The Local as the Global: Reflections on Teaching World Literature

Abstract

52 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 photo : kevin lau I n recent years I have been searching for strategies to demystify the unruly idea of “world literature” for a general undergraduate student population in a North American university. Although this search relates to specific concerns with college pedagogy, the insights it yields can be useful beyond my particular context. Upon taking up a teaching position in 2010, I was informed by my new colleagues that while I would teach advanced undergraduate courses on world/postcolonial literatures for English majors and graduate courses, I would also teach large numbers of non-English majors seeking to fill the university’s “diversity” requirement. Only recently did I realize that these circumstances and curricular conditions are, in fact, the natural habitat of world literature, where it has the most reach and can do the most work. Initially, as a newly minted PhD, I was zealously committed to the imperatives of world literature on its own terms and for its own sake. Admittedly, I have not foreclosed on my early goals of producing readers of literary texts who are curious about the different and the distant and, with a little luck, inspiring them to go on to become polyglots and literary scholars. I now see my job, for the most part, as a very different one: less cloistered and more student-oriented in the broadest sense. As a teacher of world literature, I am accountable to all students, and not to English majors exclusively. essay The Local as the Global Reflections on Teaching World Literature by Emad Mirmotahari The following essay argues for the importance of shifting world literature courses away from “survey” and toward the interrogation of categories of knowledge that typically organize the world. This is best accomplished by foregrounding minoritized literatures and beginning from “home.” WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 53 Realizing that my world literature course may possibly be the only one of its kind that many students will take, my challenge as a new professor was configuring a onesemester course that maximizes the intellectual rewards of world literature. It is still quite common to encounter the “great books” model, the idea that world literature is an aggregate of what Margaret Cohen calls the “great unread.” The peril of this approach is that it turns world literature into the instrument of some perfunctory “multiculturalism ” that requires little mental labor from students, reducing them to impassive cultural tourists. Instead of this approach, world literature courses at the introductory and general level must unsettle students by making them “unthink” their worldviews, or at the very least be conscious of them. World literature must show them the synergies between the local, national, regional, and global. To this end, world literature courses can, and perhaps must, begin at home, which for my students and myself is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , USA. This way, students see how the local, the proximal, and the familiar are coordinates of this thing called the world; the world is not something exotic, menacing , and inhospitable but an accretion of what they consider home, a larger community to which they are native. More specifically , I have found that local literatures produced by minoritized writers are especially conducive to fostering an understanding of the traffic between the local and the global. This is one of the ways in which the conversations around “world” and “postcolonial ” literature are finding confluence as categories of inquiry, where world literature takes valuable lessons from the enterprise of postcolonial studies. The latter insists that power and the way one is socially situated affect how one reads and writes the world, an idea that informs the way educators use world literature as a means of encountering and learning from difference. Foregrounding local and minoritized literatures as an entry into world literature does have a historical antecedent. Johann von Goethe, widely credited with naturalizing the term “world literature” (Weltliteratur ), famously declared, “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Less famous but related to this declaration was Goethe’s attention to local and regional literatures , or “subnational literatures.” I do not mean to ascribe to Goethe some vanguard iconoclasm...