Interkultureller Vergleich und Moderner Roman

Abstract

The article analyzes a special mode of a comparative activity, namely the “intercultural” comparison as a phenomenon of modernism and post-modernism. Faced with the pressure put upon them by the continuing process of globalization and world-wide streams of migration, new literary developments are surfacing, as well as new methodological (comparatist) approaches like the research of cultural transfer or intercultural discourse analysis. Since culture is no longer perceived as a self-contained entity, but as an open intercultural process (Homi K. Bhabha), it brings forth culturally “hybrid” works of literature. Such a literature is determined and lent special dynamics by a dialectical dichotomy (or even a paradox) of adaptation (globalization, universalism) and resistance (local difference). The latter can be exemplarily demonstrated by the interrelation between western and eastern culture. This interrelation is founded upon a long tradition, for example with respect to Goethe and Hafíz, although it is being perpetuated in new and critical ways by authors like Rushdie and Djebar. This article also sets out to illustrate that on the one hand the post-modern hybridization of literature corresponds to a new, post-colonial reality (which is not conceptualized in a eurocentrist way), while, on the other hand, it must be classified as an artifact and a conscious construction. Most paradoxically, the novels under scrutiny use the very aesthetic procedures that we find in the European (Manierist) tradition.