Teaching World Literature Research Articles

The Controversy of Teaching World Literature and the Importance of Translation in The Field of English Studies

For literary texts to be taught in World Literature courses in the Departments of English Literature, they must be translated into English as a general rule. Some scholars advocate for translating literary texts, and others believe that translation as a methodology does not do justice to these texts. This study aims to lay out the arguments for each position and evaluate them. The significance of this study is to show that World Literature remains an essential field and to highlight the importance of translation. This study questions the modes and purpose of translating literary texts. The result of this study includes a discussion of the need for translation to promote the wide circulation of literary texts and ideas and a consideration of the positionality of critics, scholars, and readers in assessing translation. The study concludes with conducting more focus and scholarly efforts on translation techniques and methodologies.

Best practices in teaching world literature: A phenomenological study

This study envisioned and explored the lived experiences, challenges, coping mechanisms, and best practices of English teachers in teaching world literature in Montevista District, Davao de Oro. It utilized the qualitative-phenomenological method of research. Data for this research were collected in random sampling method from the five English teachers in four participating schools through individual in-depth interview. The result of this study revealed that English teachers experienced difficulties and challenges in teaching world literature because of the lack of literature-related trainings and seminars attended. Moreover, this study also found that there were several teaching strategies as coping mechanisms in exploring literature. In addition, this research determined the best practices of the participants in teaching world literature such as the use of differentiated teaching strategies, video materials, and group activities. Thus, on the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that due to lack of trainings and seminars conducted, English teachers experienced difficulty in teaching world literature. As a recommendation, District English coordinator of Montevista District in Davao de Oro should conduct more training and seminars in teaching world literature.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry Lingfeng Nie (bio) Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry (eds.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor, The Modern Language Association of America, 2019, 260 pp., $29.00, ISBN: 978-1-6032-9406-5. The popular MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature has been committed to providing instructors with specific pedagogical advice on literary works or writers. This volume on Flannery O'Connor is the first book dedicated to a major Southern woman writer, filling a gap in the scholarly literature on approaches to teaching O'Connor. The editors are distinguished O'Connor experts: Donahoo has coauthored Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism (2020), and Gentry is the editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review. They have gathered twenty great O'Connor scholars and instructors who have met the daunting challenge of teaching O'Connor's oeuvre, produced in the mid-twentieth century, to high school and college students in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The result is an ambitious anthology, providing perceptive readings as well as updated approaches to teaching O'Connor. The book is appropriately divided into two parts. The first, much shorter part, "Materials," introduces an invaluable compendium of background information, such as a succinct summary of accessible editions of O'Connor's works, a useful list of reference works—mainly biographies and monographs—for teaching O'Connor, a review of the most significant critical scholarship on O'Connor (involving historical, religious, and Southern culture studies), and a guide to the audiovisual resources related to O'Connor (including film adaptations, documentaries, and digital resources). There is also a brief but helpful mention of the collection of O'Connor manuscripts housed at Georgia College and State University and Emory University. This part closes with an extremely small segment on O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah and her final home, in Andalusia. Guided by the results of an online survey of 149 instructors teaching O'Connor, "Approaches," the second and most substantial part, is organized into five sections to address thorny issues confronting them and offer new pedagogical strategies to approach the works of O'Connor. The first section, "The Author as Teacher: O'Connor as Self-Critic," focuses on O'Connor's comments on her own works and Brantley's suggestions on how to use O'Connor's correspondence to engage students, revealing how she "wanted to shape or at least take part in the critical discourse on her work" (47). The subsequent section, "O'Connor and Religion," meaningfully unravels the most common myth—that O'Connor's works are evidence of her Christian faith, which has long been "a mainstay for O'Connor criticism and a stumbling block for teachers" (30). "Contexts: Race, History, Film, and Science," the third section, not only situates O'Connor in historical, [End Page 123] social, and cultural context but also proposes interdisciplinary approaches by putting O'Connor's works in dialogue with science and technology studies and ecocriticism. The following section—for me, the most interesting section—"O'Connor and Other Authors," considers O'Connor's corpus in conjunction with authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison, as well as in the context of popular music. This part ends with the valuable section, "Specialized Perspectives," opening the study of O'Connor to new angles and topics, including, for example, women's studies, narrative stylistics, and disability and medical studies in accordance with the development of modern literary theory. The essays collected in the volume, although diverse in scope and topic, are bonded together by the persistent effort to fully capture the complexity of O'Connor and her works. It is assumed that O'Connor is interesting to students only as a Catholic Southern writer, and her works make sense only through "theology and her personal religious beliefs" (3). The book reveals a multifaceted, modern O'Connor who defies easy summation and whose works have continuing value and lend themselves readily to various pedagogical approaches and critical theories. For example, Doug Davis recommends...

The development of health promotion competence in teaching world literature

The aim of the article is to show how the health promotion technology can be used to ensure life safety (according to S. Postoienko), and raise students’ awareness about healthy behavior in integrated classes when learning of E. Ionesco’s drama «Rhinoceros» (World literature) and go on to summarize and systematize the acquired knowledge while learning the topic «The Mob» (Life safety). The methodology of the survey is range of scientific methods and approaches. A content-oriented approach has been applied to identify content-based integration of academic disciplines in one topic. The activity-based approach made it possible for university students to acquire new knowledge in the process of their independent educational and cognitive activity. The comparative method helps to compare the images created by E. Ionesco with the literary process and the traditions of world literature, and to reveal the author innovation in the field of eidology. The scientific novelty: the article describes the model of an integrated lesson «The Mob», which helps to summarize the theoretical knowledge on the topic. Students correlate their ideas about the mob psychology and the characters’ behavior in E. Ionesco’s drama «Rhinoceros» (lack of personality and responsibility for their actions; low intelligence and high emotionality; being influenced by a leader; high impressionability; rapid mood swings). Conclusion. One of the key objectives of higher education, which is in line with the social policy of our government, is to preserve and promote public health. The study program for getting bachelor’s degree aims to build health promotion competence among university students providing the health promotion technologies to be used during their studies. Non-standard approaches and the use of health promotion technology contribute to the development of students; skills to use psychological and pedagogical techniques, methods, approaches to solve the problems of preserving and promoting public health, and acquiring the necessary professional skills for their future career. Keywords: integrated learning, world literature, life safety, health promotion technology, health promotion competence.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro Francesc Morales Álvarez-Castro, Luis, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Modern Language Association of America, 2020. 247 pp. ISBN: 9781603294423. Miguel de Unamuno is one of the most studied and debated Spanish authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no surprise, then, that one of the last additions to the Modern Language Association of America publications is a book about the Basque-born writer. The following essay reviews the goals, target, and possibilities of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno, edited by Luis Álvarez-Castro. The context in which the volume has been published will also be an element of concern for this academic review. As part of the MLA series, this volume provides instructors with resources to teach certain literary texts. Nonetheless, Spanish letters do not have a strong predicament among the series. If readers look at the one hundred and seventy-one volumes in the collection Approaches to Teaching World Literature, they will see how very few explore Spanish literature. Less than seven per cent are related to authors or works from Spanish letters. Therefore, the book edited by Álvarez-Castro in 2020 is not just a qualitative addition to the ranks of MLA scholarly production, but also a necessary quantitative one. The goal and target of the volume has a clear double intention in mind. On the one hand, "while Unamuno's critical relevance in Spanish studies is secure and indisputable, the author's standing is less prominent in other academic fields and in Spanish literature syllabi at the undergraduate level" (ix). Also, he is greatly underrepresented in the broader context of comparative studies, such as general education courses on world literature, as well as in courses taught by departments of philosophy, religion, French, and English (ix). Indeed, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno is helpful not just for instructors of Spanish literature classes, but also for English and philosophy courses as well. The interdisciplinary nature of the text is the main contribution of the book to the humanities at large because the philosophical aspect of the writer is often neglected. This section needed a better location in the organization of the essays, instead of an odd position next to the last. To effectively organize the 247-page volume, Álvarez-Castro divided the book into two distinctive parts. The first section gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works focusing primarily on scholarly and critical sources. The second section is a group of essays that introduce students to the range of his works in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms. More so, it includes audiovisual resources still in preparation at [End Page 205] the time of completing the book, such as Alejandro Amenábar's film Mientras dure la guerra, "a historical film based on the last six months of the writer's life" (16). In other words, part one, together with the works cited section at the end of the edited volume, is likely the most complete bibliographical recollection about Unamuno to date. On the other hand, the scope of part two is so vast that it required a subdivision about the writer's biography and his texts as a teaching tool. Indeed, the short essays cover a variety of approaches, including the biographical details. The exile the author suffered in the 1920s is present in several of the essays, such as in the ones by Stephen Summerhill (71) and by Ana Urrutia-Jordana (87–92). Also, the admiration he had for other Iberian cultures, such as the Portuguese and the Catalan, is certainly addressed in the introduction written by Álvarez-Castro himself (19) and in Juan Francisco Maura's text: Unamuno learned that "there is no history of Spain without Portugal and that the history of Spanish literature would be incomplete if it did not embrace Portuguese literature as one of its central components" (77). As Maura asserts in his essay, the Basque writer has a lot to offer given current nationalist polemics in Spain (77). Here we have...

Comics-Based Worktext for Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Skills in World Literature

This study explores the use of the self-designed comics to enhance the reading comprehension and vocabulary skills of the college students in world literature. Specifically, it identifies the literal, interpretative, creative and evaluative domains of reading comprehension and the context clues, word analysis, word structure and loan words elements of vocabulary skills. It also evaluates the acceptability and effectiveness of the comics through the objective, language used, graphic designs, usability, readability, knowledge ability, values discovery and additional information. The results showed significant differences between the reading comprehension and vocabulary skills pre-test and the posttest indicating improved level of skills with the use of comics as instructional material. However, the improved skills level is not correlated to the acceptability and effectiveness of the material. Furthermore, the use of comics deliver moral lesson to the readers while increasing the reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. The study finds it helpful to use the comics-based work-text in teaching world literature.

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

The technology of «Learning in collaboration» in teaching world literature in higher education

This article discusses the interactive educational technology "Training in cooperation (cooperative learning)", presented in the innovative, author's method of the MHAT. The main idea of this technology is to create conditions for active joint activity of students in various educational situations, aimed at the development of critical thinking. The learning process in small academic groups relates to technologies of the humanistic direction in modern pedagogy.

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch

Reviewed by: Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch Ian Ellison Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. By David Damrosch. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2020. x+385 pp. £30. ISBN 978–0–691–13499–4. From What Is World Literature? in 2003, to the co-edited volumes of the Longman Anthology of World Literature in 2004, Teaching World Literature in 2009, and 2011’s Routledge Companion to World Literature, much of David Damrosch’s work to date has concerned the fiercely debated category of ‘world literature’. In his most recent book, however, he returns to the disciplinary purview of his Harvard professorial chair, while striving to retain an ostensibly global perspective. Anthological limitations, pedagogical practices, and interpretative approaches—to say nothing of theoretical wrangling—remain central concerns. Yet though the field of comparative literature may appear as embattled as ever, the outlook is far from bleak. [End Page 109] Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age advertises its pluralism in its title and takes this seriously throughout. Damrosch’s eight main chapters offer a broad historio-geographical survey of comparative literature, paying particular attention to its multiple nodal origins as an academic discipline and its transformations through emigration undertaken by key comparatists. He also delineates a plethora of theoretical, linguistic, and hermeneutical tools of which comparatist scholars may avail themselves. ‘Our global literary aspirations’, Damrosch asserts in the Introduction, ‘need to be matched by greater engagement with the rich variety of comparative scholarship across the past two centuries and in many parts of the globe’ (p. 6). Taking particular aim in several instances at the Warwick Research Collective’s co-authored Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Damrosch is not unjustly dismissive of comparative studies that, for all their merits, limit their analytical purview solely to literary works whose political sensibilities match their own, that focus exclusively on male writers, and that make claims concerning global literary systems without citing a single primary or secondary text in a language other than English while discussing multiple foreign-language novels in English translation. It would have been illuminating for Damrosch’s purposes to dwell further on the grammatically varying terms for comparative literature in other languages: ‘littérature comparée’ or ‘literatura comparada’ (‘compared’), versus ‘vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft’ (‘comparing’), for example. Nevertheless, on matters of language most especially, readers of the Modern Language Review will surely find themselves in agreement with much of Damrosch’s fifth chapter which addresses head-on the thorny matter of original-language work, highlighting this as being fundamentally entwined in comparative literature’s philological roots. ‘Every formally trained comparatist’, he argues, ‘should have an excellent knowledge of at least one language beyond their “native” language (if they don’t already grow up with two or three), and some will need an equally good knowledge of at least one more’ (p. 192). Damrosch emphasizes how intrinsic learning foreign languages is to literary study and how this can—and, indeed, should—be a lifelong endeavour: ‘If we need to know more, then it is time to get back into language class—a worthwhile endeavour at any age—or to collaborate with someone who has the language we lack’ (p. 192). Comparatists must nevertheless also have the humility to recognize their own limitations: ‘If neither is an option, the topic is best left for someone else’ (p. 192). Despite his distancing himself from it, the pull of the American planet is at times irresistible and Damrosch devotes several pages to the make-up of ‘comp lit’ programmes and ‘state of the discipline’ screeds from previous ACLA meetings. Nevertheless, knowledge of one’s own history and origins is invaluable and the majority of Comparing the Literatures offers a positively pluralistic and substantial overview of how comparatists from all parts of the world have shaped and reshaped literary analysis over the centuries. The pedagogical need to overcome ethnonationalist tunnel-vision while championing critical and imaginative flexibility is glaringly evident ex negativo in the failures of international politics in recent decades. [End Page 110] Comparing the Literatures helpfully maps the current disciplinary territory, leaving it to us...

Breaking the Boundaries: Reimagining the Comparative Literary Method and Pedagogy in the Philippine Literature Classrooms

At present, the Philippines is the only country that still implements the remote learning setup due to the COVID19 pandemic. This ongoing condition has placed educators to rethink how to scaffold the lessons and hone the demands of the 21st century amidst the current limitations of Filipino teachers and students. The challenge is to commit to a consistent dialogue in the virtual classroom without compromising the necessary skills, content, and learning competencies to hone the students’ literary competence. Even before the pandemic, the discipline of comparative literature has had ongoing debates about its interdisciplinarity, its framework and method as a mode of inquiry in the academia, and its pedagogy in relation to teaching world literature. With the COVID19 pandemic, the compelling issues of the discipline resurface as another layer of challenge is apparent: engaging the students to read and examine the literary texts not just through close reading, but with an eye for parity in online distance learning. This perspective article seeks to showcase how, for now, the only comparative literature program in the country offered at the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines Diliman can be integrated into teaching literature in universities and classrooms in the Philippines. More importantly, this paper seeks to propose ways to streamline the program in making up for the Philippine comparative literary studies through its method, and pedagogy.

The role of world literature in the formation of students' planetary thinking

The article is devoted to the issues of teaching world literature in secondary schools in the context of modern challenges in the world and the main aspects of education brought by these challenges. Here, the importance of world literature in the formation of students' planetary thinking in the teaching process is analyzed. The progressive role of these examples in the formation of students' logical, critical and creative thinking, teaching selected examples from world literature, the formation of cognitive and communication skills is emphasized. The study notes that the formation of national and human ideas, the development of personality in students is one of the main requirements of modern subject programs. The establishment of parallels between national and world literature is of great scientific and methodological importance in order to achieve such goals as the formation of a planetary image of the growing generation, the inculcation of ideas and ideas about the unity of the world.

Modern approaches to methods of teaching world literature

The purpose of the academic paper is to establish the effectiveness and students’ assessment of the integrated approach used in the study of world literature for high school students and university students. The research methodology provided for the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches; the experimental method is the basic one in the research; the methods of questioning and observation have been also used. The result of the research is proving the prospects and effectiveness of the introduction of complexity in the methodology of teaching world literature, forasmuch as this approach contributes to the formation of a student-centric environment in the modern educational space of Europe. Studying the effectiveness of modern methods of learning literature is promising due to the fact that these methods can be used comprehensively in order to intensify the study foreign languages in the context of world literature as well as national cultures, in particular.

Conversation Analysis Tool as an Effective Means for Teaching the University Courses of English and World Literature

This paper aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Conversation Analysis Tool in the context of teaching world literature to senior students majoring in English philology. The authors present their experience of undertaking a three-month online course “Constructive Classroom Conversations: Mastering Language for College and Career Readiness,” hosted by Stanford University, and discuss the benefits of applying this tool at universities. The study describes the basic mechanisms of the Conversation Analysis Tool aimed at developing specific communication skills in students of English for Speakers of Other Languages. The central research question is whether this method is as feasible for teaching literature as it is for language classrooms. The authors demonstrate their takeaways from applying this technique in teaching world literature, namely, analyzing literary dialogues in different classroom activities. The research findings indicate that the Conversation Analysis Tool is an efficient method for the formative assessment of senior students in the world literature classroom. This technique helps students reveal the pragmatic features of fiction dialogues, the writer’s narrative intentions, and the reader’s expected reception. The suggested method also demonstrates students’ progress in the studied topics and identifies possible gaps in mastering the educational content. The significance of the study extends beyond the specified context, as the search for novel instruction techniques targeted at improving communication skills in the 21st-century globalized world is relevant for any educational sphere. Consequently, the research findings of this paper can be applied in different teaching settings.

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen Rajiv Thind Ellinghausen, Laurie, ed., Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), New York, The Modern Language Association of America, 2017; paperback; pp. x, 249; R.R.P. US $24.00; ISBN 9781603293006. Every year William Shakespeare–related scholarship generates articles and books at a pace too dizzying even for specialists. This volume, devoted to a specific sub-genre—English history plays—features thirty-one contributors who have taught the plays in diverse colleges and universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. With such a cornucopia of opinions, how merciful of the editor Laurie Ellinghausen to devote the first thirty pages of the book to give us an overview of the field. This is by far the most informative and readable section of the book, in which Ellinghausen reviews all major critical editions and multimedia adaptations of the plays available in the great Shakespeare marketplace. I do wish, however, that the book had made it abundantly clear that Shakespeare's English history plays are not necessarily a good way to learn about English history. There is much to be said about how the plays have distorted history to perpetuate the official state and church propaganda, as scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Kastan, Leonard Tennenhouse, and David Womersley have reminded us. Ellinghausen herself claims that the plays show us how 'commoners, and the working classes also challenge official narratives of history' and goes on to cite 'Jack Cade's rebellion' as one of the instances (p. 14). But as Richard Helgerson has shown in his acclaimed Forms of Nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI also ridicules the supposedly revolutionary working classes as populist fools and buffoons. Glenn Odom offers a useful survey of primary sources that Shakespeare draws upon in his history plays. M. G. Aune mentions how students can be encouraged to compare King John with various primary sources (available online) to assess Shakespeare's dramatic choices. William A. Oram and Howard Nenner review Shakespeare's political contexts to analyse the character of Richard III. Jonathan Hart focuses on political rhetoric in various history plays. Mary Janell Metzger reads Montaigne to interpret Richard III as a sceptical text. David J. Baker focuses on British cartography and ethnic diversity. Barbara Sebek studies how the plays imagine the world beyond Britain to develop a global consciousness. Phyllis Rackin offers illuminating analyses of various female characters. Maya Mathur relies on film and television adaptations to teach the Henry IV plays. Ruben Espinosa draws attention to non-English strangers in Henry V. Like many other contributors in this collection Hugh Macrae Richmond writes about using [End Page 301] internet sources to teach Shakespeare. Some contentions aside, the book is a rich pedagogical resource. Rajiv Thind The University of Queensland & University of Canterbury Copyright © 2020 Rajiv Thind

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar, edited by Anne Donadey

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar ed. by Anne Donadey Lia Nicole Brozgal Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar EDITED BY ANNE DONADEY Modern Language Association of America, 2017. x + 188 pp. ISBN 9781603292962 paper. When the immortelle Assia Djebar—as members of the illustrious Académie française are known—passed away in 2015, she left behind her more than a half-century's worth of path-breaking work, primarily novels, but also essays, film, theater, and criticism. Already in her lifetime, the Algerian writer had come to be revered as a major figure of Francophone letters and of postcolonial women's writing. If the somewhat lighter tone and themes of her first novel, La Soif (1957), once inspired comparisons with Françoise Sagan's coming-of-age tale Bonjour tristesse (1954), Djebar has since come to be associated with aesthetic and structural experimentation, thematic complexity, and multilingualism. At once deeply personal and historically engaged, her novels and films are often intensely hermetic, so much so that uninformed readers may founder in incomprehension and surrender, unwittingly depriving themselves of the joy of a eureka moment with Djebar. This collection of essays devoted to Assia Djebar's work is thus a most welcome addition to the MLA's pedagogically focused "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series. Here, the Francophone Algerian writer finds herself in the company of Orhan Pamuk, Nella Larsen, and Anton Chekov, among others. In keeping with the series format, the volume is organized into two parts: "Materials" and "Approaches." Part I, written by editor Anne Donadey, consists of a brief essay including a biographical sketch and a section titled "Editions, Translations, and Secondary Sources." Part II begins with a helpful introduction by Donadey, which explains the rationale and structure of the "Approaches" portion of the volume while laying out some of the challenges of teaching Djebar's novels and film. "Approaches" is subdivided into four parts: "Historiographical Approaches," "Interdisciplinary Approaches," "Teaching Assia Djebar in Dialogue," and "Cultural and Linguistic Contexts." The volume is rounded out by an afterword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—a longtime friend and sister-traveler of Djebar's—who reminds us that despite Djebar's longtime association with Francophone literature, "her most important stance is against identitarianism" (157). The contributors, all of whom are women, range from assistant professor to professor emerita, and they teach in a variety of institutional settings, from the small liberal arts college to the large research university. Their approaches to the genre of the "teaching essay" are necessarily varied. Some offer concrete tools, such as examples of pre-reading activities, in-class assignments, discussion topics, and suggestions for papers and projects, framed by meta commentary on how students have typically approached a text and how their ideas and analyses have changed as a result of this approach. The essays by Guyot-Bender, Mortimer, De Raedt, Bourget, and Rice are among the most useful examples of this "how-to" genre, with the cowritten text by Abdo and Bobroff emerging as especially successful in combining practical advice and intellectual reflection. Other essays, however, take a slightly more sidelong approach to the genre, modeling (rather [End Page 264] than explicating) textual analyses, contextualization, and comparative gestures (see Boutaghou, Lachman, and Rahman, for example). It is not surprising that the hermeneutic and pedagogical imperatives that emerge from this volume might be summed up as seeking to make Djebar's work accessible without papering over the work's fundamental inaccessibility. Another, unexpected but equally delightful, through-line is the volume's determination to emphasize literature qua literature. This desire is palpable, implicitly, in all the texts, but explicitly so in Elsayed's essay when she refers, rebukingly, to "the tendency to read historical fiction from other parts of the world as historical documents" (51) and also when Abdo and Bobroff remind us that "a piece of literature is not simply a window onto the real world, a way for us to gain knowledge about the veiled and exotic Other" (55). The collective mission of these nineteen readers of Djebar is condensed into a single declarative sentence in Spivak's afterword: "Literature is not evidence but an instrument for...

Thomas A. Goodmann, ed. Approaches to Teaching Langland's “Piers Plowman.” Approaches to Teaching World Literature 151. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2018. Pp. 266. $24.00 (paper).

Thomas A. Goodmann, ed. Approaches to Teaching Langland's “Piers Plowman.” Approaches to Teaching World Literature 151. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2018. Pp. 266. $24.00 (paper).

An Introduction to “Piers Plowman.” Michael Calabrese. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. ix+355.

<i>An Introduction to “Piers Plowman.”</i> Michael Calabrese. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. ix+355.

The Importance of Teaching World Literature in Comprehensive Schools

The Importance of Teaching World Literature in Comprehensive Schools

Approaches to Teaching the Middle English by Jane Beal, and Mark Bradshaw Busbee

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Middle English by Jane Beal, and Mark Bradshaw Busbee Robert Cutrer Beal, Jane, and Mark Bradshaw Busbee, Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), New York, The Modern Language Association of America, 2018; paperback; pp. 262; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $24.00; ISBN 9781603292924. Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl is a multi-author volume seeking to aid teachers in their instruction of Pearl, especially at the undergraduate level. This book fills a much-needed role for educators by consolidating over a hundred years of scholarship and translation concerning Pearl. The book is comprised of two sections: 'Materials', which gives information and locations for sources, translations, and background material helpful for any educator in providing the necessary framework for the Pearl; and 'Approaches', which is further broken down into historical, literary and theoretical, comparative, and specific classroom contexts. The 'Materials' section of the book is written by one of the editors, Jane Beal, and provides a great deal of information and resources in print and digital format. One of the most helpful sections provided in the book is an exhaustive list of facsimiles, dual-facing editions, and translations to aid instructors in determining the best text for their students. Beal does an excellent job of introducing each of the modern translations and discussing how they relate and engage in other Pearl texts. Additionally, there are lists of many other helpful sources one might want from dissertations to multimedia resources. Beal additionally provides summaries of dating the manuscript, authorship, sources and analogues, and Pearl's place within Christian contemplative devotion. Though a smaller section of the book, it is replete with useful resources for building a syllabus. Next, the 'Approaches' section provides a breadth of methods for instructors to consider in their approach to teaching Pearl. Perhaps because the belief is that instructors will look only at their desired approach there is a fair amount of overlap in some articles' introductions. This section's organization is superb, however, in facilitating quick access to an instructor's preferred approach. For instructors looking to teach Pearl in a survey course, the comparative approaches chapter, especially, provides excellent ways to connect and consider Pearl through other texts. Whether instructors are looking to utilize a common interest in Tolkien to draw students in to the Pearl or use Pearl to begin instruction in Middle English, there are excellent chapters on how to effectively implement it in a classroom. John M. Bower's chapter, 'Teaching Pearl when teaching Tolkien', was particularly helpful in discussing the inspiration for Lothlorien from Pearl. This was an interesting approach instead of the traditionally linked texts like Beowulf or Vǫluspá. Additionally, the 'Specific Classroom Contexts' division gives many unique methods for aiding students in approaching Pearl. Whether engaging in the difficulty of translating texts, performing Pearl, or addressing genre and gender, this section covers a broad scope. This book contains nineteen articles, each containing a different approach to teaching the Pearl, bookended by an exhaustive resource list at the beginning [End Page 196] and study questions at the end. There are also five black and white plates—four with Pearl illuminations and one incipit folio. The weakest aspect of this book is the repetition of summary of the Pearl's plot and some tonal differences between the articles, but there is an immense amount of content perfect for any instructor preparing to teach Pearl, these minor quibbles aside. While this book is designed for quick reference, there is a lot to be gained for anyone's understanding of Pearl and many different ways to continue making this text accessible to students who are new to it or to Middle English. Robert Cutrer University of Sydney Copyright © 2019 Robert Cutrer