Imagology
Imagology
• Study of images of (supposedly) national
character in literature. Not what the Other is
but how s/he is perceived and represented.
• Sees national images as “intrinsic” to a
text’s inner fabric, permeating its very
substance (Dyserinck 1967, 1982).
• Deconstruction of the rhetoric of national
characteristics.
– Analyse how and why it was constructed
The issue of Otherness (Alterity)
– Closely linked to the debate Alterity / Identity
– People external to one’s society are naturally
perceived as Other in terms of language, mores,
religion or physical characteristics.
• Stereotypes,clichés, ethnic prejudices
• Essentialism
• Determinism
– Self / Other dialectic at the core of the debate
on alterity.
“Imagined Communities”
• The Other is endowed with “a specific set of
characterizations and attributes” which cannot be
tested empirically and, therefore, are ”imaginated”
(Leersen)
• Generally, imaginated discourse [
– a] singles out a nation from the rest of humanity as
being somehow different or ‘typical’,
– [b] articulates or suggests a characterological,
collective-psychological motivation for given social or
national features.
Study of Otherness
• A developing field in comparative literature
and cultural studies
• Falls under the labels of imagology or
semiotic theory of culture, literary
geopolitics, cultural geography.
• de Certeau calls it “Ethno-graphy” .
The representation of the Other
as inferior
• Imagology is closely linked to the study of
the racial, gendered, or ethnic Other, in
other words to the way “a hegemonic
culture or gender group views different and
subaltern ones as exotic or inferior or just
plain alien (Miller 1).
Identity
• Identity too is constructed and not a
transcendent-essentialist notion.
• Often based on binary oppositions,
characteristics belonging to one’s own
culture are opposed to those belonging to
the “other” culture,
• one’s own characteristics are idealized
• those of the Other are denigrated.
Self-definition
• One defines one’s own culture by defining
other cultures in the same way as “the self
defines itself by defining the other … Each
description or definition of the other culture
implies a self-description or selfdefinition”(Pfister 4)
• Stephen Greenblatt calls this process “selffashioning”.
Constructedness of Nationality
e.g. National Identity
• What came first, Nation or Nationalism?
• Notion of nationality has no ontologically
autonomous existence. There is no
nationality per se.
– Case of Italy. An abstraction. (indicates neither
a state nor a nation). Gioberti: “popolo italiano
non esiste, è un presupposto) Existed only in
literature and thanks to it. Literature promotes it
Field for imagological studies
• Exists because it has been articulated
– Literature, because it manifests and documents
the nation’s identity (V. Italian lit.)
– Travel literature
– Culture (cinema, TV, cartoons)
• National stereotypes are first and most
effectively formulated, perpetuated and
disseminated by imaginary literature.
• Nationality “ “Identity” “Alterity” are
literary tropes (Guyard, L’étranger tel
qu’on le voit, 1954)
Imagology a meta-discursive
practice
• Study of literary representation of foreign
cultures and nationalities .
• Study of national and ethnic stereotype in
literature.
• Discourse analysis. Imagology is concerned
with representations as textual strategies.
• What has been written about him/her.
What Imagology is not
• Its aim is not to understand the society or
culture of another country.
• Not sociology nor even “literary sociology”
(Wellek)
• Not anthropology.
• Not collective opinion but a summa of
subjectivities.
Not an objective representation
• Not what the Other is but how s/he is
perceived and represented. What has been
written about him/her.
• The image is a textual construct. No
question of its validity or objectivity.
• Not making the difference, i.e. Considering
difference an objective datum, has let to
persecutions, podroms, colonialism, Hitler)
Subjectivity in the construction of
the Other
• Subjectivity must be taken into account in
the analysis of representations of the Other.
• The nationality represented is silhouetted in
the perspectival context of the representing
text or discourse.
• Dynamics between those images which
characterize the Other (hetero-images) and
those which characterize one’s own,
domestic identity (self-images or autoimages).
Genres
• Fiction. Often concerned with encounter
with Other whether at home or abroad.
• Travel literature and literary works
engaging with questions of travel
– Michel de Certeau: “Every story is a travel story, a
spatial practice”
– Fictional accounts (but all representations are
fundamentally fictional)
• So-called truthful travel account, are also based on
construction of delf and other.
• Drama (V. Shakespeare); Poetry
The question of Otherness (or
Alterity) in Travel Literature
• Most travel writing - whether part of an
anthropological, sociological, semiological or
literary project - is concerned with the encounter
with Otherness either directly or through signs.
• Terms of a discourse on Otherness were
established in descriptions of the natives in
countries “discovered” by the Western world
(seeTodorov, Fanon)
Emergence of travel writing as a
focus for study
• Dismissed in the past as a ‘subliterary’
genre.
– At best considered as an historical archive .
• Travel writing has emerged in recent years
as a focus for study and research across a
whole range of disciplines.
• Now being studied in terms of its history,
formal characteristics, and problems of
representation, and for what it can be made
to say about a whole range of themes
Reasons for the resurgence of interest in
travel writing
• Cultural studies. (cf. Raymond Williams).
• Discourse analysis, or rhetorical analysis:
• a suspicious close reading
• deconstructing the text
• decoding of imperialist rhetoric and its key tropes.
• Anthropology, Ethnography. Were the first
to show interest in Otherness
– Representations of identity and difference.
– Discourse of the Other
• Colonialism, Postcolonialism. (cf. Todorov)
• Multidisciplinary studies.
Effects of travel studies
• Increase in understanding of and
interactions with the rest of the world.
• Change in how others have perceived and
understood other places, cultures and
societies. Self.consciousness about
stereotyping.
• Inputs about a whole range of themes
– history, geography, society, art
– identity and difference;
– Gender and Power,
Travel and Otherness
• Travel literature mostly focuses on different
people and countries and on how certain
characteristics, functions, and qualities are
assigned to them.
• Ideological bias behind national stereotypes
(See Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).
• Ideas of difference, strangeness, exoticism,
lack of civilisation do not only apply to far
off countries (e.g. The East) but also to
places nearby (Ireland, Italy)
Conventions about the representation
of the Other
• Stigmatisation of a foreigner or someone who is different
from oneself as a way of defining and securing one’s own
positive identity through comparison.
• Ignoring or demeaning the artistic and literary
manifestation of the Other and imposing one’s language
and one’s own literary and artistic canons are all forms of
discrimination.
• The Othering process may take subtler avenues and work
out through language.
– e.g. stereotyping, the use of clichés, metaphors.
Conventions continued
• Inexpressibility; can only be represented by inversions
“no longer a matter of a and b, simply of a and the
converse of a. ( Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus).
• Binary oppositions, whereby characteristics belonging to
one’s own culture are opposed to those appertaining to the
“other” culture, in such a way that one’s own
characteristics are idealized and those of the Other are
denigrated.
Some important theorists
– Edward Said,Orientalism, (1978) a seminal work that has
transformed the study of culture and cultures. It uncovers the
ideological bias behind national representations (primarily
concerned the East and colonized countries., but applicable to
other countries as well)
– Yuri M. Lotman Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of
Culture (1990).
– Michel de Certeau, creates a historical psychology of alterity.
– Joep Leersen, Raymond Corbey, Manfred Beller.
– Hayden White: Tropics of Discourse (1984): a milestone in
modelling and theorising non-fictional representation of the Other.
– New Historicists (Greenblatt, Montrose) study documents related
to travel and conquest as if they were literary texts.
Questions for discussion
• How have literary texts expressed, or
propagandized identity?
• How are is the image of the other used to
exorcise certain undesirable traits of the
self?
• How is otherness confronted or assimilated
• What is the role of the Other in forming
identity?