【11月25日】Michael Steppat: Across Cultural Communities: Is Literature Useful for Intercultural Learning?

   This lecture will explore the question whether, and how, learning about other cultures can benefit from studying literature (most importantly the narrative literature of recent times). In our time we have a postmodernist concept of intercultural learning, which highlights the need to raise cultural awareness, as well as the ability to deal with various language cultures. Intercultural scholars emphasize that a key function here can be an interest in poetics and narrativity, the skills of playing and negotiating with language. Literature often embodies alternative cultural voices, which we will not often hear in our own environment. The lecture will introduce concepts of intercultural competence and learning, then move on to consider multicultural literature with the key example of a short story; we will ask about effective pathways to learning about a culture, and about suitable forms of fiction analysis for this purpose. Are the standard methods of literary analysis the best ones? The lecture will explore this, bearing in mind that when cultural elements meet in a text, they can burst into a range of surprises.

Michael Steppat is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), emeritus, and an international faculty member at SISU. After gaining his Ph.D. and his “Habilitation” he became a Fulbright professor at the University of Texas, then research professor at Arizona State University. As academic Dean of his Faculty for 12 years, Steppat devised an M.A. program in Intercultural Anglophone Studies. He is an elected project director in the national Excellence Strategy. His published books include Honor Face and Violence:Cross-Cultural Representations of Honor Cultures and Face Cultures; Literature and Interculturality (3 volumes); Historical Intersections of Intercultural Studies (2 volumes); Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange (in American studies).