World literature and transformative learning

Abstract

This study investigates how Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (2006) can be read and taught as an example of world literature in accordance with the transformative and culturally empowering ambitions of the Swedish upper secondary school curriculum. A total of 18 third-year students in the upper secondary science programme read the novel and recorded their reading experiences in journals. These journals have been thematically analysed, and the results show that the students’ processes of deconstructing and reconstructing the finalised reading, using literary concepts, help forward estrangement effects, which produce critical readings. As the students read for the plot and closed in on the end, their text-centred understandings of the novel were heightened, and by actively using subject-specific terminology (i.e. stylistic devices and modes of reading concepts), they strengthened the sense-making of their relations to the world as mediated through the text. Frames of reference about historical and current Sudan support the students in allowing the novel to become a merging point, at which their cultural horizons are nuanced through the juxtaposing of different perspectives. The students’ meta-reflexive readings allow for experiencing culture on the move as part of their transformative learning.