American Studies in Europe: Its Vital Role in Internationalizing the Field

Introduction During the last decades there has been a significant increase in the number of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences in Europe. One may wonder what the position of American Studies is, or preferably should be, amid these various intellectual domains. What are its special merits-if there are any still-in today's intellectual world? How does it relate to other areas of interest? What are the rationales for its continued existence? This essay attempts to answer these questions and offers insights into American Studies in Europe today. It needs to be emphasized, though, that this expose has its limitations since it is written from the perspective of a European observer whose expertise concerns first of all sociology and related approaches within popular culture and American Studies, and who is best acquainted with the current situation in northwestern Europe.' American Studies in Europe: its origins and current state of affairs Contrary to popular opinion, American Studies was not exported from the United States to Europe after the Second World War, but had already been instituted there previously. The study of the United States as an object of intellectual interest and teaching existed in many European countries long before 1945, extending as far back as the late eighteenth century (Skard). Yet, it was in the 1920s, among German literary scholars with a basic commitment to cultural and intellectual history, that the term Amerikakunde ("American Studies") and its conceptualization originated. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, in Germany's intellectual life, cultural area studies, including those within linguistic and literary studies, were fostered by tendencies of counter-specialization. Cultural morphology, as developed by historian Karl Lamprecht and ethnologist Leo Frobenius, was applied to German literary studies as well as to English and American Studies. Its conception of a cultural system as an integrated organic whole was also implemented in world history by Oswald Spengler. Foreign language educationalists, who utilized the cultural morphology concept, advocated Kulturkunde in the form of national area studies. These tendencies were influential in the (slow) institutionalization of Amerikakunde from the late 1920s onwards, which was part of a more general set of endeavors concentrated on a so-called Auslandkunde (Foreign Studies).2 Similarly, in its early years, the late 1920s and 1930s, the American Studies movement in the U.S.A.3 was an academic heresy which started in English departments among scholars who turned to literary texts, not as philologists, literary historians, or New Critics (like in the 1940s and 1950s), but as cultural or intellectual historians and analysts. This proclivity became a movement when it was joined by historians who had also abandoned traditional historiographywith its predominance of political history-for intellectual and cultural history, particularly the investigation of "The American Mind" (Wise 293-373). These young and ambitious scholars, mostly at Ivy League universities, tried to be "interdisciplinary," to cross departmental boundaries, and to combine the insights and methods of intellectual history, literary criticism, political theory, and sociology. The architects of the movement were affected as well by the various forms of cultural nationalism that became increasingly prevalent during the late 1930s and the war years. The cultural politics of the Popular Front Communism then recovered and celebrated American folk culture. A minority of U.S. Americanists found virtue in particular cultural works, simply because they were in and of the "American soil," a Blut und Boden aesthetics (McCormick 69). These combined strains would culminate in the consensual symbol-myth-image school of explanation of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its habit of reading the entire culture from inside literary texts (Pells 105). …