Teaching World Literature Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching Piers Plowman, ed. Thomas A. Goodmman. New York: MLA, 2018, pp. 266.

After publishing no volumes on teaching medieval literature in four years, in 2018 the MLA has published three new volumes in its “Approaches to Teaching World Literature” series that are particularly relevant to teachers of medieval literature at the collegiate level: Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (2018) edited by Jane Beal and Brad Busbee; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan (2018) edited by Andrea Tarnowski; and Thomas A. Goodmann’s Approaches to Teaching Piers Plowman. Goodmann’s book is a pedagogically astute, thoroughly useful volume. Anyone teaching, or planning to teach, Piers Plowman should get a hold of this book immediately and read it cover to cover. It includes almost everything needed on how to teach Piers Plowman well, better, and (dare I say it?) best.

Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works ed. by Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer, and: Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies ed. by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elisabeth Swanson Goldberg

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works ed. by Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer, and: Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies ed. by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elisabeth Swanson Goldberg Kelly Hewson (bio) Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer, editors. Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works. MLA, 2014. Approaches to Teaching World Literature. Pp. 227. US $24. Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elisabeth Swanson Goldberg, editors. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies. MLA, 2015. Options for Teaching. Pp. 362. US $29. Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer's Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works includes contributions that were selected based on a global questionnaire sent to university teachers; twenty-seven responded and twelve are included in the collection. As Poyner indicates in the volume's first section, "Materials," the bulk of the contributors are from South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States (3). Readers are not privy to how and where the questionnaire was distributed, for how long a period it was available, or the questions it posed, and some of us may be left wondering why a volume published under the banner of the Modern Language Association's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series did not try harder to extend its reach. However, the two-part collection—"Materials," in which Poyner provides both novice and seasoned teachers of J. M. Coetzee's writing plenty to work with, and "Approaches," which discusses teaching methods—is replete with rigorous, thought-provoking pedagogical strategies rehearsed in a range of institutional and classroom settings. From secondary schools to public and private universities, from large survey classes to graduate seminars, in courses on literature, theory, existentialism, resistance, philosophy, general education, and first-year composition, inspiring educators and their students wrestle with the complexities and nuances of Coetzee's writing. The essays that bracket the collection introduce and reinforce the themes throughout. Rita Barnard's "Why Not to Teach Coetzee" smartly explicates the numerous teacher/teaching vignettes imbued with eros in Coetzee's work and encourages readers to consider "an erotics of pedagogy" when encountering his texts (40). The concluding piece, Patrick Hayes' "Coetzee and Close Reading," asserts students' pleasures in the aesthetic experiences of reading while expertly marshalling many of Coetzee's texts to reveal how they reflect contemporary literary debates and gesture beyond stalemates. Between the two are captivating essays from teachers in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Warwick, Amherst, Waverly, Petersburg, Cullowhee, [End Page 245] Singapore, Stockholm, and Jerusalem that astutely demonstrate the emergent, residual, and/or dominant knowledges that readers' encounters with Disgrace elicit. Of particular interest to those approaching South Africa from afar are David Attwell's essay describing the experience of teaching Coetzee at the University of the Western Cape in the 1980s and the curricular choices made at the University of Witswatersrand in tandem with the nation's transition in the 2000s; Carrol Clarkson's piece on the University of Cape Town students' responses to Disgrace and its film adaptation, both partly set on campus; and Gerald Gaylard's reading of the novel as an impediment to closure in the "new" South Africa. Stephen Clingman outlines the novel's reception history and how his defense of and deeply felt approach to Disgrace make their way into his Massachusetts seminar class, while Kay Heath reveals her preparations for and treatments of the novel in an African postcolonialism class at a historically black university in West Virginia. The volume covers Coetzee's other works from Dusklands through to his "Australian-period" writing, as Boehmer categorizes it (117). Michael Bell uses these works to introduce students to and engage them with arguments about the value of imaginative literatures; Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn to expand students' "horizon[s] of expectation" as readers; Boehmer to consider what approaching Coetzee as a transnational writer offers; Wright to inform students in America about America; Wendy Woodward to reveal the uncomfortable lessons proffered by Elizabeth Costello; Robert Spencer to think through the politics and ethics of representations; Emily S. Davis to facilitate understandings of deconstruction; and Shannon Payne to analyse Coetzee's texts' intricate rhetorical situations. Numerous contributors underscore the...

Tackling Teacher Lack of Knowledge When Reading Cross-Culturally

Teacher lack of knowledge outside British and American literature is a major obstacle in teaching World Literature. This article offers the experiences of three teachers teaching the Bhagavad Gita and suggests ways to overcome lack of teacher knowledge when reading crossculturally.

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 Dominick Grace Laurie Ellinghausen, ed. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays. mla, 2017. 249 pp. $24.00. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays, edited by Laurie Ellinghausen and featuring almost thirty short essays, as well as a short but useful introductory section that identifies helpful resources, adds another valuable volume to the mla Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. The series is designed to address works, traditions, or authors "widely taught at the undergraduate level," and it is "intended to serve specialists as well as nonspecialists" ("mla Book Series"). Consequently, this is not a resource designed to provide detailed close readings or an overview of the most recent scholarship on the history plays; [End Page 132] although some chapters may offer new insights into the plays, even for experienced teachers, the main function of this book is to provide an array of suggestions for teaching. The focus, therefore, tends to be more on matters of pedagogy and practical classroom work (for example, suggested exercise or assignments, or research strategies—including many very interesting suggestions for the use of electronic resources) than on direct engagement with the texts of the plays themselves. Teachers of Shakespeare looking for ways to vary or modify their teaching practice will find much to consider here. One of the most valuable things about this collection is that it covers the full range of the plays traditionally grouped under the "history" heading: the Henry plays (all of them, including Henry VIII), the Richard plays, and King John. Perhaps the relatively recent consensus that Edward III is also Shakespeare's explains its omission here, although it has been included in The Riverside Shakespeare (identified along with the Norton as one of the two most popular editions among those surveyed while compiling this project) for quite some time and is available as part of the full Norton package (digital only)—or perhaps it is simply taught so infrequently that no contributor to this volume has used it in class. Its exclusion is a minor weakness, at best, as I doubt that the target audience of undergraduate teachers of Shakespeare are likely to select it for classroom use anyway. Somewhat less helpful for that target audience is the fact that the index does not include the plays themselves, so one cannot do a quick check to find all the places in the book where the play or plays one is interested in might be considered. While many chapter titles do identify which plays the author has used, many do not. Since many readers of this book may be interested in suggestions for only one or two plays, they are put in the position of having to read the whole book, or at least scan the chapters, to find potentially useful material, which makes the book somewhat less user-friendly than it might be. Nevertheless, this is a useful book, both for the experienced teacher of Shakespeare's history plays and the teacher beginning to develop curriculum. Newer teachers will benefit especially from the opening section, "Part One: Materials," which offers a digestible summary of valuable resources, from brief comments on which editions of Shakespeare are most used, through short sections on language, sources, other useful primary texts, recommended secondary readings, the critical traditions surrounding the plays, performance history, and digital resources. These are brief introductions, not exhaustive, so they provide teachers with good starting points [End Page 133] without being overwhelming; they leave readers who interested in a particular approach to dig more deeply on their own. More generally useful is "Part Two: Approaches," itself subdivided into sections focusing on "Primary Sources," "Political, Intellectual, and International Contexts," "Theory and Criticism," "Gender," "Teaching through Research, Writing, and Performance," "Contemporary Media," "Classroom Contexts," and, finally, a short guide to internet resources by Hugh Macrae Richmond, creator of the Shakespeare-focused website Shakespeare's Staging. As these section titles indicate, the book lends itself to a variety of approaches, so individual users will find some sections more useful than others. Lynne Bruckner's chapter, for instance, "Richard II: Presentism, Pedagogy, Ecocriticism," in the theory and...

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and Other Works by Leslie A. Donovan

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and Other Works by Leslie A. Donovan Jennifer E. Nicholson Donovan, Leslie A., ed., Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and Other Works (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), New York, MLA, 2015; paperback; pp. xiv, 284; R.R.P. US $24.00; ISBN 9781603292061. Leslie A. Donovan's collection is refreshing for both those familiar with and new to medievalist and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. Her detailed consideration of Tolkien's background in Part 1 of this collection notably frames how the contributors discuss both his fiction and non-fiction. Donovan sets up a clear framework for the reader in her preface, and then in her outlines of Tolkien's context and publication history, followed by an extensive collection of teaching resources available for instructing students. Part 2 begins with a brief essay from Donovan, followed by twenty-nine chapters from other contributors, outlining a myriad of ways that Tolkien's work is built into their teaching both within and beyond literary studies. Many of the teaching resources outlined in the first part of the collection are referred to in Part 2, and so are a helpful foundation for the reader. Part 2 is also divided into subsections, on textual controversy, context, the past, the contemporary, interdisciplinary study, and teaching strategies, responding to surveys of Tolkien educators. Overall this volume's material allows for varied approaches to teaching his œuvre, and proposes within an admirable scope to present Tolkien's work as a contender for strong tertiary instruction within and beyond literary studies. Part 2 guides the prospective Tolkien instructor through different ideas. Craig Franson and James NcNelis both consider how the cultural appeal of The Lord of the Rings affects their teaching, and examine its critical reception and literary afterlives in their instruction. Franson's often-varied classroom dynamic of students who know or do not know Tolkien's work well allows him to guide students in 'turning a critical lens on reading conflicts […] [to] prompt illuminating discussion' (p. 42). McNelis comments that students' responses to 'professional scholarly criticism' strengthens and develops their argumentative foundation skills(p. 49). This idea of scholarship to support particularly junior students in their argumentative style extends throughout the next subsection. Verlyn Flieger teaches her students to grapple with both sides of Tolkien's narrative resolutions through the idea of eucatastrophe, and emphasizes that 'studying Tolkien results not in right or wrong answers but in understanding how he expressed his [views]' (p. 55). Yvette Kisor's chapter notably includes detailed tabulation of possible relationships between Tolkien's major and minor works, and the use of this information in setting student assignments (pp. 78–81). Later on, Melissa Ridley Elmes describes prompting her students by the end of the course to decide [End Page 163] and argue whether Rings can be counted as an epic, with due deference to both Tolkien's own aversion to seeing his work as allegory, and to the similarities and differences available between figures like Achilles and Aragorn. Many chapters throughout focus on students' grasp of argumentation, particularly because several of them discuss classes aimed at early college years. This can make some of the overviews seem less detailed, but many contributors also acknowledge ways in which their course can be altered for honours or graduate students too. Thomas L. Martin, for example, notes how the final 'surprise' in his course is to make use of the previous assessment tasks to write annotated bibliographies, abstracts, and even papers for graduate conferences or publications(p. 143). In addition to rhetoric, many of the contributors draw on the medieval texts and English historical records that influenced Tolkien's fictional and non-fictional work. As such, many chapters are still firmly in the realm of literary studies. Some also discuss aspects of Tolkien's mythology in detail, including those by Jane Chance, Leslie Stratyner, and Philip Irving Mitchell. The final two subsections successfully shift the collection's focus to beyond the humanities. Notable chapters from the subsection focused on interdisciplinary Tolkien studies are science-based examples by Kristine Larsen and Justin Edward Everett. However, some chapters...

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works ed. by Leslie A. Donovan

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works ed. by Leslie A. Donovan Diana Pavlac Glyer Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie A. Donovan. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2015. xii, 279 pp. $24.00 (softcover). ISBN 9781603292061. Over the years, I've relied upon several volumes in the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. Each one has proven to be an essential aid in the classroom. In addition, I've admired Leslie A. Donovan's work as a scholar and teacher for more than two decades. And yet, nothing prepared me for Donovan's Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. This book is a stellar accomplishment. There are more than 100 titles in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. Each one has a clear goal: to provide a comprehensive resource to help teachers cover a significant book in their classrooms. An effort is made to include every kind of teaching environment and various levels of study. Each volume also seeks to reflect "the philosophies, approaches, thoughts, and methods of scores of experienced teachers."1 Part One of this book is called "Materials." It includes a brief biography of Tolkien, notes on the various editions of Tolkien's work, a splendid overview of recommended books called "The Instructor's Library," and a substantial list of multimedia aids: music, video recordings, charts, maps, and films. It is a skillful overview of a broad and challenging field: in roughly 30 pages, beginners are directed to the most trustworthy voices in the field, and others are encouraged to consider new and noteworthy materials. Part Two, "Approaches," is the heart of the matter. It consists of 29 essays written by teachers, discussing the nuts and bolts of how they teach Tolkien. What all the essays have in common is a pellucid clarity and specificity: lesson plans, assignments, quotes from students, exam questions, and lecture outlines are all spelled out in glorious detail. Teaching Tolkien for the first time? Here is wise guidance for every aspect of your course. Been teaching Tolkien for years? You will be inspired with the seemingly endless possibilities of fresh approaches. [End Page 201] One of my favorite class projects comes from Robin Chapman Stacey. She divides her class into four groups and gives each group "a list of English place-names together with their Anglo-Saxon roots and translations." She then asks the students "to imagine that all these names exist in proximity to each other" and has them invent myths that account for these names. As a result of this generative exercise, students "begin to grasp what it means for Tolkien's tales to have been inspired by and grounded in language rather than the other way around" (85–86). It's not all just class activities and lesson plans: these master teachers also wrestle with significant background issues and the unique challenges that Tolkien's work presents. How do you engage a classroom of students who range from hardcore fans to the most casual, disaffected readers? How do you deal with the sheer number of pages that students must read? How much (and which part) of the legendarium is useful, instructive, and necessary? In what order should the works be considered? Is it possible to understand Tolkien without knowing Beowulf (or Roverandom? Or "On Fairy-stories"? Or "Ainu-lindalë"? Or Beren and Lúthien?). How do you handle students who love the Peter Jackson films but loathe the written texts? How (and when and how much) do you raise issues of race and accusations of sexism? And do you even dare mention cultural artifacts such as video games, action figures, role-playing games, fan fiction, Led Zeppelin, and Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins"? The wide range of available materials and the deep, deep challenges aside, what is truly striking about these collected essays is the sheer variety of ways that teachers are finding to present Tolkien. Those that focus specifically on Tolkien as a stand-alone class follow a wide range of formats...

Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden

Which John Dryden should be brought into the twenty-first-century college classroom? The rehabilitator of the ancients? The first of the moderns? The ambivalent laureate? The sidelined convert to Rome? The literary theorist? The translator? The playwright? The poet? This volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature addresses the tensions, contradictions, and versatility of a writer who, in the words of Samuel Johnson, found [English poetry] brick, and left it marble, who was, in the words of Walter Scott, one of the greatest of our masters. Part 1, Materials, offers a guide to the teaching editions of Dryden's work and a discussion of the background resources, from biographies and literary criticism to social, cultural, political, and art histories. In part 2, Approaches, essays describe different pedagogical entries into Dryden and his time. These approaches cover subjects as various as genre, adaptation, literary rivalry, musical setting, and political and religious poetry in classroom situations that range from the traditional survey to learning through performance.

The Local as the Global: Reflections on Teaching World Literature

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...

The Local as the Global: Reflections on Teaching World Literature

The Local as the Global: Reflections on Teaching World Literature

Summer Reads

include the observation that it is Eurocentric. While this might have been true, “Eurocentric” is itself a category of diminishing returns because of its own vast omissions. Eastern and central European literatures hardly figured into that “Eurocentricism,” nor, for that matter, did a lot of “western” European literary traditions (Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, etc.) This is why the euphemism “NATO literatures” came to be. These criticisms may be dour and a little heavy-handed, but they are not patently wrong. Starting with the local is a way of allaying some of these concerns, if for no other reason than the fact that students will be conscious of their cultural bearings and the ways these will inform how they read their way outward, like Wilson’s plays, toward and through the world. In the past three decades, the world has come to be characterized by prefixes like inter-, poly-, multi-, hetero-, trans-, etc. World literature should be at the forefront of unpacking these prefixes and confronting their social implications. World literature has to marshal the tools and dispensations of literary education for all students, especially those students entering business, the sciences, or law. Those students, no less than we who make our life’s work the reading and weaponizing of literature, will face the pitfalls of not possessing the cultural literacy literature can offer. World literature is neither an additive to the canon nor its abolition. It is a critical practice with targeted intellectual outcomes. It may not change the world, but it has the potential to reshape the way the world appears to a student. Teaching world literature does admittedly come with perils; it courts premature optimism by inviting students to trend toward “we’re all the same after all” based on what they feel to be universals in the texts they read. But this is only a beginning. If students feel that they can at least sense the Other—to “imagine precisely,” in the words of Amitav Ghosh—it can only lead to good things. Duquesne University summer reads WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 55 World literature is neither an additive to the canon nor its abolition. It is a critical practice with targeted intellectual outcomes. With a toddler to parent, WLT’s book review editor, Rob Vollmar, isn’t anticipating being able to go much of anywhere this summer, so he’s relying on his summer reads to take him away. His list includes travelogues and historical fiction. György Spiró Captivity Trans. Tim Wilkinson Restless Books, 2015 This is the only book on my list that I plan to reread, for reasons well articulated by reviewer Michele Levy in this issue’s review section (page 99). This mammoth of a book was like a mash-up of I, Claudius and a really well-constructed openworld video game that I wanted never to end. The first half was so rich in detail (and light on plot) that I want to go back and soak it in, armed with the knowledge that the second half of the book explodes with action. Damien Wilkins Max Gate Aardvark Books, 2016 Oh, another novel about Thomas Hardy? Yes, please! Hot on the heels of Christopher Nicholson’s excellent Winter comes this examination of Hardy’s final days from New Zealand writer Damien Wilkins. Told from the perspective of Hardy’s housemaid, Max Gate looks at the struggle between the literati and the family over the future of Hardy’s past. David H. Mould Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia Ohio University Press, 2016 Mould has done the world a huge favor by traveling extensively throughout the ’Stans of Central Asia and capturing the history and flavor of each one in written form. I look forward to wandering the steppes along with him and learning more about the world’s most elusive region. ...

Joan L. Brown (ed.), Approaches to teaching the works of Carmen Martín Gaite, The Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2013; 279 pp. (Approaches to Teaching World Literature, 128).

Se reseña el libro: Approaches to teaching the works of Carmen Martín Gaite.

Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini Andrew Hiltzik Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini, Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series 129 (New York: Modern Language Association of America 2014) 312 pp. Kleinhenz and Dini’s entry in the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series covers not only Petrarch’s seminal work, the Canzoniere, but also the important poets of the literary tradition that preceded and followed him. It is designed as a resource for a wide range of class types—from courses dedicated to the poet’s major and minor works, to broad survey courses that include Petrarchism as only one of several units. The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Materials,” is a brief overview of various bibliographic materials—from critical editions of the Canzoniere to secondary readings that may be assigned to students—and the types of courses they are best suited to. The second, “Approaches,” includes a selection of essays [End Page 251] addressing the most common and pressing pedagogical questions faced by teachers of Petrarch. While some may be assignable to students of higher-level classes, the majority are addressed to instructors themselves, and regard techniques for making Petrarch more accessible to students in different contexts. The “Materials” section starts with over three pages dedicated to editions of the Canzoniere, both critical and commercial, in Italian and in English, with detailed descriptions of the level of annotation and the style of the translation. Translations in Spanish, French, and Russian are also cited. The next section comprises a review of commonly-assigned supplementary readings, including reference texts, biographies, and background on Medieval Italian society. Finally, the editors suggest a number of electronic resources, including digital texts like the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, digitized manuscripts, and audiovisual resources such as recordings and performances of selected poems. The “Approaches” section contains twenty-six essays grouped by theme, starting with essays on dealing with the Canzoniere directly, and ending with those that consider Petrarch in a global context. The introduction, by Kleinhenz and Dini, aside from quickly summarizing the essays for ease of reference, also includes suggestions, based on responses to a survey they performed, regarding which specific poems should be selected depending on the goals of the course (that is, if the instructor is not planning on teaching the Canzoniere from cover to cover). The five types of “teaching modules” the editors address are the following: poems that illustrate the emotional narrative of the collection; poems exploring major moral, political, and psychological themes; poems demonstrating the construction of “Laura” as a poetic device; poems that put Petrarch in a historical context; poems that consider the “ethics” of writing, primarily little-taught poems more suited to upper-level courses. The first section of Part 2, “The Canzoniere’s Form: Design, Themes, Style,” contains a series of essays on methods of engaging directly with the text, by Germaine Wakentin, Aldo S. Bernardo, Christopher Kleinhenz, Madison U. Sowell, and Christopher Martin. Wakentin addresses the architecture of the collection and the arrangement of poems within it; Bernardo considers the figure of Laura and the competing impulses that construct her as a poetic figure; and Sowell suggests teaching with a concordance to explore the richness of Petrarch’s lexicon and themes. Kleinhenz describes how to use Petrarch to teach about Italian poetics, meter, and rhyme, while Martin provides a case study of Canzone 126 that may be helpful for a new teacher interested in leading close readings. The next section, “The Canzoniere and the Life,” broadens its focus to consider biographical approaches to teaching Petrarch, with essays by Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Fabian Alfie, Jobst Welge, and Massimo Lollini. Cachey focuses on Petrarch’s itinerant lifestyle and the many ways this restless mobility informs the construction of the work, and Alfie provides tips on teaching the conflict between profane and spiritual love to modern students, for whom such a crisis may be completely alien. Welge suggests utilizing some of Petrarch’s more philosophical works, such as De vita solitaria and Secretum, to introduce some of...

Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’ and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’ and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini Jason Stoessel Kleinhenz, Christopher, and Andrea Dini, eds, Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’ and the Petrarchan Tradition (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), New York, Modern Language Association of America, 2014; paperback; pp. xii, 300; R.R.P. US$24.00; ISBN 9781603291378. This guide to teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere (also known as the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) is divided into two parts. In the first, the editors, Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini, provide an overview of essential bibliographical materials for teaching the Canzoniere, which includes editions, translations, selected secondary literature, and electronic/audio-visual resources. Relatively new online resources such as the Oregon Petrarch Open Book (2011) led by Massimo Lollini are also noted. As the editors make clear, their lists of teaching materials derive from a survey of predominantly undergraduate instructors teaching medieval Italian and Petrarchism in North American institutes of higher learning. For reading courses on Petrarch, respondents indicated a strong preference for philological and translation issues, rather than secondary literature. Where secondary literature is consulted in more advanced undergraduate courses, instructors apparently rely mainly on the oft-cited, classic essays by Albert Russell Ascoli, Robert Durling, John Freccero, Giuseppe Mazzotta, and Nancy Vickers. The second and considerably longer section consists of twenty-six essays by expert scholars addressing a series of questions and techniques for teaching the Canzoniere. Topics range from Kleinhenz’s delightfully succinct exposition on the rudiments of versification and rhyme, to teaching Petrarch’s influences, legacy, and the Canzoniere in comparative literature courses, and extend to Marc Vanscheenwijck’s examination of the setting to music of Petrarch’s verse by sixteenth-century madrigalists. Vanscheenwijck unfortunately overlooks the small number of musical settings prior to the Petrarchan revival of the late fifteenth century: Jacopo da Bologna’s setting of Non al suo amante and Guillaume Du Fay’s delightful rendition of Vergine bella could be added to student playlists. As its editors intend, this book will be of general interest to those charged with teaching the Canzoniere and Petrarchism to undergraduates. Some essays will also be of broader utility to scholars looking for succinct and basic introductions to aspects of Petrarchan scholarship, including Petrarch’s place among the tre corone, his influence, the women in his poetry, his poetics, and his poetic relation with the ancients. A lengthy bibliography is assembled at the end of the book from the preceding contributions. [End Page 191] Jason Stoessel University of New England Copyright © 2016 Jason Stoessel

Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

The Problematic and Pragmatic Pedagogy of World Literature

In addressing the reemergence of world literature as a discipline, critics such as Emily Apter and Gayatri Spivak gesture to the problem of the scale of world literature in trying to preserve the value of localized knowledge. For them, deploying English as the language of instruction in world literature courses around the globe disincentivizes the learning of multiple languages in favor of a deceptively accessible English that elides idiom, style, and cultural specificity. This article seeks to examine the above critique in conjunction with the triumphalism of the world literature movement that David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and Wai Chee Dimock articulate. As a case study, the article scrutinizes the large-scale English department curriculum changes at the American University of Beirut (AUB) as an Anglophone institution in a non-Anglophone country devoted to scholarship in the humanities. The AUB example exposes the inherent tensions in the desire of global Anglophone institutions to keep abreast of theoretical and pedagogical developments while retaining strong local cultural ties. Ultimately, teaching world literature in the context of AUB allows for the study of a wide breadth of literature while destabilizing and challenging the Eurocentrism of most world literature pedagogy to date.

10. Teaching World Literature for the 21st Century: Online Resources and Interactive Approaches

This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge. I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary documents, and other sources of historical and socio-political context; and social media platforms to create a more inclusive notion of world literature, as well as a learning process that is dynamic, collaborative, and relevant to students’ daily lives.

Introduction Promoting the Study of Modern Literatures Worldwide: The MLA and Its Conventions

Introduction Promoting the Study of Modern Literatures Worldwide: The MLA and Its Conventions

Teaching Literature Like a Foreign Language; Or, What I Learned When I Switched Departments

In this article, the author explains the habits that she brought to teaching English from the field of second-language acquisition. She began teaching in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where graduate teaching assistants were trained to use the communicative language teaching method, especially as it is developed by Lee and VanPatten in Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1995). When the author switched to teaching world literature survey courses in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, she found that many of the techniques she had used in beginner language courses applied beautifully to what she was trying to do in her new field. After briefly explaining the characteristics of communicative language teaching, this article highlights the three main strategies that she found most useful: minimizing “teacher talk” and maximizing the work the students do in the classroom, emphasizing the process of learning to encourage the students’ metacognitive thinking about their own education, and making negotiation a key activity to engage their critical thinking skills. As universities and colleges increasingly decide to make critical thinking and student engagement key factors in their brand, it can be very useful to reexamine the habits that we adopt and to consider some of the best practices of our colleagues in other departments.

Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch

Research Article| December 01 2011 Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch David Damrosch; David Damrosch David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and of The Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ed., 2009), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009), and coeditor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). He is also the founding director of the Institute for World Literature (www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and of Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps and the author of, among others, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post–Coloniality (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (4): 455–485. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch. Comparative Literature Studies 1 December 2011; 48 (4): 455–485. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

What Good Is World Literature?: World Literature Pedagogy and the Rhetoric of Moral Crisis

We should make the case that literary study has traditionally been, and continues to be, an effective gateway into the cross-cultural awareness that a truly global campus needs. At the same time, we should draw upon our own pedagogical history to ensure that our institutions of learning do not reinforce the neo-imperialism of cultural globalization. In fact, since World War II, calls for teaching world literature have been tied to shifting moral imperatives.