Lessons Learned

Starting this new unit, I wondered at the abrupt transition from the Age of Enlightenment theory to those theories situated outside what is understood as the West. My little experience with the theory of the “Rest” made me question whether the connection between the two would be an obvious one, and then, to my delight, this week’s readings effectively bridged the divide between “Western” theory and the theory of the “Rest”. Karatani and Kohso argue that the tendency towards aestheticentrism, or focusing exclusively on a culture’s aesthetic cultural offerings and “bracketing” the rest, such as theoretical traditions or socio-political or even ethical arguments, is a legacy from Western tradition. Yet, this appreciation for the aesthetic can be traced back to the Romantic, a time when the West turned eastward to feed its dreams and notions of utopia with the unknown just beyond the Schwelle (threshold).

Not only did this week’s readings satisfy my need to draw connections,  they also served as a cautionary guide for my future research. According to Stuart Hall, the West-Rest/East binary was established to help create a discourse for understanding and talking about the other. Yet, history proved the difficulty of making distinctions between self and the other without necessarily equating difference with superiority of self. This tendency led to self-entitled colonization/domination of the world by the Western-European elite forces of Spain, Portugal, England, France, etc. 
In my research, I’ll be looking closely at literature written by non-Western authors in a Western language. The need to talk about what I’m finding, to create a rhetoric for describing how this literature differs from that written by native (L1) speakers echoes the initial need that created the East-West distinction. Whereas the East-West binary ultimately led to the suppression of the other in favor of the West, I’ll need to take care not to perpetuate any undervaluation of the other, L2 literature, when making comparisons to my previously assumed norm, L1 literature. 
Karatani and Kohso also talked about Kant’s bracketing, that is, excluding those things that disturb the aesthetic appreciation of a country’s cultural offerings (socio-economic factors, displeasure, etc.). I was going to look at the space between L1 and L2 as a romantic space, one with the potential for creativity and utopia. But to look at this with strictly a Western understanding of both these aspects would be to bracket the socio-cultural background of the author and deprive the discussion of vital depth. 

The solution to this dilemma is integrating Spivak’s proposal of viewing Europe (the West) as an other when reading, analyzing and discussing my texts. I hope my outsider perspective, being a non-native speaker of German, will provide enough distance from my subject to allow me to approach both the German and the other “Other” cultures as being equal in value, though different in constitution; the readings this week already served their purpose in opening my eyes to my inherent bias.