Curiosity about other cultures, tattoos and the last words of a monkey

Encyclopaedic activities of literary cosmopolitan Prof Dr Matei Chihaia

"I want to convey to students that you should try to think outside the box and be a citizen of this world," says Matei Chihaia, Professor of French and Spanish Literature at the University of Wuppertal. And this goal is no coincidence. It is the logical development of an interesting CV. But let's start at the beginning. Born in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, the current literary scholar grew up bilingual (Romanian/French). In 1979, his parents applied for asylum in Germany and Chihaia went through the entire German school system. "German culture was very important to my parents. The process of integration played a major role for me, and not just through school enrolment. I discovered a new language. My love of German literature is also connected to the fact that it had this exotic appeal for me. It was an attempt to understand more about Germany through books and to learn more about this country. Naturally, German then became my favourite subject," he explains. Kinship contacts to England expanded his language radius to include Anglo-Saxon, and his enthusiasm for Spanish emerged from the community of emigrated Argentinians who warmly welcomed him in Cologne.
"And I still have this curiosity about other cultures," he laughs. "I grew up in the 80s, when networked thinking was the keyword. It was important not to view individual cultural phenomena as isolated phenomena, but to see them in an overall context. In cultural studies, you also realise that an author lives in a certain time and that all the cultural phenomena that exist in that time - everything that came before - play a role for that author." In the multicultural environment in which Chihaia grew up, language became a central theme. He studied comparative literature, Romance languages and philosophy and wrote seminar papers on French, English and Chinese literature. "I really wanted to get to know world literature in its entirety."

The addition of the exquisite and the experienced in literature

Matei Chihaia gives German students a feel for Spanish and Latin American culture. To this end, he makes use of the various programmes that enable students to get to know the country of the foreign language. "You always need to travel to this country. And that's why I'm happy that we have so many mobility programmes here, so many opportunities to study in other Spanish-speaking countries. Students always have the chance to spend a semester or even a year in such a country," he explains. A stay abroad is even compulsory for teacher trainees.
Prospective Spanish teachers have to spend three months in a Spanish-speaking country. "That makes sense," says Chihaia, "because you don't just want to teach the language, it's also about regional studies and culture."
Together with Professor Diehr, who specialises in English, he has been running the Nicaragua project LABor (Learning across the borders) with the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Managua since 2018. Students work in binational tandems and reflect on the individual differences in the interaction between German and Nicaraguan students as well as the socio-cultural realities of the two countries. The project offers an authentic learning context that aims to promote critical cultural awareness among all participants. As the entire project is based on blended learning, a learning model that combines computer-based learning via the internet with traditional teaching, it also represents a new challenge for teachers. "It's a new task for us as teachers to teach this critical approach to media and also to teach students what a framework is. How can they determine what is fake news or reliable news? This in turn connects all parts of philology: specialised didactics, literary studies and linguistics."

A brief history of Spanish literature

The academic is always aware of his target audience and is currently working on the publication of a short history of Spanish literature for German students, which is certainly unique. "It will be a literary history that has to fulfil the following conditions: it has to be short and written for students who don't have much time, it has to be in Spanish and it has to contain as few prerequisites as possible." This project, which he is working on with three colleagues, is particularly demanding in view of the lack of prerequisites, "because a literary history always expects you to know the literature, to know literary texts. Instead, we try to provide detailed quotations from literary texts, but: these usually have a difficult vocabulary...", he explains. "Most literary stories are very difficult to read and very long." Her book "Breve historia de la literatura espanola", to be published in 2021, will provide crucial assistance.

The Golem - Artificial Intelligence of the 20th Century

In 1915, Gustav Meyrink published his novel "The Golem", a classic of fantastic literature about a creature made of clay that appears every 33 years in the Warsaw ghetto to protect the Jewish community. Almost 100 years later, Chihaia published the book "The Golem Effect", in which he revisits this figure. "The Golem is an artificial person like Frankenstein's monster, like the people who created Prometheus, like so many other artificial people who appear in literature," he explains. "The special thing about Golem is that it combines two elements that were linked in Weimar cinema at the beginning of the 20th century: magic and technology. The appearance of an artificial human being who is not purely technical and not purely magical is what interested me about this character." In addition, many of the authors he works with in this context are also inventors alongside their literary activities. "They all want to make a ground-breaking new technical invention and at the same time believe in spiritualism and psychoanalysing the unconscious." They combine both levels in a literary way, so to speak, creating a special kind of fantastic narrative, a fantastic experience. "For me, the Golem, especially in Paul Wegener's silent film and in the novel, is the epitome of a superimposition of technology and magic. But it doesn't end with the cinema. I believe that there are always innovations in the field of audiovisual media that offer audiences aesthetic experiences that they are not familiar with in order to perceive them as technical and magical at the same time. The learning machine, that's the Golem!" In the age of AI, this ghostly figure is more relevant than ever.

The theme of "violence" has changed

Chihaia's variety of themes, his interest in so many areas of literature seems immeasurable, but one subject has accompanied his entire biography: violence! As horrific as it is fascinating, this concept pervades the whole of world literature.
One of his areas of research is therefore the topic of verbal violence. "How does linguistic violence manifest itself today, how does the linguistic and literary taming of violence manifest itself? This is the subject of my anthology on violence as a framework for interpreting literature." The 46-year-old explains the increasing importance of violence, which has become a primary theme in the interpretation of literature in Latin America in the last 20 years alone. "There has always been a lot of violence. The 70s were a terrible time there in that respect: a time of dictatorships. But violence has changed. The way we perceive violence has also changed. People are now more sensitive to verbal violence and also more sensitive to forms of symbolic violence, i.e. the imposition of certain norms by a majority to which the minority must then submit. Gender-equitable language is one such example. If we are trying to curb violence against women, then part of this involves avoiding linguistic discrimination against women. That's what I'm working on."
The fact that violence has a place in almost all literary themes was recently examined by the academic in a recent seminar with his students. "In the first lesson, I asked my students what literary texts they knew in which violence appears," he explains and, with the exception of thought and landscape poetry, comes to the conclusion that "everything that is labelled as narrative and all dramas cannot do without violent conflicts." He puts forward two theses that illustrate the importance of violence in literature. "One is that literature is an aid to dealing with violence. Aristotle speaks of a catharsis, a cleansing of violent experiences. It therefore has a prophylactic function. One learns about violence in literature and is then protected from it. Or literature is a moral institution, as Lessing puts it. And the other thesis is that we naturally enjoy violence. We enjoy exposing ourselves to violence." The academic meets the astonished look on the face of his counterpart's face at such a thesis with the prompt reply: "That's why we enjoy reading crime novels so much."
In his research into violence in 17th century drama, he found that even back then people were asking whether the theatre was derailing the passions of the audience and, when comparing baroque fears with today's discussion about first-person shooter games on the internet, he notes that "the arguments then and now are very similar."
 

The theme of "violence" has changed

Chihaia's variety of topics, his interest in so many areas of literature seems immeasurable, but one subject has accompanied his entire biography: violence! As horrific as it is fascinating, this concept pervades the whole of world literature.
One of his areas of research is therefore the topic of verbal violence. "How does linguistic violence manifest itself today, how does the linguistic and literary taming of violence manifest itself? This is the subject of my anthology on violence as a framework for interpreting literature." The 46-year-old explains the increasing importance of violence, which has become a primary theme in the interpretation of literature in Latin America in the last 20 years alone. "There has always been a lot of violence. The 70s were a terrible time there in that respect: a time of dictatorships. But violence has changed. The way we perceive violence has also changed. People are now more sensitive to verbal violence and also more sensitive to forms of symbolic violence, i.e. the imposition of certain norms by a majority to which the minority must then submit. Gender-equitable language is one such example. If we are trying to curb violence against women, then part of this involves avoiding linguistic discrimination against women. That's what I'm working on."
The fact that violence has a place in almost all literary themes was recently examined by the academic in a recent seminar with his students. "In the first lesson, I asked my students what literary texts they know in which violence appears," he explains and, with the exception of thought and landscape poetry, comes to the conclusion that "everything that is labelled as narrative and all dramas cannot do without violent conflict." He puts forward two theses that illustrate the significance of violence in literature. "One is that literature is an aid to dealing with violence. Aristotle speaks of a catharsis, a cleansing of violent experiences. It therefore has a prophylactic function. One learns about violence in literature and is then protected from it. Or literature is a moral institution, as Lessing puts it. And the other thesis is that we naturally enjoy violence. We enjoy exposing ourselves to violence." The academic meets the astonished look on his counterpart's face at such a thesis with the prompt reply: "That's why we enjoy reading crime novels so much."
In his research into violence in 17th century drama, he found that the violence in 17th When comparing baroque fears with today's online discussion about first-person shooter games, he notes that "the arguments then and now are very similar."

Fashion - tattoos - piercings

Chihaia also thinks about seemingly banal topics such as fashion, tattoos and piercings, which turn out to be quite interesting in conversation. "My interest in fashion stems from my enthusiasm for the French structuralists and Roland Barthes, who wrote "The System of Fashion"," he explains. "With fashion, we express something and we communicate through what we wear. This plays an important role in literature," he continues, referring to the famous novel by Gustave Flaubert. "Why does Madame Bovary wear red stockings?" he asks with interest.
The literary scholar also has an opinion on piercings and tattoos: "It's an example of art that literally gets under your skin. I'm interested in this because I'm interested in the way we perceive literature and art. What does it do to the viewer? The skin is the organ that shields us from the outside world, that protects our insides from all violent impressions. Piercings and tattoos pierce this protective layer and are a sign of vulnerability and receptivity to art. We allow art to penetrate us and change us mentally or physically. Tattoos and piercings also have the additional function of possibly beautifying the body or showing belonging to a group."
He explains that every person who cries at a theatre tragedy or laughs heartily at a comedy undergoes a similar change. It does something to the body, changes it.
 

The last word of the monkey

In May this year, Professor Chihaia took part in the Wuppertal Zoo Talks as a speaker, where he spoke about the representation of monkeys in literary texts. Under the title "First and last words of the monkey in literature", he reported on examples of talking monkeys in novels and contemporary reports. From Franz Kafka's monkey from the report for an academy, which simply says "Hello" at the beginning, to press releases on 19th century circus monkeys, to monkeys that were raised in families and are said to be able to articulate individual words. Here, too, the theme of violence plays a decisive role. "With the Argentinian narrators I have dealt with, the question is: How do I teach a monkey to speak? As with the circus monkeys, this can only be done through certain acts of training. These acts of training are necessarily cruel and sooner or later lead to the monkey's death," he reports. "In these fantastic tales, the monkeys sometimes speak a word shortly before they die. And in the case of one story, the monkey is trained by not being given anything to drink. It is not clear to the reader whether the monkey spoke or whether the researcher just wanted to hear it. In any case, his last word is also 'water', which in Spanish is 'agua' and could simply be the translation of the last rattle into vowels."
A single word can, as in this case, touch the reader deeply and continue to do so long after reading. For Prof. Chihaia, it is definitely a concise building block of his cosmopolitan interest in the historical and contemporary literature of the cultures of our world.

Uwe Blass (interview from 24.10.2019)
 

Matei Chihaia studied Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and at the University of Oxford (where he obtained a Master of Studies in European Literature) and completed his doctorate in Munich on the theatre of French Classicism (2000). After his habilitation at the University of Cologne and deputy professorships in Regensburg and Cologne, he was awarded the DFG Heisenberg Fellowship. He has been a professor of French and Spanish literature in Wuppertal since 2010, where he is co-editor of the international and interdisciplinary e-journal DIEGESIS. Guest lectureships have taken him to Bryn Mawr College (Institut d'Études françaises d'Avignon, France), the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador) and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (La Plata, Argentina), among others.