Toward a Cosmopolitan Literature Curriculum: Teaching Literature in an Era of Transnationalism

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Conversations in Children’s Literature: Multimodal Texts, Representations of Identity, and Culturally Responsive Teacher Education

Abstract

In this paper, I begin by arguing that one way to recover literature education’s marginal position in the world today is to counter the hegemony of new criticism and reader-response theories that continue to inform the literature curriculum. Such theoretical groundings discount the role of literature in providing space for deeper engagements with the other, which, I argue, is central to contemporary cosmopolitan philosophy. Utilizing a cross-comparative case-study analysis of six English literature teachers in three cities – New York, Perth, and Singapore – I then theorize cosmopolitan literature curricula principles that encourage the development of an other-oriented culture of openness in the classroom involving de-centering the self’s interpretation of the other and transcending the self’s material understanding of the other.

Author

• Suzanne S. Choo, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education