Pedagogical Implications of Contact Literature

Abstract

AbstractThe multilingual and multicultural texts of contact literature delineate their authors’ homeland through linguistic and cultural references. Understanding such references is often perceived as the main challenge of assigning world literature texts to mainstream monolingual college students in the United States. In this chapter, I argue that the language in literature approach transforms the linguistic and cultural challenges of the text into tools of analysis. The goal is to help students become better capable of interpreting bilingual authors’ distinct use of the English language to depict foreign contexts. The language in literature approach thus seeks to expand the multicultural requirement of the humanities curriculum beyond the goals of second language acquisition programs and culturally sensitive pedagogies. This allows monolingual mainstream college students to begin acquiring the trans-lingual and transcultural skills as recommended in the 2007 MLA report. In her article published early January of 2017 in Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden notes that ten years after the MLA report calling for a more interdisciplinary transformation in the study of language and literature, the “two tiered” system is still the status quo. The ‘two-tiered’ system refers to the divide between foreign languages and the humanities departments in US colleges. In what follows, I offer a more detailed overview of the language in literature approach in teaching contact literature to mainstream, largely monolingual college students. The significance of this approach stems from the promising result of lessening the divide between language and literature courses. In addition, the pedagogical value of contact literature resides in its contribution to the precarious global attempts of bridging the divide between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ or the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ paradigm.