„The Art of Stereotyping“ – How to construct your neighbours?

„The Art of Stereotyping“ –How to construct your neighbours? Prof. Dr. Werner Nell Comparative Literature MLU Halle 2011-12-8

Stereotypes are … • … jokes • … weapons • … instruments • … media • … signs • … mirrors • … products of art • … objects of shame • … sensors of emotions and attitudes (caring – hating)

Topics of Today • Concepts and analytical dimensions • A (small) historical review • Fields of construction and reflecting: Limitations and chances of literature, art, and criticsm • Some consequences for construction proper identities: The individual and „the rest“: Purity as a threat

Research contributions • Manfred Beller, Joep Leerssen (Ed.) Imagology, 2007 • Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion, 1922 • Gordon W. Allport: The Nature of Prejudice, 1954 • A.V. Zijderveld: On Clichés, 1979 • Hans Henning Hahn (Ed.): Stereotyp, Identität und Geschichte, 2002 (poln. 2011) • Ruth Florack: Bekannte Fremde, 2007

1. Concepts • Cliché (Zijderveld) • Stereotype (Lippmann) • Prejudice (Allport) • Stigma (Goffman) • Hate speech (Butler) • Image/mirage (Guyard) • Imagology (Leerssen 2007)

Cliché • „in printing trade an engraved block for repeated printing“

Stereotype • „fixed pictures in our heads“ (Lippmann) „Throughout history there has been a tendency to fixate one‘s own estimate of oneself and the others … in terms of a limited number of foreground attributes – for the others and symmetrically or asymmetrically reflected to us too: • heterostereotypes - autostereotypes

Prejudice • Any preconceived and unsupported opinion and attitude which influences our perception, description and judgement of others • Prejudices appear on the individual level as well as on a group level • Prejudices are enforced by ideological powers like religion, nationalism, regionalism, racism (inclusion by means of exclusion programs)

Stigma • The fixation of an attribute to a sign which can be used as a marker of extinction, discrimination, exclusion etc. • The „nature“ of the sign is arbitrary on the one hand, conventional – by historical tradition, ideological obsession – on the other

Hate Speech • A disourse and its performances which are used, sometimes produced, mostly communicated, to hurt or destroy the others • Racist remarks, sexist and four letter words are instruments to hurt a body and to destroy a mind, the self-concept and the self-respect of a person

Image/mirage • The picture(s) of a group, a people, another country in literary texts or other artificial media • Of course, by describing the others we describe ourselves • „the sixth difficulty in writing the truth: the national or group founded bias in looking at the others“ (Egon Schwarz, 1976)

Imagology • The literary, critical study of media transportated images

2. Historical Review A people‘s panel from Styria (Austria) (Eine steierische Völkertafel, 1730)

Constructing and Deconstructing images/stereotypes by literary and other cultural patterns • Simple constructions (I) • Diverging constructions (II) • Paradox constructions • Complementary constructions • Competing constructions • Pluralistic constructions • Contested constructions

Reflecting/reflexive Constructions (III) • Contradictory constructions • Ambivalent constructions • Deconstructing constructions • Ironical constructions (Geoffrey Hartman, 1997) • Self-reflecting and self-denying constructions • Nonsense and no-nonsense constructions

4. Some consequences for constructing and handling with „proper“ identities: purity as a threat • The individual and „ the rest“: • Personal • Cultural • Regional • National • Global „national history means getting one‘s history wrong“ (Ernest Gellner)

Prezentacja powstała w ramach projektu dofinansowanego przez Fundację Współpracy Polsko-Niemieckiej Thank you very much!

„The Art of Stereotyping“ – How to construct your neighbours?