“What amazes me most is the stubborn ability to repress.” Elisabeth Bronfen

Elisabeth Bronfen: “What amazes me most is the stubborn ability to repress.”

She taught at the University of Zurich for three decades. In this interview, Elisabeth Bronfen takes stock of the literary canon, new sensitivities, and the fear of ambivalence.

[This interview posted on 8/24/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2334/elisabeth-bronfen/was-mich-am-meisten-erstaunt-ist-die-hartnaeckige-faehigkeit-zu-verdraengen.]

“The really sensitive students don’t come to my seminars anyway. They’re afraid of me”: Elisabeth Bronfen.

WOZ: Elisabeth Bronfen, you were a professor of English at the University of Zurich for thirty years. That’s not a long time in literary terms. Nevertheless, how far has the literary canon shifted since you started here?

Elisabeth Bronfen: Except that students read much less than they used to?

Is that the biggest change?

No, but I would say that’s one of two shifts. We’ve greatly reduced the required reading. But – and I’ve been an advocate of this – we’ve become as diverse as we can be, at least in contemporary literature. When I came to Zurich, there wasn’t a single woman on the literature list, nor a Jew or a person of color! We then made sure to include as many female authors as possible on the list, as well as other English-language literatures: South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also India. But is anyone actually reading it? The list is now very diverse, but I fear that students will just pick five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, add the required Shakespeare piece from the basic course, and then vampire and fantasy stories. If very little is read, diversity goes out the window.

And in the courses: Are the discussions different today than they were in the early years of your professorship?

Of course, there is a danger that I will sound like my mother thirty years ago. But that’s just the way it is; nostalgia romanticizes things. I will try to differentiate and not simply criticize our students; that would be too easy. What I have noticed is that it is much less intellectual. Certain theoretical texts are still read, but they are much more fashion-oriented. The idea of working through something and really getting your teeth into it intellectually, which of course sometimes led to absurdities, no longer exists. We are in a culture of handbooks and, above all, applicability. All of that is perfectly legitimate. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t teach a Melville seminar today because I can’t assume that students will read not only Moby Dick but also three other novels by Melville, let alone a whole stack of secondary literature. I know they won’t.

Hollywood and Shakespeare
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Born in Munich in 1958, Elisabeth Bronfen first caused a stir in 1992 with her study Over Her Dead Body. At the age of 35, she was appointed professor of English at the University of Zurich, where she worked at the English Department from 1993 to 2023.

And are the discussions conducted differently today?

You have to embed that. Students know that they have actually been turned into the “flexible people” that Richard Sennett talked about. Hardly any of them can imagine working in the same place for the next forty years. So why should they bother to learn the ropes somewhere? This is where the concept of self-optimization comes into play: I not only have to optimize my lifestyle, but also my work skills, and I have to constantly curate my resume. There’s no point in investing too much time in one place, because optimization means flexibility everywhere. This is, of course, linked to the disastrous introduction of the Bologna reform.

In what way?

The credit point system forces students to count points. This has become ingrained in their minds. The idea is to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, without going into too much depth. This makes it easier to persuade them to take further training courses later on – for which they then have to pay quite a lot of money. Self-organization in reading groups is also rare today: if such groups exist, it is usually only to prepare for an exam. Students operate within a neoliberal, capitalist education and work system, and it would be cynical of me to say that they should be subversive and break out.

In addition to your professorship in Zurich, you have also taught in the US on a regular basis. There are many stories circulating about the atmosphere at universities there. How big are the differences really?

When I teach in the US, it’s only at the doctoral level. And these programs only accept a certain number of students, which means there’s competition. It’s different at a university like Zurich. The people who do their doctorates here didn’t have to apply.

And don’t forget: the American university landscape is huge, and at the same time, studying is expensive. That means you not only have to apply, you also have to pay a lot of money. And in recent years, universities have increasingly positioned themselves as companies, with students as customers. That’s something to keep in mind when discussing what students are or aren’t demanding. This has a lot to do with the American attitude: we pay for it, so we want what we think we’re getting.

The university as a service provider, where the student is simply a customer – and therefore king?

Exactly. That’s not the case in Zurich, Basel or Bern. Here, once people have completed their secondary education, they have the right to study more or less whatever they want. This gives us much more authority over what we teach and what we don’t.

So when students in the US fight for different curricula and a more diverse canon, it’s not so much a battle from the bottom up, but more a case of “he who pays the piper calls the tune”?

These debates about the canon, about diversity and what is now referred to as “woke,” which has come to mean something completely different from what it originally meant: Of course, this comes from the students, but that means from the students and their parents. And that depends very much on how the universities assess it at the management level. If they didn’t make money from it, they wouldn’t even bother. In a way, it has to do with market needs, otherwise such things would never be implemented.

Another popular claim is that students have become more sensitive to problematic or potentially traumatic literature. Would you agree with that?

That depends very much on which seminar you’re in. In economics, hardly anyone would think of saying such a thing. It is my impression that sensitivity in any form is very important to students at the moment. But I hesitate a little to see this as something new. In the 1980s in Germany, there was already this attitude: “Hey, I don’t like what you’re saying. That really upsets me.” With the spread of the internet, this has become a global phenomenon. But this sensitivity has always been evident among young people at university, and I’ve never really found it disturbing. But then I’m also very ironic. And I don’t think the really sensitive students come to my seminars anyway. They’re afraid of me. (Laughs.)

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When I was a student, authors tended to be white and male, but at least they were dead, to quote Roland Barthes. In the age of #MeToo, it is no longer possible to separate the work from the author. A concrete example: the fact that the philosopher Louis Althusser killed his wife, the philosopher Hélène Rytmann, was nothing more than a biographical footnote for us at the time. Is that different today?

Well, that’s a very specific case. It shows how fanatical these two thinkers were. They were so entrenched in their political and theoretical positions that they could no longer talk to each other—and then he killed her to get rid of that position. That’s what interests me about cultural phenomena: what does it reveal, what becomes clear here? Not: do I think it’s good or bad, is it reprehensible or not? It may well be reprehensible, but it can still be illuminating for understanding a particular cultural figuration. That’s all I would say about Althusser. Quite apart from that, it would never devalue what he wrote for me.

Never?

I’m a real hardliner on that. Take Louis-Ferdinand Céline: he may have been as anti-Semitic as he liked, but Journey to the End of the Night remains a magnificent novel about the First World War. I can see that there are works that really do lead to terrible follow-up actions, such as the films of Veit Harlan. But I can’t understand why German TV stations now don’t want to show Ufa films anymore. That’s German history and German film history. Of course they have to be shown. They also have to be talked about.

Speaking of problematic texts in the classroom, have you become more cautious?

Once, without thinking about it, I put Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita on the list for a seminar. Two weeks before the seminar, I thought: Oh my God! But the students didn’t find it problematic at all. I said: First, please look at the narrative voice. This Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator. Second, read the novel against the grain, and then you’ll see: the violence Humbert inflicts on the girl becomes very clear through the gaps. I didn’t have to argue much. What we’re practicing here is reading. And reading means: Do you read something as it appears to be intended, or do you read between the lines? Quite apart from that, these are representations. That was also what fascinated me so much about Shakespeare’s epilogues, when they stand there at the end of a play and say that it was all just theater. They do this in a culture of censorship, which allows Shakespeare to write plays critical of the state if he can say at the end: We were just theater, you dreamed with us here.

One of your central lessons has always been that problematic signs can be turned against themselves. You have also drawn a specifically feminist pleasure from your critical view of certain misogynistic patterns in culture.

With books or films that really inspire me, it’s much harder to say clever things about them. I’m much better at working on things that bother me in some way, that force me to think further. The desire to do so is the decisive factor for me.

And is this desire fruitful when you have to work analytically on something that bothers you?

In some way, yes. To use a Swiss German expression: when something preoccupies me, it starts to “drive” me—it forces me to think.

You demonstrated this in your book Nur über ihre Leiche (Only Over Their Dead Bodies), your study of the desires and fears that come into play in the literary motif of the beautiful female corpse. Do you think that the willingness to re-charge such questionable images and symbols in this way has generally declined?

Yes, probably. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t and shouldn’t continue to do so. We hear about pictures being taken down, or about people saying that they are no longer prepared to engage with naked women in painting. I would simply insist that works of art can and should be read for their ambiguity and contradictions. That is the legacy of Shakespeare and early American literature, which emerged within a strict Puritan context. This ambiguity in literature is crucial, and always has been. If you no longer have an eye for it because you only look at the surface, it becomes difficult. When you read something for the first time, you see very little; you have to look at it several times and read it over and over again. People are less willing to do that than they used to be.

Would you say that we have lost the ability to tolerate ambivalence, especially in culture?

Definitely. That’s why it’s so difficult to argue today.

Where would you locate the causes?

(Thinks.) I don’t know. But I’ll give it a try. Time? Something like that takes time. You have to read a lot and really grapple with the material. What many people also lack is a sense of the past. When you can compare something with other times, you realize that it’s often not so new and perhaps even more complex. I was raised that way; my intellectual formation has to do with conflict and ambivalence. That also has to do with my father’s Jewish way of thinking, where everything is based on conflict, on wrestling with the sacred text and its commentators. And I’m the little sister of those who fought against their parents in 1968 and questioned everything. It was all about conflict and contradiction. That has smoothed out a lot. And thirdly, but this is pure speculation…

Please go on.

In the culture we live in, everything looks so perfect, so secure, and so prosperous. But many people feel that everything is very uncertain. And I don’t mean that the world will burn down the day after tomorrow and World War III will break out. But this instability, as we experienced it in the first months of Covid: I was convinced that it would have a lasting impact on us and that we would not fall back into old patterns of thinking. I was really wrong about that. Something came up, and now we’ve pushed it back down again. So that would be my third word: massive attempts at repression. Ambivalence also has to do with uncovering things and then having to keep digging.

So it’s a thoroughly enlightening impulse. Is that what drives you?

The two sides of my theoretical desire are, on the one hand, the whole question of the Second World War and the Holocaust. We must continue to reflect on the Second World War, which means reflecting on fascism, racism, violence, and history. We have to keep talking about it and force people to look at something they still want to cover up. This is linked to psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and violence theory, and the question of how culture and politics are connected and how this connection is worked through in certain aesthetic forms.

And the other side of your theoretical desire?

For me, that remains my feminist interest. Women still don’t have the same status and still don’t get equal pay for equal work, and there is still a glass ceiling. I don’t really care whether you’re a liberal feminist, a difference feminist, or any other kind of feminist. This commitment to equality in terms of what texts we read and how we view history differently actually has something enlightening about it: keep reading, keep writing, keep arguing. And convince people that if we want to think about diversity in our culture, we have to do so in diverse ways.

When we think of terms like “cultural appropriation” or “critical race theory,” we get the impression that academic concepts are spilling over into society much more broadly today—only often in a completely distorted form. How do you explain that?

That is indeed new. Marxist or deconstructivist language used to appear only to a limited extent in public discourse. Today, people adopt terms without knowing where they come from and appropriate them for whatever they want. I call them Bing words: they go “Bing!” when you hear them, and then you don’t have to think any further. They are actually just mythical signifiers that are used for this and that, detached from their context. The actual discussion surrounding the terms has long since disappeared. They are really just being used like ping-pong balls. For me, the question is: Why is this suddenly the debate that is heating up politics so much? It’s actually quite strange. Why are debates igniting over terms like “cancel culture” or “cultural appropriation”? My answer would be: These are actually sham battles.

Sham battles? What do you mean?

I need to break this down. First, the world has become more global, and cultures have indeed become more diverse. And there is also—rightly so—a demand for more democracy. And democracy means taking this diversity seriously in the public sphere, whether real or virtual. But it also means that we have to endure the internal conflict that we used to describe with Derrida’s concept of difference: difference as something that cannot be resolved. These are terms that I would rather see in public discourse than cultural appropriation or critical race theory. We’ve been there before.

And now it’s all even more explosive than it was in the 1990s when we published the book “Hybride Kulturen” (Hybrid Cultures). We were the first in the German-speaking world to translate the postcolonial thinker Homi K. Bhabha. At the time, Germanists thought: Oh, come on, that’s not important for us in the German-speaking world.

That would be unthinkable today. But what do you mean by “sham battles”?

I believe that this migration of empty scientific terms into public discourse is a crutch in a public culture that has become very complex, a reduction of complexity that allows us to have a clear opinion: Do you want the gender star or not? Do you think people should still read Goethe’s Faust or not? Should high schools be allowed to put on a play about a gay couple or not? People can quickly say yes or no. Then they don’t have to deal with what’s much more important and what’s being swept under the rug. For example, the class issue or the fact that democracy is an open project that we have to keep working on.

You have been a Swiss citizen for almost twenty years. What is the biggest mystery about this country for you?

What amazes me most? The persistent and absolutely effective ability to repress things instead of dealing with them openly. This culture of restraint, of not speaking, of talking behind people’s backs. And linked to that is this culture of old boy networks and small, interconnected power groups – and how impossible it is to break that down.

And is that particularly pronounced here?

It’s particularly pronounced in Zurich. Probably in Basel and Bern too, but I can only speak for Zurich.

Is that also a statement about the university?

It’s a statement about the university, about cultural institutions, about the media.