(Assistant Professor)
A little background: While I was born in Europe, in Salzburg, Austria, most of my childhood was spent in Vancouver, Canada. I grew up in a bi-cultural, bi-lingual environment, which has had both its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages has been an appreciation of other cultures and desire to learn more about them, which also led to an extensive career of travel, largely in South Asia, and later to anthropology, both a personal and academic discipline which in turn, through many twists and tangles, led me to my present career as an associate professor in the English Department at Reitaku University. foreign language, academic writing, and a seminar called "International English." The latter deals with the proliferation of and dominance of English on the world stage, in both its positive and negative aspects, and tries to encourage a balanced view of both the history and current context of this to some extent extraordinary development. The challenge at this moment in history is to come to grips with, and forgive me if I end with the a quotation, this perspective: both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swathes of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe -- a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly-conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -- with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly (sic) apart and coming together at the very same moment." (Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1997:9).
Go To Japanese Page