I
How propitious it is for me to write about significant experiences, events in one's life, having some time and distance between the times narrated and the standpoint from which such narration is effected. Almost seven months have already elapsed since my return to Argentina after two years living and studying in New York. And that is a further distance to bear in mind, not just the psychological split between the events in one's memory and their evocation at a given moment, in a given place: to be physically as far away from the US now as I was from my home country then. If I had to adjectivize that distance I underwent - at times I should say, I withstood - today I can say, what a necessary experience! For it allows one to grow, because of leaving - temporarily though - your own things and beloved people, simply, to add new ones to your life. How distant do our language and culture soon become! Conversely, how close, how “domestic” what used to be given the adjective “foreign” gets! I am thinking of a language and culture, in particular those of the US, so much disseminated, apprehended, largely aided by mass-media, in these days of globalization.
II
I arrived in the US in August 2005. I started my MA program in Comparative Literature with a Fulbright Scholarship at State University of New York at Stony Brook. I was so eager to read and study, yet I soon realized that at the same time there is another learning process that is triggered once in the distance: the daily exposure to and interaction with the 'other.' I always intuited, even used to tell my students here in the Profesorado de Inglés at our local national university, that the everyday exchange in a foreign language is the moment when all that you have somehow practiced comes to be put to the test when communication is what is at stake. In the distance I confirmed what I have repeatedly sought to make our students at university see: that even unsuspected, banal moments can contribute to the knowledge of a foreign language and culture, language always embedded, contextualized, attached to such intricate array of values, norms, attitudes, ideological leanings, and social, historical and political variables instantiated in the most trivial exchange.
III
Carlo Guinzburg, the Italian historian, in his Ojazos de madera: nueve reflexiones sobre la distancia translated from the Italian into Spanish by Península in 2000 - addresses what he conceives of as the "intellectual fecundity" derived from the condition of being a stranger:
I have understood better something I thought I already knew: that familiarity, tied as it is to cultural belonging, cannot be a criterion of relevance. That the whole world is someone's country does not mean that everything is the same: it means we are all alien with respect to something or someone. I know I am saying nothing new, but it may be profitable to reflect again on the intellectual fecundity of this condition.
Distance, in other words, that which another country, and language, and culture afford is what here is thought of as exactly what allows for fruitful perspectives towards the same problems of language, teaching and learning one had in mind before being queried, recycled, restated, reterritorialized.
IV
The distance has now been temporarily bridged and I am back in my country, in my university department. In the distance I could examine complex modes of interrogating language, culture and, naturally, literature. For the contact with the document, any reading task that seriously attempts at casting light on
the text as a source of potentially innumerable answers, entails further reconfigurations of distance. First, there is the distance between the reader and the object of study, his/her time and the text's or the author's. Second, the distance presupposed whenever we regain a crucial form of consciousness as professionals of a foreign language: a linguistic and cultural distance to be even brought to and commented on in the classroom, the quotidian engagement with the other.
V
It is difference that distance clears the ground for. I have written a thesis on the representation of desire and writing in two South American writers, Pedro Lemebel from Chile and Claudio Zeiger from our country. How language represents, namely the strategies deployed at the level of rhetoric and poetics in representing a given situation, character and narration became a crucial question with which to read these two authors closely. I like to think of the space I have in the Profesorado de Inglés at UNMdP as one in which I can resort to the contact with a text that deserves to be examined, queried, in short, problematized in the classroom. Put in other words, I write about Lemebel and Zeiger, yet I reveal a form of reading that I also offer to anyone attempting to grapple with the complexity of any text used for a cluster of academic intents. Last, I would like to think of a further form of distance that should not be forgotten: the thin line that separates the figure of the English teacher from the diverse angles and interests of trainers and instructors to potential English teachers, those who teach how to teach, if that is possible at all. That form of disciplinary distance has afforded me a different perspective from which to make sense of the cultural complexity challenging the critical reader in the crucial role of a university instructor.
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