsby’s bedroom. This world is invested with a certain glow and magic because of Jay

Gatsby’s love for Daisy. His love transfigures everything in his life, including his parties, his

whole world. Everything he does is out of love for her, including the corrupted ways in which

he got rich.

Against this world, there is “the modern world of dislocated, rootless and grotesque

images, the world of history disinvested of meaning, reduced to fragments without manifest

order, the waste land.” (Bradbury, 82) The symbols of this world, which appear both in the

novel and in the film, are the city, with its crowded streets and noisy traffic (the sound effects

are put to good use in the city scenes), the ash heaps, Wilson’s garage, Myrtle’s party in the

apartment from New York City. Both the city and its environments, as well as most of the

characters (except Nick and Gatsby), appear to belong to this world dominated by

carelessness and dishonesty. Gatsby himself appears to be a victim of carelessness: “They

were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then

retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them

together, and let other people clean up the mess they made” (Fitzgerald, 188) The movie

highlights the idea of a careless world, especially in one of the scenes from Gatsby’s parties,

inexistent in the novel, where several women dressed as flappers, sitting at a table and

gossiping about Gatsby’s identity, get heavily drunk and one of them instantly falls asleep,

her head in her plate.

4. Main Characters

As far as the characters are concerned, the students seemed to have a better

understanding of Daisy’s material and superficial character when they watched the scene

taking place in Gatsby’s house, in which she is actually feeling the big golden objects placed

on one of the tables, a scene inexistent in the novel. The image shows only her hand touching

those objects, a gesture which is symbolical of the pleasure she takes in this act, as well as of

her materialism and superficial relation to the people in her life.

More than that, Jay Gatsby and Daisy, embodied by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow,

become even more consistent in the movie, and acquire new shades and meanings. Robert

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Redford brings with him something from his previous roles, that combination of a Hollywood

hero and criminal, whereas Mia Farrow overwhelms us with her air of apparent innocence

and frailty. The following dramatic scene from the novel, presented through Nick’s eyes in

the following understated passage, contributed to a great extent to the students’ better

understanding of the women’s status in the predominantly patriarchal society of the 1920s:

“Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite to each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold

fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at

her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while,

she looked up at him and nodded an agreement.” (Fitzgerald, 152) As compared to the above

passage from the novel, the movie manages to transmit even a higher degree of drama and

understatement in a scene seen again through Nick’s eyes, while he is peeping through the

window into the Buchanans’ kitchen, a scene in which, this time, there are no uttered words,

only looks, movements, gestures.

As far as Gatsby is concerned, he remains a mysterious character in the novel. One

can never get at the truth of his real identity. The characters in the novel or in the film spread

rumors about what he does for a living and how he made his immense fortune. The first

image we get of Gatsby, both in the novel and the film, is when he is standing out at the edge

of his dock, looking out to the green light which stands for the thing that is unattainable to

him – Daisy or his dream, whatever that may be. In this respect, both the novel and the movie

become very good tools to teach the students about the contemporary sense of identity, that it

is not something inborn, but continuously under construction. This served as a good basis for

the students to write drafts of, and afterwards to shoot their ‘talk show’ videos in which they

interviewed Jay Gatsby, while others allowed Scott Fitzgerald to speak his mind about “the

roaring twenties”. These are examples of the students’ projects, which, in general, were

successful, since they encouraged the students to think creatively and analytically about the

periods of the U.S. history and literature and, most importantly, they helped all students to

learn, because they were able to use their own voices in the endeavor.

5. Narration vs. Focalization

The movie turned out to be a very effective way to teach the concept of focalization in

the novel. The camera–narrating agent relationship has been highlighted by literary theorists

too: “A camera in film production is a narrating agent, but in order to tell the story it has to be

located in space. Therefore, its spatial position determines its angle of vision. We can say that

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the concept of focalization describes the special relation in which the narrating agency is

placed to the story.” (Bottez, 80) In literary theory, Genette is the one who introduced the

term of ‘focalization’ (33-85), in order to designate this inescapable adoption of a (limited)

perspective in the narrative, a viewpoint from which things are seen, felt, understood,

assessed, not only (though often most centrally) in terms of visual perception. This is why the

term ‘focalization’ is considered to have a broader sense (implying ‘cognitive, emotional and

ideological perspectives’) than that of ‘point of view’ which seems to have mainly optical-

photographic connotations. (Toolan, 68)

In the novel, Nick Carraway is the narrative agent, playing the role of the internal

focaliser. “When the represented events are perceived from the same level (the diegetic one),

that is from the perceiving position of a character, we speak of internal focalization or a

character-focaliser.” (Bottez, 82) The novel is written in the voice of Nick Carraway, a

Midwesterner who finds himself among the New York upper class. Interestingly enough,

Nick seems to have a lot in common with Scott Fitzgerald: they both come from a

Midwestern city and were educated on the East coast; they both have a critical eye on the

world they live in, thus distancing themselves from it and developing an outsider’s

perspective: “There is no scene at which Nick is not present and of course, the miracle of The

Great Gatsby – the device, the technique that makes it work – is Nick. Everything is filtered

through Nick.’’ (Bruccoli, The Bigread Radioshow)

In the movie, the main focaliser is the camera, even though, there are several scenes in

which we can also hear Nick’s narrative voice, like in the novel. As a result, the characters

appear to move more freely in the movie, independently from Nick Carraway’s presence as a

witness. Even though Nick appears in the majority of the scenes, there are moments when he

withdraws (e.g. in the scenes in which he facilitates the romantic encounters between Daisy

and Jay Gatsby), the camera undertaking his role as a focaliser. There are also some scenes in

which the camera and Nick overlap each other as focalisers: for instance in the scene, after

the accident, where Nick is peeping through the window, into the Buchanans’ kitchen,

checking what is happening between Tom and Daisy.

As far as the narrative is concerned, the novel combines the linear narrative with the

one that unfolds through a series of flashbacks. The same kind of technique is to be found in

the movie narrative, employing narrative ‘ellipsis’ for the sections of the narrative which

need rapid summarizing rather than full dramatization. Such a scene is that of the car accident;

neither the novel, nor the film ever shows how it really happened. Both in the novel and in

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the movie we come across several versions/points of view (belonging to the eye witnesses)

regarding the car accident which caused Myrtle’s death.

6. The Plot

Even though the plot and its interpretation by readers is generally considered in literary

criticism as culturally biased, the students did not find it difficult to understand and even

identify themselves with a man’s (Jay Gatsby’s) attempt to fulfill his (American) dream.

Nevertheless, the novel contains a poetic passage which clearly connects Gatsby’s dream to

the American dream, a scene which the movie lacks:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away

until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for

Dutch sailor's eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees,

the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers

to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment

man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent compelled into

an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for

the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for

wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of

Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's

dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have

seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it

was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the

city where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby

believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before

us. It eluded us then, but that is no matter – tomorrow we will run faster,

stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats

against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’’ ( Fitzgerald, 90)

The effect this passage had on the students is amazing since it speaks of the human

condition. They immediately noticed how it turns the mirror right on the reader and implies

us as well. While watching the movie, the students seemed to identify with the main character,

especially because they were completely mesmerized by his looks, his magic, the luxury he

lives in, his parties etc. The underlying theme of a man’s attempt to fulfill his dream fades out,

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to a certain extent, in the movie. In the end, Jay Gatsby appears to be more the victim of a

misunderstanding (on Wilson’s side) and of a conspiracy (on Daisy’s and Tom Buchanan’s

side), rather than a man who failed.

The analysis and comparison proposed above is meant to provide teachers with

inspiration and guidance for using films not only in the English or American literature class,

but also in a wide range of classroom settings. The activities mentioned may be used as

examples for developing other activities or research projects. Such an approach confirms

once again the close connection between literature and visual arts, an idea expressed by

Edgar Allan Poe, who defined the short story writing as narrative writing ,whose elements

combine to produce a single effect, which he calls “the unity of effect” (The Philosophy of

Composition). In the Hollywood style of filmmaking, all elements combine in order to

produce a total effect. The same idea was championed in the late 1970s by Alexandre Astruc

in his essay The Birth of a New Avant-Garde, where he argued that the distinction between

author and director had disappeared in the new age, that of the camera-stylo: “The film-

maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen” (158).

References

Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo.” Film and

Literature: An Introduction and Reader, edited by Timothy Corrigan, Upper Saddle

River. NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Bottez, Monica. Analysing Narrative Fiction: Reading Strategies. Bucuresti: Editura

Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2007.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bruccoli, Mathew, The Big Read Radio Show. http://www.neabigread.org/books/

greatgatsby/audiotranscript.php

Cisco. Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says, 2008.

http://www.cisco. com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-

Media.pdf. Retrieved on 2012-12-13.

Featheringill, Robert. “It’s not noble to feel guilty or using films in your classroom

productively with impunity.” California Association of Teachers of English, Spring

2000, 20-23.

Fitzgerald, Scott. The Great Gatsby. Collier Books. New York: Macmillan Publishing

Company, 1986.

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Genette, Gérard. Narrative Dicourse: An Essay in Method. trans. J.E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1980, 33-85.

Herbeck, Maria D. “Film, Foucault and the Fringe: Outcasts of Contemporary Film.”

Practical Approaches to Teaching Film. ed. Rachel S. Ritterbusch. Newcastle upon

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 105-123.

Hoche, Dominique. “Double Dipping: Teaching English Composition and Introduction to

Film in the Same Course.” Practical Approaches to Teaching Film. ed. Rachel S.

Ritterbusch. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 2-18.

Hurlburt, Sarah. “Teaching Scene Analysis through Remakes”. Practical Approaches to

Teaching Film. ed. Rachel S. Ritterbusch. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2009, 19-50.

Hurrell, George. “Intertextuality, media convergence, and multiliteracies: Using The Matrix

to bridge popular and classroom cultures”. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy,

44(5), 2001: 481-483.

Klein, Joanne. “Teaching Film to Trouble Verisimilitude”. Practical Approaches to Teaching

Film. ed. Rachel S. Ritterbusch. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2009, 86-104.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16, no.3, 1975:6-18

National Endowment for the Arts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby audio guide:

http://www.neabigread.org/books/greatgatsby/radioshow.php.

Poe, Edgar A. “The Philosophy of Composition”. Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no.4,

April 1846. http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm.

Ruland Richard, Bradbury Malcolm. From Puritanism to Postmodernism, Penguin Books.

USA, 1991.

Toolan, Michael J. Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Turner, Graeme. Film as Social Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.

Walker, Marshall. The Literature of the United States of America. London: Macmillan, 1988.

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Submission information

Articles should be no more than 16 pages long, written in English, 12 pt Times New

Roman, 1.5 spacing. An abstract of the paper (up to 250 words) should accompany the article

together with a list of up to 5 key words. Papers should be prepared according to the most

recent edition of the MLA style. The article title, author’s name and affiliation, and body of

the article (including all section headings and example sentences) should be written in 12 pt

Times New Roman. Footnotes (not endnotes) should be written in the 10 pt size of the same

font, single-spaced, be fully justified, and be numbered serially throughout the article. All

text should be both right and left aligned (justified). This includes references and footnotes. If

example sentences are used, leave a blank line below the example. The example number

should be contained in parentheses. The written text of the example should appear 0.5" (1.3

cm) from the left margin. A gloss and translation should be given for each sentence in a

language other than English. The actual example should be in italics, the English translation

between quotes, and the word by word glosses should be aligned.

Examples of references:

Brooker, Peter. New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, The New Modern. New York

and London: Longman, 1996.

Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth. “Gritos desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and

Postmodernism.” MELUS, Vol. 25.2 (2000).

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Eds. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl.

Feminisms. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991: 334-349.

Rowley, A. James, Lorenzo, Nicholas (September 7, 2005). “Insomnia”. eMedicine from

WebMD. http://www.emedicine.com/neuro/TOPIC418.HTM#target10. Retrieved on

2008-08-04

Table of Contents

Thomas Skrtic

The Civic Professional in Deweyan Democracy................................................................... 1

Stipe Grgas

American Studies and the Canonization of Thomas Pynchon ......................................... 17

Jelena Šesnić

Situating H.D. Thoreau's Walden within Post-Exceptionalist American Studies

Exceptionalism reconsidered ............................................................................................... 27

Zalkida Hadžibegović

Teaching Staff Benefits of the International Exchange Programs: a State Alumna

Experience ............................................................................................................................. 44

Aida Koçi

My American Experience: Theoretical and Practical Issues of Teaching/Learning .......54

Brunilda Kondi

Importing American Pop Culture: The Case of Tirana, Albania .....................................66

Daniela Stoica

Movies as a Practical Approach to Teaching Literature. The Great Gatsby: the Novel

and the Movie ........................................................................................................................ 76