World Literature Course 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.

Literature and Media: A Closer Look at Literature through a Social Networking Application

Today, traditional literacy habits are changing with various technological tools in digital environments. Social reading platforms are one of these innovations and changes. These networks are widely used in the world and in Turkey. The application 1000Kitap, the largest book reader network in Turkey, is one of these social networks. In this study, the opinions of pre-service teachers who review the books they read on this application, their attitudes towards reading and writing, and the contributions of this application to pre-service teachers were examined. The study was conducted with fifty-five Turkish pre-service teachers within the scope of the world literature course in the spring semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. In the study, it was aimed to examine in detail the views of pre-service Turkish teachers on the 1000Kitap application by using mixed method. The quantitative dimension of the research is a survey model that tries to describe the existing situation as it is. In the quantitative dimension of the study, survey technique, one of the data collection techniques of this model, was used. In the qualitative dimension of the study, a case study, one of the qualitative research methods, was conducted. The qualitative data used in the study were obtained from a semi-structured interview form. It was found that the attitudes of the pre-service teachers who examined the work they read in the 1000Kitap application, made quotations, and shared their opinions were at a high level; their opinions about the application were very motivating and useful in terms of interaction and sharing; the application increased their reading motivation and contributed to the opportunity to see different perspectives.

Our Américas: Writing beyond Borders: Latinx voices in World Literature

Students’ input and identities are prioritized to cocreate a culturally responsive world literature course.

Addressing the Works of World Literature with Radio Play Application

In the study, within the scope of World Literature course, radio play adaptations of works from French and Russian literatures were vocalized by pre-service teachers and tried to be presented in radio play format. In this regard, the aim of the research is to address the attitudes of pre-service teachers who experience preparing radio plays towards collaborative studies and their perception of information communication technologies competence levels. In addition, the thoughts of pre-service teachers about whether they enjoy the work of preparing radio plays, vocalizing, getting to know the work closely, and getting to know the author closely were also discussed. It is thought that the research will contribute to getting to know the literary work, the author and the characteristics of the period in which it emerged through radio plays, learning by doing and experiencing, learning permanently and with pleasure, increasing motivation and contributing to speaking skills. Because in today's education and training environments, rather than transferring knowledge, students are expected to be involved in the education and training process in which they are active, access information in creative ways, construct knowledge, learn collaboratively and interactively. In the study, qualitative and quantitative data were collected and mixed method was used. The study group of the research consists of pre-service teachers taking the World Literature course. "Cooperative Learning Scale" and "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Competence Perception Scale" were used as data collection tools. The findings obtained as a result of the research indicate that pre-service teachers' perceptions of collaborative studies for preparing radio plays are at a "high" level; their mean scores of ICT competence perception are at a "sufficient" level; there is no significant difference in their attitudes towards collaborative learning and their perceptions of competence in using ICT according to gender. Most of the pre-service teachers stated that it was their first time doing such an application. Regarding the qualitative findings, the students stated that they enjoyed the radio play very much, that this application contributed to them to get to know the work closely, that they had the opportunity to get to know the work more closely, and that they were curious about the other works and life of the author. More students stated that going beyond just knowing the work as a name and giving life to a character in the work ensured the permanence of the work and what was learned. They also stated that they learned about new applications related to technology through the radio play they experienced and that they saw their deficiencies related to technology.

COMMON ERRORS IN COMPOSITION WRITING BY COLLEGE STUDENTS

The alarming decline in the English language proficiency of Filipinos in recent years calls for further exploration into the challenges encountered by learners across the four macro-skills, particularly in writing, being the macro-skill met with the most challenge alongside speaking. Hence, this study aimed to identify the common writing errors of college students from the Marinduque State College in writing recount text and attempt to determine the reasons behind these writing deficiencies. Twenty (20) recount texts written by third-year Social Work for their World Literature course were subjected to analysis. The results revealed that punctuation use, selection of correct verbs and prepositions, capitalization, subject-verb agreement, and selection of appropriate pronouns were the areas in writing that the participants were most challenged with. These composition errors may be attributed to a lack of focus on grammatical rules in L2 learning and the strong influence of the native language. Hence, intervention on these identified writing deficiencies must be implemented immediately in order for the learners’ communicative writing skills to be at par with global standards for English communicative competency.

IDENTIFICATION OF CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WORLD LITERATURE COURSE AT UNDERGRADUATES LEVEL

Research shows that literature contains propensities of human instinct and experiences. The knowledge imparted through literature is more effective as it is relatable to life experiences. This research paper highlights the challenges faced by teachers and students in a world literature course taught at an undergraduate level. In Pakistan, majority of students exhibit low English language proficiency levels. This leads to comprehension issues in literary meaning making. This as a consequence makes it challenging for teachers to effectively teach the course at tertiary level. The data was collected through a quantitative survey method. The participants identified for the study were 436 students and 6 teachers teaching the course. The sample represented almost 73% of the student population taking the course on World Literature at an undergraduate level. The results indicated that lack of language proficiency coupled with poor reading habits were major factors that impeded learning and directly impacted the motivation to study literature. The results from teachers' questionnaires determined that innovative pedagogy, appropriate selection of texts and genres were key determinants in generating interest in classrooms. The study was significant in terms of highlighting key factors that impeded student interest in studying literature and determining interactive pedagogy as an effective tool to achieve effective learning outcomes.

Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema by Luiza Franco Moreira

Reviewed by: Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema by Luiza Franco Moreira Hande Gurses Luiza Franco Moreira. Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema. Albany: State U of New York P, 2021. Pp. 233. US$105.00 hardcover, US$32.95 paperback. Almost two centuries after Goethe’s coinage, world literature [Weltliteratur] continues to be a category that abounds with debates as it invites multiple modes of analysis, reading, and categorization. The complexities and tensions inherent to world literature encourage interdisciplinary interventions ranging from history to geography, from political science to philosophy. Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema contributes to the ongoing debates around world literature by focusing on the various definitions of the categories of “world” and “literature” as well as the resulting violence of their respective boundaries. Edited by Luiza Franco Moreira, Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema is the result of a colloquium organized by the Fernand Braudel Center and Binghamton University’s Department of Comparative Literature in April 2016. The volume appears as part of the series published by the Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science. In her introduction, Moreira states that both the volume and the colloquium express a “convergence of interests between the Center and the Department” (2), yet this convergence of interests does not necessarily result in an interdisciplinary methodology. Moreira draws attention to the distinction between social sciences and literature as she claims that despite sharing “an interest in world literature, their approaches do not necessarily coincide” (3). The firmness of disciplinary boundaries in a volume that questions such boundaries comes across as a missed opportunity. The volume, by directing its focus to a methodological concern, aims to call into question the definition of world literature understood as a “systematic category” (1) in the United States. Claiming that such categorical definition prioritizes certain languages while disregarding the “literary languages that do not hold a sufficiently high level of prestige” (1), the volume aims to understand the “ways that hegemony is established and the costs of losing it” (2). While examining the causes and consequences of prevailing hegemonic structures, the volume focuses “on specific historical moments that afford dynamic and not quite central perspectives on hegemony and, more generally, [End Page 574] into the conflicts between diverse literary and linguistic traditions” (2). The volume presents a wide range of linguistic diversity as well as distinct temporal and geographical contexts. Nonetheless, the connection between diversity and the intricate workings of hegemony remains rather disconcerting. While claiming to refrain from “reproducing the point of view of the current hegemonic literatures” (2), the volume remains silent on the hegemonic reach of the languages and literary traditions that are included in the chapters. Ranging from Arabic to Portuguese, from Turkish to Spanish, these languages do have histories of various degrees of hegemonic practices as well as their respective fields of subjugation. The volume’s specific argument would have been more compelling if the implications and complexities of hegemony were more openly addressed. A closer look into the content of each chapter makes it disconcertingly clear that most of the authors and filmmakers that the contributors discuss are names with international prominence, having already gained recognition via prestigious awards and translations. Coming across the names of Bolaño, Borges, Pamuk, and Ceylan in a volume claiming to problematize the hegemony of certain linguistic traditions is disheartening to say the least. Inclusion of works by authors, translators, and filmmakers who have not made it into the syllabi of world literature courses across North American institutions would certainly enhance the argument of this volume. The chapters, organized around thematic and geographical proximity, allow the reader to follow an organic unfolding of ideas. Chapter One, by Tarek Shamma, offers a study of the impact of the translation of Aristotle’s work into Arabic by Abu Bishr Matta bin Yunus. Shamma advocates for a new understanding of translation that “challenges the standards of comprehension and miscomprehension that are usually used in the assessment” (25). Arguing that the translations into Arabic allowed for a new conceptual paradigm to become possible, Shamma advocates for the exploration of “the...

Research on the Teaching Methods of World Literature Course from the POA Perspective

Research on the Teaching Methods of World Literature Course from the POA Perspective

Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities by Richard Serrano

Reviewed by: Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities by Richard Serrano Susan Spencer Richard Serrano, Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities (New York: Routledge Press, 2020). Pp. 138. $59.95 cloth. The author of three engaging books on topics covering interrelated traditions in French, Arabic, and East Asian literatures, Richard Serrano has spent the past two decades broadening the Comparative Literature curriculum at Rutgers University. In Spring 2020, he initiated a popular new course on “The Global Eighteenth Century.” This fourth volume, which informed that class’s teaching philosophy, is the latest installment in Serrano’s lifelong project of expanding the availability of obscure works and encouraging us to reflect on how we read literary works in a global context. A fifth work currently in progress, World Literature and the Challenge of Translation, will concentrate on 21st-century authors. [End Page 1030] On the face of it, Reexamining World Literature is not an eighteenth-century book. The subject matter ranges from the medieval period to the present day. Three of the six chapters, however, are concerned with overlooked authors of the long eighteenth century, making a powerful argument in favor of their inclusion in our assessment of the period’s literary production. For academics in their roles as both educators and researchers, this book is important to consider for the innovation of its conception as well as for its argument and readings. Through six representative case studies, the author invites us to break from the temptation to ignore or push aside works that resist familiar genre boundaries or prevailing schools of criticism. This temptation is especially strong in the classroom, where we often strive to create a cohesive thematic narrative at the risk of oversimplifying the human experience to fulfill expectations that we ourselves have set up. Citing the claims of Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter that “our view of the world is necessarily skewed by the availability of works relatively easy to translate into English,” Serrano suggests, “I would push this further. It is not simply a question of whether a work can be translated easily or well into English, but whether it fits easily into categories of literature that the reader in English finds comfortable” (119).1 In Reexamining World Literature, Serrano proposes that the vitality of the study of world literature demands that we counteract such overdependence on familiar anthologized material and theoretical frameworks by asking new questions, drawing attention to works, authors, and genres that few many have heard of, and, when possible, making new works available for further exploration by our colleagues and students through translation. In Chapter 1, Serrano challenges prevailing notions of prose fiction as the preeminent form in eighteenth-century China through a close reading of seven short poems by Sun Yunfeng (1764–1814). The first and most important poet in the coterie of her patron Yuan Mei, and a focus of his influential Anthology of Poetry by the Female Disciples of Harmony Garden (1796), Sun Yunfeng was famous during her lifetime but lost popularity when later generations turned away from the classical style she favored and extended. Unlike the subjects of Chapters 5 and 6, Sun Yunfeng has not been neglected altogether; in fact, her reputation is currently on the rise.2 As with other undervalued authors who have regained prominence both in the West and in their home countries as a result of renewed interest from Western academics, Sun Yunfeng has benefited from the “literary archeology” of feminist critics who in the past two decades have returned attention to Qing dynasty poets along with their European sisters—though Serrano suggests that some of her more transgressive poems still languish in obscurity because “their inability to meet the expectations of the scholar reading them as a woman’s poetry has further marginalized them” (7, 8). Chapter 1 provides fresh translations and detailed analyses of representative examples of such neglected poems, alongside precursors on similar subjects by some of the male Tang Dynasty poets who developed the conventions that underlie Sun Yunfeng’s imagery and subjects. Such comparisons can be overlooked in a World Literature courses because of the traditional separation of medieval and early modern...

Twenty Years of Literature at University. An Insider’s Perspective

Taking the Estonian philology BA curriculum as an example, the article analyses the changes in literature courses in 1998 and 2018 at Tallinn University (former Tallinn Pedagogical University). The year 1998 marks the beginning of my student life, the year 2018 marks the last full year as a lecturer. The 20-year period shoes vividly the changes that have taken place in the Estonian educational system. The overview is based on Estonian literature and world literature courses included in the Estonian philology BA curriculum. The article gives an overview of the periods, topics, themes, authors, theories and methods discussed in literature courses. The emphasis is on the changes that have taken place.

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

Investigating Curricular Injustices to Uncover the Injustices of Curricula: Curriculum Evaluation as Critical Disciplinary Literacy Practice

Conversations around disciplinary literacy have often focused on the skills particular to each discipline without analyzing closely the discipline-specific properties of curricula. These silences suggest the need to nuance the ways in which curricula acts as a discipline-bound social construct, meaning that English math, history, and science curricula are fashioned, presented, and preserved differently. This article presents findings from a case study conducted with secondary English students in a World Literature course as they worked to analyze both the large-scale injustices their curriculum favored as well as the ways in which curricula itself acts as an injustice-perpetuating mechanism. Findings reveal that the injustice mini-unit positioned students to view curricula as a political entity; connect sociocultural and curricular privileging; and begin to agentively re-purpose, and re-see, curricula. Implications include the importance of delineating the phenomenon of critical disciplinary literacy, and the ways in which problematizing curricula serves as a powerful and important critical disciplinary literacy practice.

The Evaluation of World Literature Courses in Turkish Language Teaching Departments Based on Conceptual Field

In this study, that are given in Turkish Language Teaching Departments of the universities in Turkey have been evaluated within the scope of World Literature that was used by Goethe in the 1820s and developed afterwards. With the purpose of conducting this evaluation, contents of of Turkish Language Education Departments in Turkey and European Credit Transfer System forms have been obtained, and these contents have been examined within the context of the conceptual field that is pointed out by the definition. In this study where document analysis was used among the qualitative research methods, the data have been evaluated under the headings of learning outcomes and course flow chart based on multiculturalism, multidiscipline and multitime which are the key words of world literature. The first remarkable point is tackling the topic of Turkish literature as a world literature sub-unit that is independent from East and West. Considering the axis of the study, it is observed that the Turkish language teaching programs focus on the relationship between written work and writer within the scope of multiculturalism in world literature teaching course. These written works exceed beyond the culture elements they belong to, and they are worldwide famous and generally novels.

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...

Rabindranath Tagore and World Literature

Courses on world literature in English translations indicate to a new popular trend in the discipline of comparative literature in North American universities. Some scholars like David Damrosch promote the practice as a new way of doing comparative literature, but others like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak think that an encyclopedic survey of world literatures in English translations confirms the logic of globalization. Whether the world literature courses and anthologies in English translation inspire enthusiasm or invite reservation, the question "What is world literature?" has come to the fore as one of the central concerns of the discipline. In 1907, eighty years after German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany coined the term Weltliteratur, Rabindranath Tagore in India expressed his views on “comparative literature” translating it as vishwa sahitya, “world literature.” My paper is a reading of Tagore’s lecture on world literature. Tagore envisions world literature as a creative transgression that activates a persistent human struggle for a bonding between aesthetics and alterity.

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.

Comparative Scholarship / Worldly Teaching

Comparative Scholarship / Worldly Teaching John Burt Foster Early in our careers, I suspect, many comparatists have had to ask, “What are we supposed to teach?” For me this issue first surfaced during a job interview with a university that was building comparative literature by piggy-backing new hires partly in established departments and partly in the new program. Somehow, in the confused weeks before the mla, I learned that I was to interview with English but not that I should also do so with Russian. So there I was, just one step past graduate school (where we were able to move quite freely among the languages, philosophy, and history) and already entangled in the uncertainties concerning where I belonged, at least in the university’s day-to-day role as a teaching institution. Does this story strike a chord? In my case, I soon found that unlike my research in French, German, and Russian, the two-fifths of me assigned to comparative teaching had to rely largely on translations. This situation even prevailed at an overseas campus in France, where students on a junior-year study abroad were generally taking third-year language courses and still not ready for much reading in French. Of course, issues of language and culture were directly relevant there, unlike at the home campus where they could seem vaguely pedantic. For comparatists in the U.S., I found, teaching and scholarship often had to exist in two separate compartments, even after the federally funded language programs of the 1960s. So, several decades after that initiation, with world literature now on our agenda, how much has the situation changed? Here I need to distinguish between comparatists like myself, trained when the English, French, and German triad reigned supreme, so that even my Russian seemed exotic in comparison, and those comparatists I admire as interregionalists. These are the scholars with a knowledge (say) of Arabic, Bengali, or Chinese (people in the mold of Said, Spivak, or Eoyang). I like to imagine that these comparatists, with their more-or-less equal command of a Western literature alongside their knowledge of another geocultural tradition, are better suited to teach world literature with our field’s ideal of even-handedness. Yet if world literature as a subject for undergraduates must also mean, at its most basic level, the literature from a worldwide sweep of regions, even these comparatists must accept the challenge of moving out into a larger variety of traditions. Obviously, a good world literature course does not have to be that inclusive, and a well-focused case study that explores a smaller number of traditions at greater depth can do a lot to expand horizons. Nonetheless, “world literature” is a label [End Page 21] that promises a breadth of coverage that students need to encounter in some form, somewhere. Lacking the interregional expertise just mentioned, I have still gradually edged my way from comparative to world literature. The first step in this direction was to accept the value of teaching works I knew only in translation. For several decades I have taught in an English department with established courses on Continental Fiction for majors and on World Masterpieces for the general student body. Both of them boiled down to the same thing: works from the Western tradition not originally written in English and hence taught in translation. These were ideal courses for someone with my training, given the power of the French and Russian traditions in the novel, the importance of some striking achievements in German, and the rise of modern drama. In time, however, I compromised my conscience as a comparatist by adding other figures to fill out the picture: Verga, Pirandello, and Calvino despite my limited Italian, and Ibsen, García Márquez, and Kundera though I lacked meaningful Norwegian, Spanish, and Czech. The significance of this urge to “fill out the picture” in taking me beyond “knowing what you teach in the original” finally dawned on me several years ago. In a moment of sink-or-swim resolve sparked by a retreat where we made world literature a departmental goal, I decided to teach at least one world literature course every year. Our decision had...

How to Read World Literature , and: Teaching World Literature , and: The Longman Anthology of World Literature (review)

Reviewed by: How to Read World Literature, and: Teaching World Literature, and: The Longman Anthology of World Literature John M. Kopper (bio) How to Read World Literature. By David Damrosch. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 147 pp. Paper $24.95. Teaching World Literature. Edited by David Damrosch. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. 440 pp. Paper $22.00. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. 6 vols. Edited by David Damrosch and David L. Pike. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. Paper $300.00. In Borges's story "The Aleph," the narrator's account of what he saw at/ in the mysterious Aleph appears to echo the book project of one of the characters, an undertaking that "covers" entire hectares of the Australian landscape. If the aleph stands for the totality of literature, then today's rich and expanding bibliography of works about that immensity, along with the increasingly massive anthologies that seek to encircle it, show that we have lost our fear of the unbounded object that we study. In his Teaching World Literature, How to Read World Literature, and the six-volume second edition of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, coedited with David Pike, David Damrosch has more than created a classroom Australia. He has produced a pedagogy. The vastness of the debate entered into by Damrosch, his coeditors and contributors leaves the instructor of literature with many [End Page 399] teaching tools, some uncertainty, and a few intriguing questions about today's pedagogical imperatives. Teaching World Literature contains thirty-two essays by scholars who have taught world literature courses. Damrosch gathers them in sections that steer the reader to the specific: "Issues and Definitions," "Program Strategies," "Teaching Strategies," and "Courses." Beleaguered by the fall-off of Americans' interest in reading books of any sort, an instructor turns instinctively to the second section, a justification for world literature courses that is less theoretical than tactical and tied to the floating policies and intellectual engagements of different campus communities. Summarizing the authors' approaches, Damrosch notes that "from Goethe's time onward, definitions of world literature have oscillated among three basic paradigms: as classics, as masterpieces, and as windows on the world" (3). Thomas Beebee recasts these as Friedrich Nietzsche's three archetypes of historical writing: the antiquarian, the monumental, and the critical in his contribution to the volume (276). In Teaching World Literature it is the "critical" study of literature that predominates and receives validation. Kathleen Komar, for example, describes how the particular cultural and ethnic environment of the UCLA student population has not only guided her teaching aims but to a great degree inflected class discussion of texts. The fortunes of history turned Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas" and Büchner's Woyzeck, read in her class in 1992 during the LA riots, into narratives that spoke to the city outside the window, where "the very legal and political systems that are supposed to uphold justice and equality become polluted and corrupt" (107). In How to Read World Literature, Damrosch responds to his title's question by asking us to "read around in anthologies" or take a favorite author and travel back to her or his favorite authors (125-26). "This book is organized around a set of skills that we need to develop—or recover and hone—in order to read world literature with understanding and enjoyment" (4). "Skills" is the organizing principle of the volume. The first chapter's subheadings—"The World of the Text," "The Author's Role," "Modes of Reading," and "What is a Novel?"—reflect Damrosch's overarching concern with context. "The fundamental difference between the poet's role in the Chinese and English traditions... involves ways of reading as much as poetic practice" (20). While failing to answer its own question, the terse chapter on "What is a Novel?" shows that an informed understanding of Murasaki's The Tale of Genji requires knowledge not only of Japanese culture but of literature's place in that culture. To appraise the violation of a cultural norm, our students need to know the norm. [End Page 400] A chapter on translation in How to Read gives a dizzying list of the variables that affect...

Teaching World Literature by David Damrosch

818 Reviews contribution to Irish studies but also as a model for futuremusico-literary criti cism. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Matthew Paul Carlson Teaching World Literature. Ed. byDavid Damrosch. (Options forTeaching) New York: Modern Language Association of America. 2009. viii+432 pp. $40 (pbk$22). ISBN 978-1-60329-033-3 (pbk 978-1-60329-034-0). This collection comprises thirty-two essays by different authors, in fiveparts: Is sues and Definitions', 'Program Strategies', 'Teaching Strategies', 'Courses' (show ing what an exemplary syllabus in world literaturemight be), and 'Resources', including bibliographies. David Damrosch begins by asking 'What literature? Whose world? How has literature been understood in itsmyriad manifestations over time and across space?' (p. 3). He refers to Goethe's idea of 'world litera ture' as classics, masterpieces, and windows on theworld (p. 3), and agrees with JohnPizer (The Idea ofWorld Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006)) that, even ifonly primary texts are studied, 'world literature courses should include direct discussion of thehistory of the termWeltliteratur (p. 3), first used by Goethe. He also discusses national literatures and literature in translation, maintaining that the study ofworld literaturemust be seen 'not in competition but in symbiosis with the study of national and regional traditions' (p. 9). The essays inPart 1are themost theoretical, discussing what literature should be taught and what world we refer to inworld-literature courses. Sarah Lawall argues 'if"West" refers to something more than geography [. . .] then the excluded "rest" becomes even more problematic' (p. 17). She compares, as many contributors do, anthologies ofworld literature, noting that our understanding of texts is shaped by Western frameworks, such as 'Renaissance', 'Enlightenment', and 'Romanticism', even if the volume (such as theNorton Anthology ofWorld Literature (New York: Norton, 2002)) deals with literature in China or Japan (p. 27). Lawall maintains that translation is a challenge for aworld-literature anthology because of differing linguistic and cultural traditions, the difficultyof locating accurate translation, and even the issue of getting translation right.Other problems include how genre is changed in translation and how, for example, songs of African oral performance or the dialect of a Greek comedy should be translated. These important issues, pinpointed in one paragraph, could have been developed further.On translation, Lawrence Venuti applies Derrida's idea of iterability, that themeaning of any sign can change, and argues that if translation partakes of iterability, it is actually a recontextualizing process. He engages with the question of what happens when a narrative from the global periphery is translated into a core language such as English using English-language stylistic analogues (p. 94). He suggests a possible destabilizing power in doing so.While translation is an issue inworld literature, surprisingly, none of the contributors refers to Benjamin's ideas on translation in 'The Task of the Translator (in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 70 82). Vilashini Cooppan uses The Arabian Nights to discuss the ethical obligations MLR, 105.3, 2010 819 of world literature by referring to such postcolonial critics as Spivak and Homi Bhabha: the 'world' is an issue, or in Spivak's term, 'the arrogance of ambition' which mimes the imperial certitudes of the West's recognition of itself through its others (p. 37). Cooppan suggests a reading technique for someone who does not read The Arabian Nights inArabic: to consult versions throughout the history of translating the work and remind ourselves that the aim of reading world litera ture is to 'decolonize' the hegemony ofWestern schemas (p. 40). Zhang Longxi demonstrates how themetaphor of life-as-a-journey can be compared in itsuses by Plato and theChinese philosopher Zhuangzi. He argues that 'philosophy, religion, history, and literature are notmutually exclusive' (p. 65), and thatwhat is appealing 'is not just linguistic ingenuity [. . .]but the attractiveness of its thematic content, the idea thatmanifests itself in felicitous language and exquisite poetic expres sions' (p. 65). Following this,Zhang argues, 'sometimes we may find Shakespeare closer in spirit to the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming than to his fellow countryman' (p. 70). Thus the aim of studyingworld literature is 'to acquire a broad perspective for discerning thematic affinities and patterns of literary imagination beyond the gaps of languages and cultures' (p. 71...