Jane Edwards

Wesleyan University

The New Yorker no longer runs quaint little stories culled from the British press under the rubric “There’ll always be an England,” but a steady stream of Jane Austen adaptations and gritty television police shows, along with a rise in the import of pickled onions and Devonshire cream, still serve to remind us of the range and unpredictability of British cultural products available to stimulate the American imagination. Raised in Britain but resident in the U.S. since 1971, I have always been fascinated and often puzzled by the nature of this “special relationship”— based, it sometimes seems, on largely fictional premises—as it has played out not in diplomacy, but in the academy. Here I will attempt to untangle some of the issues that characterize what might be termed “British studies ” on American campuses. These issues are of interest to American international educators because Britain plays a prominent role in exchange activities of all kinds. Common campus assumptions in respect to Britain have significant effects on the way in which we think about study abroad in Britain for our students, about the nature of British academic institutions, and about the quality of transatlantic academic interactions. Some of these assumptions, I will argue, need re-evaluation. Exploring this usually taken-for-granted corner of our intercultural lives may help us see with new eyes the ways in which our institutions shape and influence our students’ understanding and experience of this still (somewhat shakily) sceptered isle.

The study of British culture, whether focused on the historical or the contemporary, slides into the curriculum of American universities (and indeed all the way through the school system) not as an element in the campaign to infuse the international throughout the intellectual experience of our students, but as something much more comfortable and familiar. English culture is presented as a precursor, or at the very least as a close cousin, of the full-blooded American. The history of Britain is often presented and defined as the natural forerunner of U.S. history, and courses focusing on the role of women in medieval England or on English Renaissance drama have a different status than courses on the role of women in pre-Meiji Japan or the works of Racine and Molière. The box in which they are stored is a different one. This is not World History—it is in some sense an annex of American history. Patrick Wright points out that the mythic (constructed) historical identity of Britain

is sufficiently inclusive to embrace not only all true Britains but also white America as well. […] even if those expatriates who somehow drifted over the ocean onto the hard core of Earth’s greatest nation also went on to kick “England” out in a War of Independence, this only goes to prove their Englishness: how could people of such descent do anything but insist on governing themselves (after “English ideas of liberty, justice and self-government?”) (Wright 177)¹

Obvious and less obvious grounds of divergence are swept away under rhetoric of this kind, a staple of the public discourse. American academicians have periodically worked hard to define the point of separation between the English and the American, particularly in the 19th century, in respect to the definition of the American university and the strategies of liberal education, but as soon as new parameters for separation become comfortable, the scale tips, and the similarities once again seem to outweigh the differences. In our own era, the imperatives of cultural studies have led scholars towards redefining the status of England as primary begetter of a lot of American values and folkways. Within the new paradigm, however, which ascribes value to the contribution of other traditions, some things remain constant. This was, after all, a colony, and Americans are still negotiating gingerly the need to understand the colonizers. Even in an era when understanding of the negotiated stance of all stakeholders in events long over seems an undertaking worth the attempt, the very investigation of all the voices of those who have stood in opposition to that process of colonization requires definition and understanding of the attitudes and actions of that culture that has, until recently, essentially owned the public domains of American history. So it is that from kindergarten American children experience the English first through dioramas of Pilgrims and subsequently through Shakespeare, Dickens, and further selected episodes in history, which together form a composite suspiciously resembling Masterpiece Theater. No matter what the educational take is on imperialism and on the human rights violations of conquest, English history is part of America’s own mythic past. Without admitting to it, American education has been busily if somewhat incoherently engaged in British studies all along, but the real shared legacies of values, traditions, and customs mask the real divergences. So much is at least partially familiar that the gulf between contemporary English culture and contemporary American culture is only occasionally glimpsed, there between the undergrowth of muddled assumptions and the new canopy of the global homogeneity of cultural products.

This is of course particularly notable in respect to the study of literature. Students planning to major in English might well be hard put to know whether this is shorthand for “literature in English” or “literature like that of England” or “literature of England and America written in English and bits of the literatures of other countries that were written following English stylistic models.” English majors are apt to find themselves roaming from Keats to Louise Erdrich, Shakespeare to V.S. Naipaul, Beowulf to Oscar Hijuelos. Students are likely to notice when they study Naipaul that something complicated is happening culturally, but they will take Keats simply as a member of the 19th century. England is an old country, a country of the past, a Gormenghast territory of tradition, social stability and homogeneity, a country where even the mad cows of the 1990s are able to trace back their genealogies to grandmothers who chewed the cud through the Hundred Years War. And it is mainstream America’s “Old Country,” the forerunner, the precursor, and it is thus embraced and accepted on the basis of assumptions that are rarely questioned. Thus, American classrooms in a sense claim, as well as study, English literature. The appropriation may be justified, but it may also be misleading. The group of contemporary English writers of Indian, Asian, Caribbean and African background, who have “married the tradition of Austen and Dickens to the global culture that rose from the ashes of nationalism after the second world war” (Acocella 95)² may have a place in the syllabus of classes on postcolonial literatures, but this is not the English literature that first springs to mind for our students. Students are apt to be working with an imagined present that is really as much a mythic construct as the past. Thus they may build their expectations about study abroad in the U.K. as if they were planning a trip to a 19th century theme park.

The British mythic Pilgrim, a common language, Shakespeare, Harry Potter and Princess Diana are thus, incongruously, often the foundational layer of knowledge for those students we send to study in the United Kingdom. There are a lot of these students: 25,900 in 1997-98— almost one fifth of all U.S. students abroad. It may seem superfluous here to be asking why we send these students abroad, but it becomes significant when we consider the U.K. as a destination. I want to question whether the experience most students have in the U.K., on the basis of the particular assumptions and preparation they take with them, can possibly be fulfilling study abroad goals as we have defined them.

Study abroad has been defined as one element in a process called “internationalization,” which has many definitions, mostly something like:

The complex of processes whose combined effect, whether planned or not, is to enhance the international dimension of experience of higher education in universities and similar educational institutions. (de Wit 28)³

As part of such a strategy, sending students to the UK is (and has long been) a useful thing to do. England has always been a preferred destination for American students wishing to spend time abroad—the Henry Jamesian pull of Europe became extremely strong in the 19th century, and England has always been the most accessible part of that package. The mystique of those ancient institutions Oxford and Cambridge has great academic resonance—John Harvard graduated from Cambridge, after all. They have retained this mystique by way of startling conformity to the mythic image of the medieval, traditional, arcane and aesthetically pleasing, combined with the world’s most labor-intensive pedagogical strategy and a still-justified reputation for academic intensity, and this aura has partially spilled over to other British universities. Many American faculty members have spent time learning or teaching in the U.K., and since our own experience is always privileged, Americans have in general maintained very positive views of British universities, even after the depredations of the Thatcher Administration that so traumatized the higher education system. Students have thus gone to Britain with the blessing of their faculty because of faculty members’ comfort level with what they believe is happening in English classrooms, combined with their perception that because instruction is in English there will be no impediment to students’ learning in Britain as they do in the U.S. Study abroad in the

U.K. is open to students in all disciplines, and while modes of assessmentmay be somewhat different, integrating such study with the curriculum on the home campus has not presented significant problems. Not surprising, then, that since 1954 Britain has almost always been among the top three destinations for study abroad.

In recent years, however, the paradigm within which we consider the international dimension in higher education has changed. Discussion of “internationalization” has largely been replaced in American academic discourse by discussion of “the response to globalization.” Increasingly, we have student-centered goals, ambitious in their expectations for individual personal development and no longer focused on the provision only of rigorous, or at least appropriate, courses. Study abroad is examined not just as a statistical element in an institutional campaign, but in terms of providing students with an opportunity to develop both academic and personal competencies that will expand their world-view, reduce their ethnocentrism, and make them better able to live productively and cheerfully in a world where intercultural interactions are becoming the rule rather than the exception. Richard Lambert’s definition of “global competence” includes the attributes of knowledge, empathy (the ability to recognize validity in other points of view), approval (the ability to appreciate aspects of other cultures), foreign language competence, and task performance (the ability to achieve specific goals in a different cultural environment) (Lambert 12).⁴ This model of outcomes to be achieved matches similar shifts of emphasis in current general discussion of higher education, and is useful to us as international educators in ways that are immediately apparent. It is certainly possible to examine, if not to measure, our students’ plans for study abroad in terms of their potential for leading to such “global competence,” and since our institutions are increasingly grappling with demands that they should respond to globalization, we are legitimately asked how to describe, and indeed justify the effectiveness of study abroad.

It is therefore timely to consider the extent to which short-term study in the U.K. can lead to these outcomes for our students. I have already suggested that traditional reasons for sending students to the

U.K. have little to do with this definition, rooted as they are in respect ofacademic excellence and a sense of familiarity and compatibility. Lambert’s list is about something quite different. It is about the search for a mode of education which can free students from the unspoken—indeed, denied—assumption that the most basic human beliefs and values are universally shared, a conviction that burdens most people until something happens to change it. This deep-seated emotional conviction cohabits uneasily in contemporary popular culture with the notion that “everyone’s point of view is equally valuable.” A student who has Lambert’s global competencies knows and feels that neither of these things is strictly true. But it is not clear that a short period (anything less than a full academic year) in the U.K. actually results in the development of such competencies for many students. One of the major reasons for this is the problem of English.

The fact that Americans and Brits speak mutually-comprehensible varieties of English means that study in Britain is treated as a kind of autopilot immersion experience. It allows Americans to leap to the belief that a shared language implies shared culture, and it also reinforces a whole set of notions which bring into question the very issue of “foreign language competence” as framed by Lambert. Britain is today not only the originator of the language most spoken by America, it is also a shareholder in the ownership of the language everyone else most wants to learn. There is thus between the two nations the tacit agreement that English is enough. No one admits this: there are cheerful stories in American newspapers about the rise of foreign language learning in high schools (Hartford Courant),⁵ and language pedagogues in the U.K. point with pride to the fact that degrees in modern language require a year of residence abroad to insure fluency (Coleman 176).⁶ There is, however, also wide-spread recognition of the fact that English is the “the new Latin” which is “increasingly becoming the language of higher education and science around the world” (Bollag A73).⁷ Since America has so much difficulty with the issue of language, this makes partnership and interaction with the British at the very least restful. Perhaps “foreign language competence” can be written off as a pre-globalization requirement?

There are other aspects of the English proprietary share in the language of globalization that are extremely important for American students’ understanding of the subtler aspects of daily interaction in Britain, and which are often completely invisible to them. Students may be barely aware of the nature and history of the relationship between the English, Welsh and Scots, even though they study in Edinburgh or Cardiff, and since they are outsiders and not implicated historically (whether they experience themselves that way or not), it is unlikely that anyone will spend much time enlightening them. Language has important implications for the way in which Britain is positioned in its lukewarm commitment to become part of the European Union, allowing a separation based on having, as it were, other options to be maintained. The post-colonial

U.K. can continue to hedge its bets by claiming linguistic as well as his-torical kinship with the U.S., and has the ERASMUS (now SOCRATES) enrollments to prove it (de Wit 46).⁸ The complexities of these ambivalences and their relationship to the rapidly-changing and increasingly heterogeneous British society are unlikely to be glimpsed by most American undergraduates until they run up against them once they are actually in a classroom in England, and poorly understood by most even then.

It is not just language that renders Britain non-foreign. As I have suggested, students come to the U.K. with a set of beliefs and expectations about the society that they are entering that render it in many ways immediately familiar (“England is not exotic,” emphasized a colleague of mine at a recent information session). The British are of course complicit in this construction of an edifice of similarity (just as it is the Brits’ own mythic past that Americans have assimilated), and it would be foolish to assert that such similarities are not significant—apart from anything else, the dissemination of American cultural products in this age is obviously producing large-scale convergence of popular culture in most Western societies, certainly including the U.K. So yes, American students come to a society that is in many ways familiar and similar to their own. But there is another important element here, revealed by redescribing effective study abroad as a kind of ethnography.

Study abroad is, in the best instances, a fieldwork experience in human behavior, an experience in ethnography, which is the empirical study of human societies by the use of the methodology of participant observation, and has been for the most part the province of anthropologists. Recognition of the fact that study abroad can be compared to anthropological fieldwork, and that study of content in academic mode can fruitfully be contextualized within an ethnographic framework has recently informed interesting innovations in programming for study abroad. Students from Earlham College (a leader in this field), for example, are assigned ethnographic projects during their experience abroad because

Ethnographic inquiry, we have discovered, is a way to guide students to become autonomous cross-cultural learners and explorers who can describe, understand, analyze, appreciate and enjoy cross-cultural difference. (Jurasek Lamson and O’Maley 28)⁹

This approach is perhaps best exemplified by “experiential” study abroad programs such as those run by the School for International Training. Such programs typically involve homestays and intensive colloquial language study, community involvement and travel, seminars in fieldwork and independent study. Students who go to Tanzania or Indonesia as participants in such programs undergo (with supervision) a period of encounter with another society that is not just a matter of immersion: they are, ideally at least, provided with tools to understand the society in which they are immersed and, significantly, their own response to that society. However, it must be said that on many campuses the notion that such elaborate pedagogical strategies might be necessary in a European country, English-speaking at that, is likely to encounter serious resistance.

There is also the problematic fact that ethnography is premised on a belief in our ability to understand human behavior by empirical analysis, and this is a moment of ethnographic angst, of profound uneasiness about our ability to understand “the other.” The theoretical matrix of post-modernism and the re-evaluation of cultural analysis to reveal the confusions produced by the complex relationship between observer and observed have led us to extreme caution about our ability either to understand other societies or to write about them (see for example Clifford,¹⁰ Atkinson and Coffey¹¹). To some extent we have exempted study abroad from the kind of scrutiny to which textual representations of the partici-pant-observation of anthropologists have been subjected—for obvious reasons. The goals of study abroad are multiple and contested, as I have suggested, and the analysis of the host society often takes place in an area which we do not even monitor; we most frequently look at the grades students bring back, and leave it in the hands of the individual student to process the other aspects of the experience. We do this even if we are working with Lambert’s “global competence” model or something like it, because we work most easily with what we know and can measure, and because the real currency of educational exchange at this level is: credit. Thus, we are sending students abroad hoping that they will have the kind of perspective-changing experience that can be induced by a significant encounter with the “other,” but we do this at a moment when all such encounters are suspect, and we do it, in many cases, without formally or even informally preparing students for such an experience. When we send students to the U.K., if they take with them no discriminating expectations that they will in fact be in a foreign society, it seems over-optimistic to expect that this can possibly be such a meaningful encounter.

If there is any merit to this complaint, then I would seem to be suggesting that the only valid study abroad experience is a semester on a carefully constructed experiential program in Cameroon or Thailand. I would not go so far—in fact I would argue that a full academic year spent in any society, with even minimal preparation, is long enough for any student (who wishes to do so) to achieve the kind of intellectual and effective shift Lambert suggests. But the vast majority of students go abroad for shorter periods—today only 10 percent of undergraduates students spend a full year abroad. What then is happening to a student who spends, say, two terms at the University of York?

To answer this question, we need first to return to the question of language. I referred to the “shared-language fallacy” above, and claimed that it is language that makes it possible to think about study in the U.K. with less anxiety than we might think about study in France or Spain; it makes it possible, together with the collection of assumptions I have mentioned, to exempt the British from “otherness.” The primary sources do not, as it were, require translation, and it is easy enough to ignore the deep rifts signaled by tell-tale surface signs of differences in social organization, spirituality, and familial interactions. We always understand what is said in our transatlantic dialogues, and this effectively masks the fact that we are frequently wrong about what is meant. Looking at this phenomenon at the lowest level of description, the student arrives in York and finds, essentially, the expected: nice friendly English-speaking people doing lots of gardening (although probably less friendly and doing less gardening than their American counterparts, but students, trapped by expectations, are unlikely to notice that); plenty of old infrastructure like York Cathedral and the Shambles; a lot of American television shows; and courses that approximate the curriculum at home. English culture also falls much further towards the “indirect” end of the continuum (on which America is placed very close to the “direct” end in terms of cultural interaction), so there is a good chance that an American student will not have the experience of contradiction (except in political debate, which in the British abrasive mode makes Americans so nervous as to avoid it altogether). Because all the various miscommunications possible in such encounters are happening through the medium of English, it is more than possible for a student to spend four months in York without delving much deeper into the culture. In a country where the language is not English, every interaction can contain reminders of “foreign-ness”; in England, every interaction can reinforce notions of kinship. This high level of comfort can work very effectively against the processes of self-discovery that we anticipate as necessary and productive components of study abroad.

So, does the student in York encounter the “other,” and does it matter? If an appropriate response to globalization is to try to produce students with new sets of competencies of the kind described by Lambert, then yes, it does, because study abroad is a primary route to the development of such competencies. There are strong voices however, especially in the social sciences, for the argument that necessary global knowledge in the new information age is a matter of systems knowledge, and that in fact localized knowledge of any single culture is only of marginal importance: “territoriality is odious; knowledge attached in and for itself to any specific territory is archaic and limited, low-tech and low-brow” (Ludden 6).¹² Sojourns abroad, if our institutions adopt this intellectual agenda, will be important only as opportunities for gathering knowledge of specific fields, or perhaps refining negotiation skills, and might become unnecessary altogether as the technologies for distance learning improve rapidly and radically. But this ignores the human dimension of our efforts to grapple with the world as we find it: as educators we still accept the responsibility for developing the whole student, and while we should remain very much aware of this debate, we can probably uphold our commitment to the development of a culturally-rich interior life for our students and to forging a powerful resistance movement in the face of cultural homogenization. We work, after all, at the level of the individual as well as the local and the global.

This suggests a course of action. My jaded views on study in the

U.K.

is often a matter of direct enrollment, and such students have anexcellent chance to become part of a community, but they too often lack the preparation to turn this into the cross-cultural experience we believe it to be. Better preparation can make an enormous difference, and we could manage such preparation. First (and least likely) we might run students through a short re-education program based on contemporary life in Britain, designed to compete with the Masterpiece Theater model. I designed such a program as an intensive course for students with very limited experience going from the State University of New York at Potsdam to Birmingham for a term in Liverpool, using British situation comedies and cartoons, Royal genealogies and sociology texts, short stories and films. That kind of content-based study served them well, they alleged, and several of them had stories to tell to prove it. They felt as if they had at least some knowledge of the society and cultural products that framed their English cohorts’ experience and world view, and the orientation that they received in the U.K. contained no component of this kind. Since it is very possible that students in the U.K. will be studying in classrooms with British students and that no accommodation will be made in the syllabus to the different background of visitors (nor should it), and since it is also relatively likely that students will have no coursework designed to teach them about Britain as a foreign society, we could at least give them a plan of action for developing this knowledge before they go and while they are there. If we cannot mount such programs ourselves, we can work with colleagues in the U.K. to create such options, as indeed some institutions have. But it would be far better if we recontextualized this expe

rience as part of what would amount to an area studies program.

What might a student accomplish if study in the U.K. required a strong classroom preparation in something approximating an area studies curriculum? Such a student would have taken courses in British history and literature (in comparative perspective, by all means, but with the focus on the British rather than the American side of the equation), but would also have been given the tools for analysis of contemporary British society. Sampson’s Essential Anatomy of Britain¹³ is due for an update, but the information contained by that work and its predecessors is a powerful component in a contextualizing course in contemporary British society that would tie other elements of such a curriculum together. The interests of individual faculty always determine the detail of course clusters of the kind that would be ideal for a curricular project of this kind, but an area studies program drawing together a range of disciplinary perspectives in the social sciences and humanities could provide students with what they would need in order to undertake a direct enrollment experience at York University and experience English society as an “other,” separate and different, culture. The subtle difference in content emphasis in courses, the underlying assumptions in discussion, the attitudes brought by their British cohorts to the classroom but not made explicit—all would then become not minor sources of puzzlement but pieces of evidence in the construction of a rich, nuanced understanding of British society that could produce academic work of exceptional caliber. We have all seen students produce such work—the foundations of senior theses in sociology, in history, in music.

Students who study in England as participants in American-run island programs may receive considerable classroom background on the U.K., but they may also find themselves socially isolated (particularly in London) and not even potentially part of any recognizable local community, and thus cut off from much of the experiential learning that comes from interactions with their British peers. However, such programs offer special opportunities to construct programs whose content is of no use or interest to British students because they already have native-speaker knowledge of British society. If such programs develop strategies for getting students out of their expatriate peer group they can offer real advan-tages—but that depends on another element of preparation.

The second element of such preparation would surely be an introduction to the ethnographic process, complete with critique, drawing on the methodologies and cross-cultural knowledge developed under the rubric of cross-cultural communication studies (e.g., Luce and Smith¹⁴). Raising students’ antennae to the fact that this is in fact a foreign culture may indeed best be accomplished through role play and other active exercises rather than information-sharing. Students could be introduced to the concept of analytical journal writing as a means of optimizing their experience, as advocated by Wagner and Magistrale,¹⁵ who present a very accessible plan of action and strong rationale for the value of the activity. The burden is then on the organizers of programs in the U.K. to develop opportunities for students to use these skills in the communities in which they find themselves.

I have suggested that far from being the easiest option in study abroad, the U.K., hiding its otherness under a sort of assumption blanket, may require not less but more preparation. We can, of course, return to the comfort of numbers of bodies moved and positive evaluations registered, but if we are serious about providing our students with the opportunity to develop global competence, then we will wish to roll up our sleeves and get serious about inventing curricular and extracurricular tools to help students we send to the U.K. have an academically brilliant and genuinely cross-cultural experience, rather than an assumption-confirma-tion trip to England’s “green and pleasant land,” to that “other Eden,” to the too-familiar domain of the “Cousins.”

Notes

1 Patrick Wright, On Living in An Old Country, Thetford, Norfolk: Thetford Press, 1985.

2 Joan Acocella, “The Third Way: Review of Kazuo Ishiguro ‘When We Were Orphans,’ ” New Yorker, Sept 11 2000, 95-96.

3 Hans De Wit, “Education and Globalization in Europe: Current Trends and Future Developments,” Frontiers, Fall 1995, 28-53.

4 Richard D. Lambert, “Parsing the Concept of Global Competence,” in Educational Exchange and Global Competence, Richard D. Lambert, ed. New York: Council on International Educational Exchange 1994, 11-24.

5 “Italian Not Such A Foreign Language,” Hartford Courant, September 12 2000, A1, A11.

6 James A. Coleman, “Language Learning and Study Abroad: a European Perspective,” Frontiers, Fall 1998, 167-203.

Burton Bollag, “The New Latin: English Dominates in Academe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8 2000, A73A77.

8 Hans De Wit, “Education and Globalization in Europe: Current Trends and Future Developments,” Frontiers, Fall 1995, 28-53

9 Richard Jurasek, Howard Lamson, and Patricia O’Maley, “Ethnographic Learning While Studying Abroad,” Frontiers, Fall 1996, 2:1, 23-44.

10 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

11 Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey, “Realism and its Discontents: on the Crisis of Cultural Representation in Ethnographic Texts,” in Theorizing Culture, Barbara Adam and Stewart Allen, eds. New York: New York University 1995, 41-57.

12 David Ludden, “Area Studies in the Age of Globalization,” 1998. Retrieved from http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/areast2.htm

13 Anthony Sampson, The Essential Anatomy of Britain, London: Harcourt, 1993.

14 Louise Fiber Luce, and Elise Smith, Eds., Toward Internationalism, 2nd ed. Cambridge MA: Newbury, 1987.

15 Kenneth Wagner and Tony Magistrale, Writing Across Culture: An Introduction to Study Abroad and the Writing Process, New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

References

Recommended Books for International Education Administrators

Adam, Barbara, and Stuart Allan, eds. Theorizing Culture: An

Interdisciplinary Critique After Postmodernism. New York: New York

University, 1995

This collection of essays by British scholars in cultural studies is interesting in two ways: the eighteen extremely diverse essays introduce the reader to the salient field of cultural studies as conceptualized in the U.K. Since the subjects dissected by the essays—ranging from the representation of AIDS through attitudes to nature to the contemporary construction of the idea of family—are contextualized in British society, these essays offer keys to analysis of cultural distinctions between the U.S. and the U.K.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,

Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Anyone interested in the study of culture in the age of globalization would be advised to start with Clifford: whether engaging issues of cultural appropriation in museum exhibitions, the conceptualization of native American tribal identity, or the preponderance of “hybrid products” at this moment in history, Clifford maps out strategies for broaching cultural studies that are always provocative and have become powerful models for the analyses of cultural products of this age.

Lewis, Tom J., and Robert E. Jungman, eds. On Being Foreign: Culture Shock in Short Fiction. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1986.

Fiction can do serious work for the student of intercultural encounters, and short stories serve as effective guides for students in ways inaccessible to instructional manuals. It is time for a new version of this anthology, but until one appears, it should be a source book for all international educators. Paul Theroux’s “The Yard Sale” and Jane Bowles’ “Everything is Nice” are two of the best of these wonderful stories. This text can serve as a useful model for educators to use in identifying British short fiction for use in the same way.

Miller, Stuart. Understanding Europeans. Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications, 1987.

I am surprised to find myself recommending any book entitled “understanding” anything. This wise and elegant book from a perhaps unlikely source (a former professor of comparative literature who became director of the Esalen Institute) clarified for me by anecdote and extrapolation realities about contrasting American and European cultural values I had barely intuited. I would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone who wants to develop any analytical sense of the elements of world view that shape social behaviors in Britain and in the other European “old” countries.

Sampson, Anthony. The Essential Anatomy of Britain. London: Harcourt, 1993.

No longer completely up to date, Sampson’s encyclopedic presentation of contemporary Britain is full of thought-provoking and startling detail, and provides factual information basic to an understanding of the way in which British society, and particularly public life, is constructed.

Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in

Contemporary Britain. Thetford, Norfolk: Thetford, 1985.

Nothing that has appeared in the years since Wright’s book was published has matched the depth and sensitivity of his analysis. A rich text in the tradition established by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, Wright’s book invites the reader to examine in exhaustive detail a series of cases in British attitude towards cultural history, cultural products and national values. Chapters can be read and assigned as separate cases. A dense work of great specificity, this can open unexpected avenues of inquiry and imagination for the American reader studying or, better, sojourning in Britain.