Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur by Karl S. Guthke

Abstract

MLR, I02.2, 2007 549 of teaching about gender and sexuality,while Piers Armstrong proposes an attractive model forBrazilian cultural studies in a competitive higher-education marketplace. Co-editor Danny J.Anderson clearly has a good course on business Spanish and seems pleased to appear to be challenging goal-oriented students. Elsewhere, Jesse Aleman talks about Mexican-American literature,Kirwin R. Shaffer uses filmand popular culture to contest external constructions of theCaribbean, and JoyLogan appears to get her students to perform comparative exercises with Hawai'i in order to encourage reflectionon hybridity. The best thing about the essays collected here is theway they show interesting things that teachers can do and get students to do in (and sometimes out of) the classroom. In doing so, the book does a service to the importance and critical value of cultural studies.What tends toundermine the impact of some versions of cultural studies, unfortunately, is their self-conscious self-projection. Aggrandizing claims to post-9/I I relevance and the rubbishing of other approaches do not add to a sense of persuasiveness, while claims ofmarginality are nowadays simply laughable: possibly evenmore so, in some respects, in theUK than in theUSA. This volume isverymuch focused on the situation in the latter, whose politically correctAcademy may seem, for some, thenatural home of cultural studies: as evidenced by certain aspects of practice and seeming policy in course offerings,professional organizations, conferences, jour nals, and publishers, and theirmarketing strategies.However, the institutionalization of cultural studies inHispanism ispossibly even greater in theUK, owing to recent rapid expansion in a discipline thathas been relatively small compared with theUSA; coupled, more or less simultaneouously, with an increase in anxiety about the appli cability of thehumanities inparallel with the erection of policed research assessment structures. If range and inclusiveness become in reality threatened by cultural studies, then itwill have achieved the opposite ofwhat it sometimes claims towant to do. If its achievements come into linewith its sometime rhetoric, then itwill make a vital contribution to the study of cultures inLatin America and wherever else. UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD PHILIP SWANSON Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalitdt und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Litera tur. By KARL S. GUTHKE. (Edition Patmos, i i) Tubingen: Narr - FranckeAttempto . 2005. vi+589 pp. ?78. ISBN 978-3-7720-8I42-2. This volume assembles eighteen essays of between eight and seventy-three pages in length, all ofwhich, bar one, have been previously published invarious periodicals and conference proceedings between 2000 and 2005. The volume's guiding premiss is that the changing world-view since the 'second age of discovery' (JohnParry) and the 'groBeOffnung in die weite Welt' (Ulrich Im Hof) of the late eighteenth cen tury can be traced in thewritings of the time and beyond. In the lengthyopening essay, evidently thecornerstone of thewhole collection, Karl S. Guthke demonstrates how the traditional diachronic principle of classical Bildung was complemented by a synchronic ideal of globale Bildung, and so how broader geographical horizons deter mined the study of humankind-in aword, howMenschenkunde became Vl1kerkunde. In another long essay he argues thatHermann Samuel Reimarus's rational deism de rives from the author's 'global' outlook and shows how this thinking influenced the literarycharter of religious tolerance, namely Nathan derWeise byReimarus's editor Lessing. Elsewhere the 'global' cross-fertilization between Goethe and his English visitors is reflected in an entertaining yet substantial account that sheds lighton the Weimarian's preoccupation with Weltliteratur; Hebbel's comments on non-German materials and experiences illustrate this author's refusal to go beyond prejudice in 550 Reviews his engagement with thewider world; a lengthypiece on non-European motifs in the literature of the nineteenth century, from Stifter to Fontane, proves how rewarding further treatment of all of the authors covered would be; and German accounts of encounters with 'natives' on thePacific island of Palau reveal how attitudes changed between the 'philosophical' travellers of the lateeighteenth century and thevisitors of the i86os whose clear design itwas topave theway forGerman colonial penetration. Most of the other chapters show less obvious connections to the overall theme as formulated in the titleof the collection. There are, however, discernible clusters of concern: two articles trace the influence of early Shakespeare...