Authoring the German

Abstract

Recent trends in immigration to the German speaking countries have contributed to a new multi-cultural demographic in the "culture boxes" of L2 German textbooks. A close analysis of their content, however, reveals a racist discourse that promotes and reinforces a power-based, hegemonic majority culture at the expense of minorities, as well as materials that reinforce U.S. American cultural values at the expense of German ones by imagining a community of German speakers that meets U.S. national identity needs. Utilizing tools from the fields of semiotics, critical discourse analysis and cultural studies, the dissertation demonstrates how both racism toward the German "Other" and U.S. American ethnocentrism are promoted by discourse strategies including but not limited to: narration, indexicality, myth, metaphor and metonym. This dissertation views and comments on the L2 German textbook from the perspective of text itself, the culture therein represented, and the users of the materials, proposing that "reading" the L2 German textbook from a Cultural Studies perspective effectively addresses current theories about culture teaching and disciplinarity while bringing basic language learners into a much-advocated arena of critical thinking about the self and others. Such activities align basic language instruction more closely with beliefs about the responsibilities and goals of Humanities and General Education teaching in the United States.