Across Cultures, Across Disciplines—or from Newark to St.Gallen: An Introduction

Abstract

Across Cultures, Across Disciplines—or from Newark to St.Gallen:An Introduction Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “Usura” [detail] by Martin Disler. Copyright University of St.Gallen (HSG). Photograph by Hannes Thalmann. The cover illustrations on this issue show two murals that are part of Martin Disler’s (1949–1996)1 work “Usura,” which he painted directly onto the concrete walls of one of the main rooms in the University of St.Gallen’s Library Building. Constructed in 1989 on a hill overlooking St.Gallen, Switzerland, the building is testament to the University’s success, as it evolved from a small Business Academy (Handelsakademie) founded in 1898 to a [End Page 7] School for Economic and Social Sciences (Hochschule für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, HSG) to the University it is known as today.2 Often, the renaming and the thereby implied upgrading came with either a move to a new building or an expansion of the campus. As its earlier names imply, the University of St.Gallen is not a University in the strictest sense but has mainly made its name as a Business School and the place to study if you would like to pursue a career in, for instance, consulting, banking, or law. In this sense, it might appear a rather unlikely location for a gathering of the Philip Roth Society—yet there are some commonalities between location and subject. One may point to the quickly growing interest in “business fictions,” the intersection of management and literary studies, which could easily benefit from reading Philip Roth: from the many shop-owning fathers and their strong professional ethos, for example Everyman’s Jewelry Store, as everyone calls it, thanks to which even a plumber’s wife can own something imperishable (Everyman 56), to the glove manufacturer Lou Levov in American Pastoral and representing the American promise of meritocracy, Roth’s novels raise many a question for management scholars. The Levov business would even provide a nice link to the history of St.Gallen as a center of the textile industry, in particular as one of the prime sources of embroidery. Just as the setting of Newark provides an increasingly difficult environment within which to maintain a prosperous manufacturing company, St.Gallen had to cope with the shrinking of its formerly dominant sector, with only a few highly specialized manufacturers remaining. Moreover, the University’s main campus is located only a few yards away from an insurance company’s headquarters, a service industry that was also present in Roth’s homes, fictitious and real. These rather superficial parallels, though, have not been the reason why St.Gallen was honored to host Philip Roth: Across Cultures, Across Disciplines on June 13 and 14, 2014. Blame it on the Philip Roth Society’s President: without Aimee Pozorski’s initial suggestion, and subsequent wonderful support and encouragement, it might not have occurred to me to try to prove that Nathan Zuckerman was quite right when he told his brother in The Counterlife that “[t]here are worse places than Switzerland” (36). Admittedly, Theodor Herzl’s Basel would have provided a more compelling rationale for meeting in one of Europe’s smallest countries. A thriving Society, though, depends more on personal connections and commitments than the pursuit of the perfect narrative, and it was thus that the conference participants found themselves enclosed by the murals of neo-expressionist artist Martin Disler. “Usura” dominates the room in the Library Building known as Senatssaal, the “senate hall,” which is customarily the setting for the University’s “senate,” the convention of all tenured faculty members and select representatives of the untenured faculty and of the student body. During the rest of the semester, it [End Page 8] is witness to lectures on the rules of accounting, the four “Ps” of marketing, the appreciation and depreciation of currencies, or the intricacies of tax law. And sometimes it is home to conferences such as ours. The two murals, red and blue, frame the room, which is slightly curved and, to the back, opens to the outside via large windows. You tend to forget this openness in the back, once your gaze is...