Leerssen the Rhetoric of National Charakter

The Rhetoric of National Character:A Programmatic Survey

Joep LeerssenModern European Literature, Amsterdam

Abstract This article studies the notion of ‘‘national character’’ as it is formulatedin literature and as it influences literary praxis. Starting from the insights of imagestudies or ‘‘imagology’’ (a comparatist specialism developed over the last five decades,mainly in France and Germany), national thought, as one of the most pervasive andenduring cultural ideologies, should be critically and systematically studied in its lit-erary manifestation. In order to propose an agenda for such a study, I survey theexisting constructivist and structuralist literary practice, drawing two general con-clusions: () It is possible to make an analytical distinction, based on cogent textualobservation, between the discursive registers of factual reporting and stereotyping.That distinction revolves not only around the commonplace nature and intertextualdissemination of certain characterizations but also around the individual text’s strate-gies of characterization: the quasi-psychological (‘‘character’’-based) motivation thata given text may adduce for cultural patterns, and the way a text constructs salientfeatures concerning a given nation as ‘‘typical’’ or ‘‘characteristic.’’ () ‘‘Deep struc-tures’’ in national stereotyping, involving the construction of binaries around oppo-sitional pairs such as North/South, strong/weak, and central/peripheral, should beaddressed diachronically and historically. The end result of such (historically vari-able but unfalsifiable) stereotypical oppositions is that most imputed national char-acteristics will exhibit a binary nature, capable of attributing strongly contradictorycharacteristics to any given national group (‘‘is a nation of contrasts’’). I propose thatnational stereotyping be studied at a more fundamental level as a pattern of Janus-faced ‘‘imagemes,’’ stereotypical schemata characterized by their inherent tempera-mental ambivalence and capable of being triggered into different actual manifesta-tions.

Poetics Today : (Summer ). Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.

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On the basis of these insights, it must be possible tomove from textual analysis andintertextual inventory to a pragmatic/rhetorical study of national characterizationand national stereotyping, taking into account a text’s audience function.This ambi-tion (i.e., to address the dynamics of national stereotyping as a historical, audience-oriented praxis rather than as a textual feature) raises a challenge of its own, largelyrevolving around the hermeneutic and/or historical distance between a text’s prove-nance and its audience; but some possible ways to address that challenge are alsoindicated.

Literature, like real life, is suffused with problems of national identity andnational confrontation. Suchmatters make themselves felt, either in explic-itly thematized or in subtly (or insidiously) implicit form, from Shakespeareto Thomas Mann and from Dostoyevsky to Yehuda Amichai, from Lutherto Mussolini and from Tomáš Masaryk to Nelson Mandela. The questionof cultural, national, and ethnic identity is particularly noticeable in thefield of literature, which of all art forms is most explicit in reflecting andshaping the awareness of entire societies and which often counts as the veryformulation of that society’s cultural identity. Actors in literary texts areoften characterized, both in their appearance and in their narrative role,according to conventions and indeed stereotypes regarding their nationalbackground; the local and international spread and reception of literarytexts takes place in a process frequentlymarked by the force play of nationallikes or dislikes, while in the polysystem of world literature as well as in theacademic discipline of literary studies, the category of nationality occupiesa paramount, but by nomeans unproblematic, taxonomical status. Even so,literary studies, to the extent that they have often concentrated primarilyon the aesthetic function and formal or poetic aspects of literary texts, havetended to turn their attention to other matters than the role of literature innational or ethnic stereotyping, or the role of such stereotyping in literature.However, political and ideological developments over the last two de-

cades (involving the reemergence of nationalism in Eastern Europe, therise of Euro-skepticism inWestern Europe, and the intensification of ‘‘iden-tity politics’’ in our increasingly multicultural societies) have given freshurgency and relevance to the study of national and cultural identity con-structs and stereotypes. As a result, the study of literature is now increas-ingly preoccupied with cultural stereotyping and identity constructs, espe-cially in the fields of postcolonial and feminist criticism; a similar trend isnoticeable in the adjacent field of cultural history. It is a good time to takestock and to draw attention to the existence of a specialization of long stand-ing within comparative literature, ‘‘imagology’’ or image studies, whichdeals with the discursive and literary articulation of cultural difference and

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Leerssen • The Rhetoric of National Character 269

of national identity; and to assess the insights and possible future develop-ments of this specialism. A promising perspective seems to be indicated bythe ‘‘pragmatic turn’’ that has beenmaking its presence felt of late in literarystudies and that increasingly sees the dynamics of literary representation interms of its audience function.1

From Typological Inventories to Structural Analysis

For the best part of this century, literary scholars have addressed themessuch as ‘‘Spaniards as represented in English literature’’ or ‘‘French views ofGermany.’’ 2 The value of such earlier thematically oriented surveys varies.They are often based on a diligent and exhaustive search through the pri-mary literary record and as such still have a bibliographical value; but inmany cases they do not problematize the subjectivity of their literary sourcematerial or reflect on their a priori assumption that their investigation ad-dresses what is believed to be a preexisting, autonomous and objective thingcalled ‘‘nationality,’’ which is in the second instance represented, manipu-lated, or distorted in literary mimesis.From the midcentury onward, however, comparatists in the wake of

Marius-François Guyard have become increasingly aware that the literarysources with which they dealt were not merely a record of the ‘‘representa-tion’’ of a given nationality but, rather, constituted a cultural praxis articu-lating and even constructing that nationality.3 In other words, imagology

. In what follows, I limit myself largely to a very specific set of cases in collective stereo-typing: national stereotypes within Western Europe. To be sure, the patterns and featuresaddressed here can also be registered in other forms of collective stereotyping: ethnic-racialimagery both within Europe and regarding other parts of the world (indeed, the distinc-tion between ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘race’’ in stereotyped thought is never clearly defined), as well asother collectivities (e.g., sexual stereotyping).Witness the ‘‘gendered’’ nature ofmany nationalstereotypes, or the degree to which patterns of national-ethnic denigration resemble eachother whether they are applied in an intra-European or colonial context; in both regards, theimage of Ireland provides a case in point (see Cairns and Richards ). However, whilethere are clear parallels, there are also differences. Not wishing to introduce additional vari-ables and different contexts into the limited scope of this introductory survey, I have restrictedmy examples to the mutual perceptions of Western European nations, leaving the wider ap-plicability of the findings open for now.. On the early history of such studies, see generally Fischer . A searchable bibliographi-cal database of such studies is in the process of being posted on the Internet, at www.hum.uva.nl/images.. To be precise: when I refer to nation and its derivations, I exclude the usage where the termrefers to a state or polity (as with expressions such as ‘‘United Nations,’’ ‘‘the national debt,’’or ‘‘the national football team’’); as to the analytical need for that distinction, see Roobol, especially . Nationality is used, therefore, not in the sense of ‘‘citizenship’’ but ratherin the sense given by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘‘national quality or character’’; ‘‘in litera-ture, art, etc., the quality of being distinctively national’’; ‘‘a national trait, characteristic, or

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moved into a constructivist paradigm. It was seen that stereotyped markersof national identity were invoked as shorthand ciphers for collective literarycharacterization in the narrative assignation of actorial role patterns; that inthe cross-national dissemination of literary texts and themes, the receptionof ‘‘foreign’’ influences was filtered through a priori assumptions of nationalcharacter; and that in the various instances of texts describing a givennation’s ‘‘character,’’ their relations were predominantly of an intertextualnature. Comparatists came to refer to national images not as mimetic rep-resentations of empirical reality but as objets discursifs (e.g., Lipiansky ,in phraseology borrowed loosely from Foucault) or as ‘‘objects of World-’’(e.g., Dyserinck , following the ontology of Karl Popper).This shift in image studies—away from a thematological inventorizing

of text instances and toward an investigation of the complex links betweenliterary discourse, on the one hand, and national identity contructs, onthe other—was not often sufficiently appreciated at the time. For RenéWellek (), imagology was a form of literary sociology that only dis-tracted from the true goal of literary studies, the formulation of a theory ofliterariness; for others who, in the wake of Hans-Robert Jauss, thought thatthe entire national paradigm in literary studies was outmoded and obso-lete (Jauss , ; Fokkema ), imagology was the futile flogging ofdead horses. Both critiques are shortsighted: the discursive fabric of nation-ality constructs was not as extraneous to literary praxis or literary art asthe cosmopolitan idealist Wellek would like to believe, and the fact thatscholars have now transcended an old nationally based ‘‘paradigm’’ in theirtheory does not retroactively annul the presence of national thought, overmany centuries, as an active, shaping force in literary and cultural history atlarge. However, although such critiques were refuted (Dyserinck andPrawer : –, against Wellek; and Gsteiger , against Jauss), andalthough the interest in comparatist imagology was kept alive—largely bycomparatists around the Belgian scholar Hugo Dyserinck and his depart-ment at Aachen University—image studies was at best a marginal pursuitin the worldwide field of literary studies during the s and s. Its re-vival from onward was triggered by the realization that the ideologyof nationalism, and the underlying psychologisms of ethnic prejudice andnational thought, were as present, and as potentially virulent, as they hadalways been; additionally, there was an upsurge of interest in image for-

peculiarity.’’ In this sense, the term is an extrapolation and, as such, close to the notion of‘‘culture’’ as used in the social sciences: ‘‘Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract and purelyanalytical notion. In itself ‘it’ does not ‘cause’ behavior, but denotes an abstraction from it,and is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining howpeople understand and act upon the world’’ (Baumann ).

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mations and identity constructs in the adjacent scholarly field of culturalhistory (Leerssen b).Meanwhile, however, imagologists had made progress and had moved

the study of national stereotypes in literary discourse from the inventoryof their constituent elements into the analysis of their structural makeup.National stereotypes were no longer studied as Stoffgeschichte but were con-sidered in their structural interconnections and occurrence.One key insightthat helped to move the study of images out of the inventory of particularcases and into a structural analysis was the realization, formulated aroundthe mid-s, that national characterizations take place in a polarity be-tween self and Other and that the dynamics between ‘‘auto-image’’ and‘‘hetero-image’’ tends to show invariant dynamics in various different na-tional or cross-cultural confrontations.From that point onward, the study of national stereotypes couldmove be-

yond merely inventorying the ‘‘vocabulary’’ of national prejudice in differ-ent texts and turn to its ‘‘grammar.’’ This shift was also made possible by anenhanced appreciation of the historical development of national thought.Until well into the s, national thought was considered either in ahis-torical terms (as the manifestations of a categorical essence in the humancollective) or else in a very crude historical periodization (as something thatappeared, more or less out of nowhere, with Romanticism). Studies of na-tionalism in political and intellectual history, pioneered by Hans Kohn andIsaiah Berlin and further bolstered by scholars like Elie Kedourie, ErnestGellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Otto Dann, pointed the way toward a morerefined long-term periodization, while conferences during the s ands provided occasions for scholars working in different periods to col-late their findings.4 Thus, a more properly historical analysis of ethnic andnational stereotypes is now possible in the light of an emerging long-termhistorical understanding of their different manifestations at various periodsin European literature.

Structural Patterns 1: A History of National Characterization

Collating various historical typologies of national confrontations and imagedevelopments makes it possible to outline a generalized longue durée peri-odization of the development of national characterization in European lit-erary history. That process may be summarized as follows:

. Dann ; Gellner ; Hobsbawm ; Kedourie ; Kohn , . Among theconference proceedings that have proved of seminal importance are Blaicher ; Dyser-inck and Syndram , ; and, more recently, Barfoot ; Beller ; andMontandon, as well as Berding and Giesen .

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A. Ethnocentrism dates back as far as our records reach and appears tobe present in all human societies; likewise, there is a long-standing readi-ness to register and reflect on the fact that humanity is divided into ethni-cally or tribally distinct societieswith different cultural patterns and values.5

However, a systematically diversified and particularized assignation ofcharacters to specific ethnic groups (as opposed to incidental instances offinger-pointing and name-calling) appears in European written cultureonly during the earlymodern period. In the course of the late sixteenth cen-tury and the seventeenth century, a systematization took shape in Europeanattitudes toward nationality, whereby character traits and psychological dis-positions were distributed in a fixed division among various ‘‘nations.’’ Thisprocess was most clearly visible in neo-Aristotelian poetical writings in thewake of Scaliger andhad stratified into a regular taxonomyof national char-acterization by the midcentury, as can be seen from Jules de La Mesnar-dière’s Poétique of . LaMesnardière’s extensive list of national characterattributes (prescribing how the playwright should characterize Germans,Spaniards, Italians, etc.) is a locus classicus that has by now been frequentlycommented upon.6

What made this poetic distribution of national characterization impor-tant was that it took place alongside parallel developments that gave newand added meaning to the concepts of ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘character.’’ ‘‘Charac-ter,’’ until then largely understood in the Theophrastic sense as the appear-ance or gestalt of an individual or social type, came to be seen more andmore in the sense of essential nature and combines the two senses into themeaning that is still current nowadays: a fundamental predisposition that moti-vates behavior. ‘‘Character’’ became that inherent personality blueprint thatoffers a psychological underpinning and causation (and hence an interpre-tative frame of reference) for behavior and acts (you act like this because youare like that).When applied to nations and other collective human groups,this notion of character adds to theAristotelian notion of the proprium (a coreproperty, common to every member of a species and differentiating thatspecies from its nonmembers) the overtones of psychological motivation.This psychological meaning of the term character as ‘‘motivating essence’’is to some extent a seventeenth-century development and arises alongside

. At least as far as the Old Testament and ancient Greece (regarding which, see Hall ;Hartog ); for amajestic study of the enduring influence of the ethnic tables inGenesis X–XI, see Borst ; or, to look in a different direction, we may find traces of ethnocentrismin the vocabulary of tribal in-group formations, as Emile Benveniste () has suggested forthe Indo-European root *arya.. By Stanzel , ; Zach . For a more extensive analysis of seventeenth-centurydevelopments, see Leerssen b.

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neo-Aristotelian poetics, with their insistence that the acts and occurrencesof the muthos should be properly motivated by the personality and disposi-tion of the actors.7

B. Likewise, in the same period, the term nation began to acquire a morespecific and politically meaningful charge (see generally Dann ). Am-biguously hovering between a sociological meaning (‘‘commoners’’) and anethnic or racial one (‘‘an ethnically distinct society sharing common cul-ture and descent’’), ‘‘nation’’ becamemore andmore the category of humanaggregation that linked culture and polity. For enlightenment philosophy,nations (defined and characterized as such by their respective ‘‘national char-acters’’) became an increasingly important taxonomical category—witnessGiambattistaVico’sPrincipi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla natura delle nazioni(), Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (), Hume’s essay ‘‘Of NationalCharacters’’ (), or Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations ().With Johann Gottfried Herder’s cultural philosophy, culture became thedefining principle of ‘‘nations’’ as the principal, most organic subdivisionof humankind, and with Rousseau, the ‘‘nation’’ and its volonté générale be-came the sole legitimate and sovereign mandate giver for state power.Theconsensus of the Enlightenment attitude toward national character is per-haps best summedupby the entry, inDiderot andD’Alembert’sEncyclopédie,under ‘‘caractère des nations,’’ where a contrastive list of national particu-larities is drawn up on the basis of clichéd commonplaces in order to definethe European moral landscape:

National characters are a certain habitual predisposition of the soul, which ismore prevalent in one nation than in others (even though that predispositionneed not be encountered with all the members of such a nation).Thus the char-acter of the French is their airiness, gaiety, sociability, their love of their kingsand of the monarchy as such, etc. Each nation has its particular character; it isa sort of proverb to say: airy as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, serious as aSpaniard, wicked as an Englishman, proud as a Scot, drunk as a German, lazyas an Irishman, deceitful as a Greek.8

. See also Genette , who likewise draws on La Mesnardière (among others) to illus-trate the importance of psychological (characterological) motivation for the purposes of neo-Aristotelian vraisemblance. The development of the notion of character during this period isadmirably charted by Louis Van Delft ().. Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘‘caractère,’’ subentry ‘‘caractère des nations.’’ In the original: ‘‘Caractèredes nations consiste dans une certaine disposition habituelle de l’âme, qui est plus communechez une nation que chez une autre, quoique cette disposition ne se rencontre pas dans tous lesmembres qui composent la nation. Ainsi le caractère des François est la légèreté, la gaieté, lasociabilité, l’amour de leurs rois & de lamonarchiemême, &c. Chaque nation a son caractèreparticulier; c’est une espèce de proverbe que de dire, léger comme un françois, jaloux commeun italien, grave comme un espagnol, méchant comme un anglois, fier comme un écossois,

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C.The nineteenth century is the heyday of national thought.Under theimpact of philosophical idealism, the concept of ‘‘character’’ once againshifted and was promoted from the status of ‘‘temperamental and motiva-tional predisposition’’ to the ontological status of a Platonic Idea, an in-forming Geist. From Fichte and Hegel onward, it was felt that each stateshould incorporate the nationality or Volksgeist of its inhabitants and thattherefore the state should be based on the organic unity, solidarity,and homogeneity of its constituent nation.9 Meanwhile, the comparativemethod in philology and ethnology had, on the basis of Franz Bopp’sand Jacob Grimm’s successes in comparative linguistics, obtained a far-reaching impact on attitudes toward human diversity. Herder’s culturalphilosophy was taken to ‘‘scientific’’ extremes, and cultural difference wasstratified into a biological ‘‘family tree’’ model of descent and genotype,classing languages and literatures into the ethnic vocabulary of ‘‘Ger-manic,’’ ‘‘Slavic,’’ ‘‘Celtic,’’ ‘‘Semitic,’’ and so on.10 The conflated vocabu-lary of race and culture helped to lay the basis for a virulent ideology of thenation-state and of the ethnic-racial purity of the state’s citizenry.As part of the same trend, nationality became a touchstone for literary

praxis: literature became less and less the cosmopolitan pursuit of writtenculture in a transnationalRepublic of Letters, andmore andmore themani-festation of the nation’s character by means of verbal art. Literature wasseen by nineteenth-century philologists as the very speech of the Volksgeist,and literary artists felt that the highest artistic pinnacles were to be achievedonly by an organic commitment to one’s traditions and culture.11

D. In the present century, finally, national characterization, having be-come one of the commonplaces of Western thought andwriting, has gainedan added twist: its ironic usage. Further on in this article I shall have moreto say on the topic of the relation between irony and commonplace or (inparticular) national stereotype. Suffice it at this point to say that nationalcharacters, if they are used by modern authors such as E. M. Forster orThomas Mann, are often deployed in a backhanded way, as manifestationsof the mock security of their bemused characters. Authors tend to be ironi-cally equivocal as to whether the national characteristics they invoke are to

ivrogne comme un allemand, paresseux comme un irlandois, fourbe comme un grec.’’ Thedefinition follows the general definition of character as a disposition habituelle de l’âme.. This is why Karl Popper (), in his Open Society and Its Enemies, decries Hegel as thephilosopher of ‘‘the new tribalism.’’ See also Leerssen a.. Cf. MacDougall ; Stepan ; Davies ; and Augstein .. For philology as the study of the national character as expressed through its language andliterature, see the nineteenth-century quotations given in Dyserinck : –; Kedourie: –; Davies ;Werner . An example of a literary artist following the agendaof national commitment is the early W. B. Yeats (cf. Leerssen ).

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be taken seriously or as a jocular reference to trite commonplace (Leerssend). It should be pointed out, perhaps, that if such stereotypes are usedhalf-mockingly, they are by the same token also used half-seriously, and thatthey at least acknowledge and reinforce the currency of the prejudice theyclaim to transcend.

Structural Patterns 2: A Grammar of National Characterization

The attribution of characteristics to national or ethnic groups appears inmany cases to obey structural rather than case-specific patterns.That is al-ready obvious from the banal and famous example of stupidity jokes: thesame set of jokes involving extraordinary stupidity are told featuring Bel-gians (inHolland or France), East Frisians (inGermany), Newfoundlanders(in Canada), Irish people (in England), or Kerrymen (in the rest of Ireland).The attribution of stupidity is obviously not derived from a cogent case-specific observation concerning the group in question but determined bythe need to predicate an actorial role on an available group. The insightthat national characterization takes shape in the interplay between an auto-image and a hetero-image was a vital first step in the process of lookingat such stereotypes in terms of their grammatical patterning rather thanmerely in terms of their ‘‘vocabulary’’ (what they said about whom).Whether Germans are portrayed like this or like that, whether the char-

acter of Flemings or Spaniards is seen in one modality or another, is vari-able, and in its variability it seems to be determined not by empirical reality(how people purportedly or allegedly ‘‘really are’’) but rather by the way inwhich the discourse regarding them is constructed. In the eighteenth cen-tury, Englishmen are depicted as suicide-prone splenetics; the next centurysees them as unflappable, self-controlled phlegmatics with a ‘‘stiff upperlip.’’ Germany for Madame de Staël is a country of tender individualism,metaphysical and musical sensibility, and romantic idyll; one century later,the imagery is dominated by Krupp engineers, scientists, and bemonocledPrussian officers.This poses the intriguing question as to what governs such discursive

shifts and volatility. Indeed, structural or at least invariant factors can be ex-trapolated from the changeable mechanism of character attribution. I willbriefly present, by way of example, three of them: the invariant oppositionbetween South and North, between strong and weak, and between centraland peripheral.A.The opposition between North and South activates an invariant array

of characteristics regardless of the specific countries or nations concerned.Any North-South opposition will ascribe to the northern party a ‘‘cooler’’

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temperament and thus oppose it to its ‘‘warmer’’ southern counterpart.The oppositional pattern ‘‘cool North/warm South’’ further involves char-acteristics such as amore cerebral, individualist, more rugged, less pleasingbut more trustworthy and responsible character for the northern party, asopposed to a more sensual, collective, more polished, more pleasing butless trustworthy or responsible character for the southern party. Democ-racy, egalitarianism, a spirit of business enterprise, a lack of imaginationand a more introspective, stolid attitude are northern; aristocracy, hier-archy, fancy, and extrovert spontaneity are characteristic of the South.Thisopposition will be encountered wherever a European North-South com-parison is made: between Denmark and Germany, between Germany andItaly (thus in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger), between England and the Con-tinent (Charlotte Brontë’s Villette), between France and Spain. Moreover,the North-South opposition can work in intranational, regional terms aswell as between countries: the same array is activated in the opposition be-tween Prussia and Bavaria (already inMme de Staël’sDe l’Allemagne []),between northern Italy and Sicily (witness Giovanni Lampedusa’s Il gatto-pardo), between Yorkshire and Surrey (as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North andSouth, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, or Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End ), be-tween Paris and the Midi (Alexandre Dumas’s Le comte de Monte-Cristo).12As result, any given point on the European map can be contradicto-

rily constructed as ‘‘northern’’ or ‘‘southern’’; any given country, region,or nation can be juxtaposed either with a northern or a southern counter-part and can accordingly be invested with contradictory sets of character-istics. Flanders, when seen from a Dutch perspective like that of Anton vanDuinkerken (), is ‘‘southern’’ and hence full of ebullient, sensual quali-ties: its Catholicism is that of Breughel and Rubens, its cuisine and feastsare collective explosions of joie de vivre. The same region, when viewedfrom a French perspective, is ‘‘northern’’ and hence full of mystical, quietintrospection; its Catholicism is that of Jansenism, of the silent béguinages ofBruges and Ghent, of the meditative paintings of theVan Eyck brothers; itscuisine is that of beer rather than wine, its landscape a rain-sodden coastalplain (see Dyserinck ). Similar contradictory characterizations, whichare obviously governed by the contextualization as ‘‘northern’’ or ‘‘south-ern,’’ can be found for almost any European region or nation between Lap-land and the Maghreb.B. The second structural factor is that of weak versus strong. Images of

. This pattern has been operative for a long time in the European imagination and de-rives from a link between temperament (in the old humoral sense) and climatological circum-stances, which can be traced back as far as Hippocrates. An exemplary case study of suchclimatological temperament attribution is Zacharasiewicz .

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powerful nations will foreground the ruthlessness and cruelty associatedwith effective power, while weak nations can count either on the sympa-thy felt for the underdog or on that mode of benevolent exoticism thatbespeaks condescension. Spain as a world power in the seventeenth cen-tury provoked, throughout Europe, fear and disgust, and a strongly markeddiscourse began to focus on matters like the Inquisition, the ruthless con-trol of Crown and Church over the individual, and the genocidal policiesin the Americas. The specific allegations of cruelty featured in this leyendanegra could by the late seventeenth century be transferred wholesale to simi-lar allegations concerning France,13 while the Spanish decline from worldpower and its occupation by Napoleonic France made it possible for a moreromanticized image to emerge: the Spain of castanets, bullfights, balmyevenings, and colorful passions schematized inWashington Irving’s Sketchesfrom the Alhambra or Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen. Thus, an amelioration of agiven image is made possible by a decline in political power.The converseprocess can be charted with regard to Germany, which, in the rosy-tintedrepresentation of Mme de Staël, has all the charms of a politically weakcountry, while the Germany of the Wilhelminian period has all the repul-sive hallmarks of efficiency, power, and ruthlessness. In other words, it is asif during the nineteenth century Spain andGermany swapped actorial rolesas one nation declined and the other rose in international stature (Leerssen).C. Specific sets of attributes are activated if a nation or region is con-

structed as central or peripheral. Centrality carries with it the connotationof historical dynamism and development, whereas peripheries are stereo-typically ‘‘timeless,’’ ‘‘backward,’’ or ‘‘traditional.’’ It is a commonplace tosay of remote corners that they have been ‘‘bypassed by history’’ or that‘‘time has stood still here.’’ In our chronotopical view of the world, journey-ing away from the centers of societal activity means metaphorically jour-neying backward in time. This may apply to exotic extra-European traveldescriptions or to ethnographical commonplaces that certain remote tribalsocieties ‘‘still live in the Stone Age,’’ or it may apply to the view that theprovincial countryside moves more slowly and is ‘‘closer to nature,’’ as op-posed to metropolitan ‘‘life in the fast lane.’’ The entire genre of the rusticnovel, fromGeorge Sand toThomas Hardy toMarcel Pagnol and GrahamSwift’s Waterland, partakes of this commonplace as much as the topos in

. Lurid Dutch descriptions of cruelty could ascribe the same standard set of horrid actsto Spaniards (Spaensche Tyrannye) in the early seventeenth century, to the French in the lateseventeenth century and most of the eighteenth (Franse Hranny), and incidentally (in )to the English (Engelsche Heranny); the process of transference obviously follows closely thedevelopment of political hegemonistic threats as felt in Holland. Cf. Beening .

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late Victorian adventure romances that explorations into the undiscoveredcorners of the world may lead us to the remains of a still-persisting past:the dinosaurs in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, the traces of a masoniccivilization founded byAlexander theGreat inRudyardKipling’sManWhoWould Be King, King Solomon’s mines in H. Rider Haggard’s book of thattitle (Leerssen a).

Structural Patterns 3: The Ambivalence of the National Imagemeand Its Unfalsifiability

Having thus looked at national stereotypes as structural elements in a gram-mar of characterization, it becomes interesting to return from the actorialpatterns to the actual actors in the multinational soap opera called Europe.The various national characterizations attributed to the different nationsand countries of Europe turn out to be highly variable according to context,historical moment, or discursive configuration.Whether a given nation isconfigured as central or peripheral, northern or southern, threatening orharmless, will call radically different predicates into play. Accordingly, wesee over time how the images of various nations are likely to undergo re-markable oscillations and changes, some of which have already been men-tioned (Spain, Flanders, Germany).These changes do not occur by way of falsification. Old images are not

abrogated by new developments; they are merely relieved from their dutiespro tem.They remain subliminally present in the social discourse and canalways be reactivated should the occasion arise. Thus, the leyenda negraimage of Spain, after having been overtaken by Carmen-style sentimental-izations for more than a century, could be reactivated to evoke the intol-erant harshness of the Franco period. After a century of English imagerycentered around a phlegmatic dandy with a ‘‘stiff upper lip,’’ Churchillianwar propaganda in the period – could effortlessly reactivate a gruffJohn Bull of eighteenth-century vintage.14

There are reasons why this should be so. Over time, as current stereo-types are found inadequate, they are not so much canceled and forgotten asgiving rise to their very opposite. By the mid–eighteenth century, when thehate-image of Irish brutes and rascals became threadbare among Englishaudiences, it was replaced by its very contrary: stereotypes of soft-hearted,sentimental Irishmen. As a result, from ca. onward, two contrary typeshave become current: Irish rascals and brutes, on the one hand, and doe-eyed ballad-singing dreamers, on the other (Leerssen ). Both can be

. Cf. Ben-Porat for similar findings.

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activated according to the needs of the given situation (terrorist violence ora folk music concert). Once such stereotypes are formulated, the texts inquestion remain in currency long after the circumstances of their concep-tion have passed; they are there to be read and will keep the imagery alivefor as long as they find readers. The choleric John Bull squires in AnthonyTrollope’s Barsetshire novels or Eliot’s Silas Marner are as much part of theavailable discourse as the unflappable stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen such asPhileas Fogg (in Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) or JohnGalsworthy’s Forsyte family.The end result of such a historical process of old stereotypes giving way

to inverted new counterparts is one of strongly ambivalent imagery. Theavailable discourse concerning a given nation’s character tends to be highlycontradictory. The French are either Cartesian rationalists or passionate,sanguine emotionalists. The Swedes are suicidally melancholic or rationaland sexually liberated.The Dutch are either staunch individualists defend-ing personal liberty or moralistic pettifoggers maintaining strict social con-trol over each other’s conventionality.At this point, a deeper-seated pattern seems to emerge. Most national

images can, in all their contradictorymanifestations, be collapsed intowhatI term an imageme, a ‘‘blueprint’’ underlying the various concrete, specificactualizations that can be textually encountered. I would suggest that ima-gemes are typically characterized by their inherent ambivalent polarity. Animageme is the bandwidth of discursively established character attributesconcerning a given nationality and will take the form of the ultimate cliché,which is current for virtually all nations: nationX is a nation of contrasts.Thus,Ireland’s imageme might be that of nonrational ebullience (be it in sen-timental song or mindless aggression), Germany’s that of a penchant forsystematic abstractions (be it in the form of metaphysical systems or orga-nizational efficiency).National imagemes are defined by their Janus-faced ambivalence and

contradictory nature.They define a polarity within which a given nationalcharacter is held tomove. As a result of their ambivalent polarity, their vari-ous manifestations (national images such as we actually encounter them)are highly impervious to historical obsolescence or desuetude. Once theidea that Flemings are sensual, Irish are sentimental, or Germans are effi-ciently systematic fails to meet with a given audience’s concurrence, theeffect will be that the opposite pole of the selfsame imageme is activated:that of Flemishmysticism, Irish violence, or Germanmusico-philosophicalabstraction, which is considered to complement rather than contradict thestereotype in question.In other words, the currency of a national attribute means it is tacitly ac-

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companied, in the discursive tradition, by the latent presence of its possibleopposite.That is one of the reasons why the affirmation of national clichésis so peculiarly suited to the trope of irony. If, in one possible definition,we understand that an ironic utterance simultaneously asserts and deniesthat which it proposes (‘‘What tender-hearted people the Germans are!’’),then it will be obvious that irony calls into play radical ambiguities that arewell suited to the contradictory ambivalence of imagemes.Thus, the ironicdeployment of national stereotypes in twentieth-century novels (Forster onEngland, Italy, and India is an obvious example, as is Mann on Germany)seems to be rhetorically effective in part because it partakes of the ironicpotential that is inherent in cliché once its clichéd nature has become obvi-ous.15 I shall suggest a further reason for the privileged relationship betweennational stereotypes and irony toward the end of this article.

A Rhetoric of National Characterization (1): A Typology of theDiscourse of National Stereotype

National characterizations, like other stereotypes, function as common-places—utterances that have obtained a ring of familiarity through fre-quent reiteration. Their strongest rhetorical effect lies in this familiarityand recognition value rather than in their empirical truth value. Historicalstudies of discursive corpuses containing images concerning a given nationconcur in the finding that these corpuses have a high intertextual cohe-sion; the remarkable concord of the semantic register of various images asbrought forward by individual texts is demonstrably the result of later textsechoing, citing, or referring to earlier texts. Even when an author claims towrite from direct, empirical experience concerning the nation in question,it will usually transpire that that experience was preceded by preparatoryreading on the topic. AsWalter Lippmann ( []) put it in his seminalwork on public opinion, we read about the world before knowing it. Hence,it can be argued that national images in their function as commonplacesrefer primarily not to the nation in question but to the currency of other,previous images about that nation.Imagologists have accordingly decided that national images and charac-

terizations should in the first instance be studied under precisely that aspect

. The work of Ruth Amossy on cliché, commonplace, and stereotype has already drawnattention to the ironic potential of cliché—with, for a paradigmatic starting point, Flaubert’sDictionnaire des idées reçues (Amossy and Herschberg Pierrot ; Amossy and Rosen ).This raises the fascinating question as to the precise point at which cliché becomes recogniz-able as such and hence open to ironic deployment. It is obvious that this point is not reachedby all readers at the same time: irony often goes unrecognized.

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of their commonplace nature: the aspect of their intertextuality, recogniz-ability, and vraisemblance. Rather than studyMme de Staël’sDe l’Allemagne asto its fidelity to a ‘‘real’’ Germany (to which access could be gained only byway of other mediations and representations), imagologists have opted forthe more promising approach of studying such a text historically and inter-textually against a whole tradition of texts dealing with Germany, startingwith Tacitus’s Germania and subsequently leading to the germanophilia ofFrench Romantics like Gérard de Nerval. It is from this intertext that thefunctional effectiveness of Mme de Staël’s text can be assessed.Perhaps this insight should also suggest an additional inference. If na-

tional characteristics work on the basis of vraisemblance rather than vérité (torecall the neo-Aristotelian opposition), on the basis of the ease with whichreaders can recognize the purport of a given text, then such recognizabilitynecessarily calls the comprehension of an audience into play. Much as inthe distinction between vraisemblance and vérité, the audience’s acceptance ofutterances as valid plays a cardinal role in the process of national image for-mation, and a ‘‘pragmatic turn’’ may be in order to address the functioningof national imagery in terms of audience recognition.National stereotypingtakes shape not just in the binary polarity between texts-that-represent andnations-that-are-represented but also in the triangular situation of texts,represented nations, and an audience’s Erwartungshorizont. It may be useful,therefore, to progress from a grammatical, structural analysis of the dis-course of national characterization toward a rhetorical, pragmatic analysis.A necessary first stepmust be to definemore clearly what wemean by the

discourse of national characterization and what distinguishes it from othertypes and modalities of discourse (e.g., factual reporting or lyrical poetry).To begin with, we must ask ourselves about the specific status of the liter-

ary genres in the field of national stereotyping.While that question (whichmight otherwise raise the dreary specter of the definition of ‘‘literature’’)can only be addressed in the broadest of terms, a few things are worth point-ing out.Those discourses that traditionally count as the province of literarystudies (the novel, drama, poetry) are by no means the least important oneswhen it comes to the formulation and dissemination of national stereotypes.A number of reasons for this fact can be given. Since (as I have hinted whenspeaking of the earlymodern development of the notion of ‘‘character,’’ andas I shall further specify below) national characterization usually involvesthe idea of the motivation of behavior, descriptions of national peculiari-ties will often gravitate to the register of narrativity—exempla, myths, par-ables, and jokes, as well as novels or drama. Accordingly, it is no surprise tofind that the systematization of national character in the seventeenth cen-tury is to a large extent undertaken in metaliterary discourse, especially the

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tradition of neo-Aristotelian poetics. More particularly, a study of authorswho have been active in both fiction writing and cultural criticism indi-cates that national stereotyping is engaged inmore freely under whatMann(: ) called the ‘‘schützende Unverbindlichkeit der Kunst,’’ under thecloak of fictive conventions and in the context of narrative characteriza-tions rather than in nonfictional, referential prose.16 To put things bluntly:national stereotyping is easier in a context that requires the reader’s willingsuspension of disbelief. In many cases, therefore, national stereotyping isnot merely a matter of affixing certain psychological traits to a given nationor ethnic group but also the attribution of certain actorial roles to a certainnationality within a narrative configuration. In all these cases, it is obviousthat analyzing the mechanism of national stereotypingmust call into play acertain amount of literary expertise on the scholar’s part (Leerssen d).What is more, texts that enjoy the status of literary canonicity have a

longer shelf life and a more extended currency than other genres. Thenational images formulated in literary texts (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays) willtherefore remain operative in the cultural system for a far more extendedperiod (and with all the added prestige of having been formulated by afamous author) than instances from other, more ephemeral texts (geogra-phies, political commentaries, etc.).However, while the specificity of literary texts is beyond question, it is

not absolute. The discursive modalities peculiar to national stereotyping(as opposed to, say, factual reporting, metaphysical meditation, or lyricalevocation) are relatively genre-independent, and it is these modalities thatneed to be pinpointed in order to focus on possible pragmatic analyses.Twogrounds for distinguishing the textual-discursive mechanics of stereotyp-ing, as opposed to other forms of representation, may be summarized asfollows.A. Stereotypes are concerned with explaining cultural and social pat-

terns from a purported character. Empirical reporting of verifiable facts(‘‘Holland was one of the first European republics,’’ ‘‘Spain is a largelyCatholic country’’) is not in itself part of the stereotyping complex, eventhough it may be deployed in a tendentious way. By contrast, nationalstereotyping is specifically concerned not with reporting facts concern-ing a given nation but with defining its character—in the aforementionedmotivational-temperamental sense of the term, the sense that emerged inthe course of the seventeenth century.

. Spiering () juxtaposes fictional and nonfictional writings of certain British authorson the topic of national identity and comes to the conclusion that fiction allows for moredrastic affirmations than nonfiction.

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On the surface, this means that the discourse of national stereotypingdeals primarily in psychologisms, ascribing to nationalities specific person-ality traits (witness, again, the ones listed by the Encyclopédie in the fragmentcited above: French gaiety, Italian jealousy, etc., all of them markers fromthe realm of emotion and psychological temperament). More fundamen-tally, a nation’s ‘‘character’’ in this sense is that essential, central set of tem-peramental attributes that distinguishes the nation as such from others andthat motivates and explains the specificity of its presence and behavior inthe world.Thus, national stereotyping sets in when the utterances concernin some way a psychologism or temperamental predisposition (the Encyclo-pédie’s ‘‘habitual predisposition of the soul’’) and when the attributes predi-cated to the nation are held to be typical and characteristic (‘‘more prevalentin one nation than in others’’)—in other words: a psychological proprium.This criterion allows us to leave factual sociological or historical obser-

vation out of our analysis and to include tendentious or stereotyped char-acterizations.To state that Holland was one of the first European republicsis not in and of itself a matter of national stereotyping, but to imply or statethat this fact bespeaks a ‘‘typical’’ love of liberty in the Dutch ‘‘character’’ is.To state that pragmatist philosophy is a stronger tradition in England andidealistic philosophy a stronger tradition in Germanymay be a valid obser-vation in the field of the history of philosophical thinking and can be put tothe test by charting developments in the academic praxis of the countriesand their respective universities; to imply that the two nations in questionare somehow ‘‘characterized’’ by this fact, to accord this fact a symbolicmeaning in the field of collective psychologisms, is where factual report-ing shades into national stereotyping (Leerssen ).17 It is obvious thatin actual practice the two descriptive registers are closely intertwined, andtheir difference is much less obvious than what I propose here by way of ananalytical distinction.B. National stereotyping works on the basis of what I have termed an

effet de typique (Leerssen c): the conflation between the salient and the

. Ben-Porat furnishes an interesting case in point: whereas one would expect that the‘‘hooked nose,’’ so prominent in anti-Semitic caricature, would function among contempo-rary audiences as an obvious and unmistakable signal of anti-Semitic tendencies, in practicethis predicative connection proves to be fairly weak, and hooked noses by themselves can betaken as attributes of widely different personality types.The anti-Semitic content is activatedonly if the nose as a ‘‘category label’’ is associated with a stereotyped Jewish predicate, that is,with a predicative psychologism. For this reason any pragmatic research on the connotationsof a given nationality or culture cannot afford to merely chart the connotations triggered bythe mere mention of a continental, national, or religious designation (Europe, Germany, Jew)but must pay attention to its specific contextualization and narrative deployment—whichincludes the genre conventions of the text of its occurrence; see also Ben-Porat .

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representative. In stereotyping, qualities or features that are ascribed to agiven nationality are posited as typical of the nation in question, in a pecu-liarly double sense of the term. On the one hand, ‘‘typical’’ (as in ‘‘I saw atypically Spanish bullfight’’) means that a certain type (Spanish) is markedand characterized and that the attribute or characteristic in question (bull-fight) is representative of the type at large. On the other hand, typicalmeansthat the attribute in question is salient, nontrivial, remarkable, and note-worthy and that a bullfight is something that strikes the unwary observeras something out of the ordinary. Thus, it may be true to say that Span-iards do not practice polygamy, but it cannot be typical since (unlike bull-fights) monogamy does not mark Spaniards as a distinct type, does not makethem stand out from the default value of European manners and customs.Hence, the effet de typique, which canonizes salient features into represen-tative propria, will account for the tendency in national characterization togravitate to the restricted register of caricature. Certain traits are singledout and foregrounded because they are typical in both senses of the term:they are held to be representative of the type, and they are unusual andremarkable.Witness (to give trivial examples) English bowler hats, Dutchwooden shoes, German lederhosen, or French berets. The effet de typiqueis linked to the register of exoticism, which, as anthropologists have put it,conflates the distinct and the distinctive (Foster ).This mechanism can be observed even at the microlevel of single utter-

ances.The proposition [] ‘‘Spaniards are proud’’ is, as anyone will immedi-ately recognize, a stereotype, whereas the proposition [] ‘‘Spaniards aremortal’’ is amere fact.Why are two similarly constructed propositions, bothstraightforward affirmations, recognizably different? In proposition [], thepredicate mortal is nonsalient; the prevalence of mortality outside Spain (beit among Italians, bacteria, flowers, computer programmers, horses, or an-cient Babylonians) is not at issue. Once we realize this, we see the differencewith proposition [], which places the predicate proud in a privileged salient-cum-representative relationship with the subject-class Spaniards. In effect,proposition [] is shorthand for ‘‘The quality of pride is more remarkablypronounced in Spaniards than elsewhere.’’ Thus, the effet de typique allowsus to distinguish the discourse of national stereotyping from other registersor modes of discursive representation.

A Rhetoric of National Characterization (2):The Pragmatics of Commonplace

Once the discourse of national stereotyping is properly specified in itstypology, we may approach an exciting task for the future: to assess its

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audience-function, its pragmatic functioning. Since stereotypes appear tofunction primarily because of their intertextually established recognizabil-ity, they can be properly described in the cognitive terms of schemata beingactivated by triggers, and an entire dynamics of the way that certain textsserve to affirm or deny current stereotypes, echo them or ironically sub-vert them, contradict them or endorse them, becomes describable.18Whatis more, it becomes possible then to allow in our analysis for the fact thatone and the same text may for certain readers exemplify a type, whereas forother readers it controverts it, while yet other readers may not even noticethis aspect.An example of the possibilities opened by such a ‘‘pragmatic turn’’ lies

in the further elaboration of the ironic potential of stereotype deployment.Not only does that ironic potential lie in the utterance that simultaneouslyaffirms and undercuts a proposition; more recent analysis has further speci-fied the idea that this ironic duality results from a ventriloquistic qualityin the utterance, which, as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have put it,‘‘mentions’’ rather than ‘‘uses’’ a given proposition. Irony, in that view, isthe mocking echo of a tacitly presupposed intertext of earlier, similar state-ments (Sperber andWilson ).This accounts, I propose (following RuthAmossy), for the fact that clichés, once they are established as such, be-come peculiarly suited to ironic echoicmention, and it explainswhy so oftenthe deployment of national stereotypes will drift to the genre of caricature,humor, and not-wholly-serious perpetuation. As Heinrich Plett () haspointed out, the same typographical symbol that signals quotation can alsobe used to signal ironic distance.19

Even the authors of the Encyclopédie were already aware that nationalcharacters are schemata, intertextually established commonplaces, ‘‘uneespèce de proverbe.’’ But if we take the commonplace, conventional natureof such characteristics to be a type of intertextuality, we should add that it isof a problematic kind. For the intertextuality of cliché is peculiarly unspe-cific. A textual utterance invoking or triggering a current ‘‘everyone knows’’consensus as to the nature of a given nation does not need to involve anyspecific source references to author X or description Y but rather refers toan unspecified ‘‘discourse,’’ to a scheme, to general knowledge in the ab-

. An early example of this approach (albeit in text-analytical rather than empirical terms)was given in Teeffelen .. This tropological aspect of irony will overlap, in postromantic authors from GustaveFlaubert and Thomas Hardy to Henry James and Thomas Mann, with that situational orexistential ironywhich is based on the awareness that all human expectations reflect simplisticand limited worldviews and will be confounded by the chaotic complexities and intractableconfusion of real life. Cf. Leerssen d.

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stract, or to received opinion, whose vague, textually unspecific nature isindicated by the terminology one encounters: ‘‘collective memory,’’ ‘‘cul-tural memory,’’ ‘‘cultural literacy,’’ or a ‘‘reader’s competence,’’ which restson the collective-anonymous hearsay of on-dit, discours préalable, discours so-cial, opinion du public, or even ideolo/—all of them terms 20 that in fact boildown to an acknowledgment of ignorance as to the precise textual prove-nance and consistency of this intertextual referencing.What is activated isneither empirically verifiable hard-core information about the real worldnor a textual construct linked to any specific source but rather a set of amor-phous, inchoate notions that are widely known and current in their broadflavor but unspecified as to clear authorship. Stereotypes and prejudicesmay be defined by that very aspect: they are the kind of things we cannotplace as to where precisely we have learned them. They were infused intoour cultural literacy at an early, informal stage of our socialization process,in early childhood, as part of texts that by themselves are ephemeral andunmemorable ( jokes, comic strips, B movies, proverbs or turns of phrase,publicity billboards or television shows). The schemata that remain in ourawareness as a residue of all these small, individually unmemorable cul-tural socialization experiences are therefore unclearly source-anchored. Atbest, the general schemata to which a cliché’s vraisemblance refers the pub-lic can be exemplified by prominent representative texts or authors whoare individually specified—but only à titre d’exemple. Barring such pointers(‘‘London that evening exuded a Dickensian lugubriousness’’), the prove-nance of clichés (their currency as commonplaces, from which they obtaintheir familiarity) is unspecific and vague.The conclusion to be drawn is, as I see it, threefold.To begin with, prag-

matic analysis cannot be undertaken on the basis of incidental, individualtextual samples. If one wishes to get at all close to the proper discursivecontextualization of any given textual utterance in terms of the unspecificdiscursive schemata that text activates, then one must attempt to inventoryas broad a corpus of intertextual connections as possible and to establisha fairly inclusive corpus of other texts dealing with the character of thenation in question. In other words: text-specific pragmatic analysis cannotdispense with the working basis of a broad and inclusive inventory of re-lated texts, and the historical typological gathering of the intertextual ‘‘tra-dition’’ representing a given nation remains as important now as it was fifty

. Most of the terms will be encountered in Amossy andRosen .The notion of a discourssocial was coined by Duchet (). The interesting conjunction, between the goût du public asa literary form of ideolo/ involving both bienséance and vraisemblance, on the one hand, and theaudience’s preexpectations as to how a world should be properly represented and motivated,on the other, is made in Genette .

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years ago.21What is more, it is in this of all fields that literature, while play-ing a role and obeying a set of conventions that are particularly its own, ismost closely intertwined with other forms of discourse.When contextual-izing a literary text in its ‘‘social discourse’’ and in the tradition from whichit derives its national imagery, we should cast the net far and wide, reach-ing from history writing to political discourse and from cultural criticismto entertainment ‘‘pulp.’’Moreover, it should be obvious that one cannot hypostatize all the vari-

ous possible reactions and scheme activations triggered by a given text intoan ideal-typical, generalized reader (‘‘the’’ Reader, with a capital R). Thecontentious nature of many reactions triggered by texts like, for instance,The Merchant of Venice orHeart of Darknessmust indicate that different readerswill, on the basis of one and the same text with its substantially uniformset of textual stereotypes, activate strongly divergent sets of schemata andconnotations.That divergence should not be seen as a complicating factorin one’s research but rather as precisely the central issue that pragmatic-rhetorical analysis, of all approaches, should hope to address. For it is in thisarea that the most intriguing questions are still to be asked. For instance,take the fact that the Encyclopédie, in its entry on national characters, shouldpoint out that the French nation is characterized by its ‘‘love of their kingsand of the monarchy as such.’’ For a contemporary reader, such a statementwritten on the eve of the French Revolution must raise a smile. But is theirony a situational, unintended one, discernible only to latter-day readerswith their superior hindsight—merely a gratuitous piece of political pietyregarding that king known at the time as Louis le bien-aimé, which only insubsequent decades was to develop its added ambiguity? Or is it a piece ofVoltairean sarcasm, intended to have the very barb that still raises our eye-brows two centuries later? While that question is not in itself answerable inany clear-cut fashion (except perhaps by dint of diligent historical contex-tualization), it does point up the fact that such interpretations and possiblemodalities of irony are by no means clear-cut. What is more, the histori-cal distance between text and reader poses, in this of all topics, a majorchallenge.As I indicated above, national characterization develops and changes

. For an example of such a compendious typological inventory, see Leerssen . Onemay go further and voice the wish for a comprehensive bibliographical database listing allexisting imagological studies regarding national representations. Much material has beengathered and collated by the Aachen Program around Hugo Dyserinck; and the bibliogra-phy in Beller goes some way toward meeting that requirement. It is envisaged that it, ora similar database, will be posted on the Internet at www.hum.uva.nl/images. Further initia-tives in this direction are being contemplated by the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch NationalResearch Institute for Cultural History (www.hum.uva.hl/˜huizinga).

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over the centuries; as a result, a given utterance from should not beconflated with a similar utterance from , despite possible superficialsimilarities.However, froma pragmatic, reader-based perspective, the textsfrom and are in a sense contemporary in that they are bothsimultaneously available in the here and now, albeit to a heterogeneouslycomposed readership. Some of us may choose to read earlier texts throughpostmodern, ironic glasses; others cannot help but see the Shylock in Shake-speare’s Merchant of Venice or the Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist throughthe intervening filter of anti-Semitic discourse of the period –; theschemata triggered by Shakespeare and Dickens also include Der Mythusdes . Jahrhunderts and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This leads to re-peated, anguished political controversies involving the mutually contradic-tory principles of the inadmissibility of anachronism, on the one hand, andthe impossibility of transcending our own position in time and history, onthe other. Rather than wishing to explain the problem away or to ‘‘resolve’’it, I feel that such factors should point us toward a more precisely informedappreciation of the two contradictory modes of literary historicity: the his-toricity of its production and of its reception (Leerssen ).In addition, it may well be that we should add a third dimension to that

multiple historicity: not just the temporal order of literary production, orthe temporal order of literary reception, but also the temporal order ofreaders’ literary socialization.While this process of ‘‘becoming a reader,’’ ofacquiring the various schematas and literacies thatmake up a reader’s com-petence, cannot be reconstructed in detail, let alone generalized from theavailable individual life-stories, certain patternsmay bemeaningful enoughfor the purpose of informed pragmatic analysis.We may, by way of a work-ing hypothesis, entertain the possibility that the acquisition of conventionalrepresentations tends to precede that of counter-stereotypical representa-tions—that an established set of children’s classics, from Enid Blyton toTintin and Astérix, will be of the sort to fix the conventional national at-tributes.22

All these factors involve complexities that cannot be adequately an-swered in the scope of this survey; a reception-oriented and reader-orientedapproach to national stereotyping, while it will complement the researchand insights gained heretofore, will also raise methodological and proce-dural problems of its own. The audience function of stereotype cannot begained, I fear, from anecdotal empiricism dealing with decontextualizedin vitro reading experiences. A pragmatics of national stereotype is an ex-

. In this field, much is to be expected from future cooperation with developmental psy-chologists and pedagogicians; witness the work of Martyn Barrett (; Barrett and Short) and Emer O’Sullivan (, ).

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citing future prospect for literary studies, but it is a departure that should beadded to, rather than replacing, the historical and text-grammatical studyof that discourse.

References

Amossy, Ruth, and Anne Herschberg Pierrot Stéréotypes et clichés: Langue, discours, société (Paris: Nathan).

Amossy, Ruth, and Elisheva Rosen Les discours du cliché (Paris: SEDES).

Augstein, Hannah Franziska ‘‘Linguistics and Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century: James Cowles Prichard’sMoral Philology,’’ History of European Ideas (): –.

Barfoot, C. C., ed. Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amster-dam: Rodopi).

Barrett, Martyn ‘‘English Children’s Acquisition of a European Identity,’’ in Changing European Identi-

ties: Social Psychological Analyses of Social Change, edited byG.M. Breakwell and E. L. Speri,– (Oxford: Butterworth/Heinemann).

Barrett, Martyn, and Janis Short ‘‘Images of European People in a Group of –-Year-Old English Schoolchildren,’’

British Journal of Developmental Psycholo/ : –.Baumann, G. ‘‘Dominant and Demotic Discourses of Culture,’’ in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-

cultural Identities and the Politics of Racism, edited by P.Werbner and T. Modood, –(London: Zed Books).

Beening, André ‘‘Duitsland op school, –,’’ Theoretische geschiedenis (): –.

Beller, Manfred, ed. L’immagine dell’altro e l’identità nazionale: Metodi di ricerca letteraria, supplementary vol. to

Il confronto letterario (Fasano: Schena).Ben-Porat, Ziva ‘‘German Embodiments of Europe in Modern Hebrew Literature,’’ SPIEL (): –.

‘‘Stereotype andCognitiveModels: TheMeaning of a SemiticNose.’’ Paper presentedat the conference ‘‘Cognitive Models of Intertextuality,’’ Tel Aviv, January.

Benveniste, Emile Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vols. (Paris: Minuit).

Berding, Helmut, ed. Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußt-

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Documents

Leerssen the Rhetoric of National Charakter