Canons, Contexts, and Pedagogy: The Place of World Literature

??? COHPAnATIST CANONS, CONTEXTS, AND PEDAGOGY: THE PLACE OF WORLD LITERATURE Sarah Lawall "World Uterature" has occupied an ambiguous, contradictory, or perhaps merely flexible position in the decades-long controversies over canon and curriculum. Certainly there is no single canon of world literature, nor is there likely to be one. As Brandt Corstius has shown in studying canons around the world, different countries always give special weight to their own or famüiar traditions (6). In the American curriculum, world literature is both mainstream and marginal: on the one hand, it is part of a firmly situated dominant tradition, its "window on the world"; on the other, it is a sign of definitive difference from that tradition. CoUege surveys of Western "world" literature and Western civilization have flourished since the time ofWorld War I, when they were offered as an introduction to other cultures that also strengthened the common anchor in Western tradition; they were not introductions to global literature (LawaU 8). Modern courses, responding to the discrepancy between the image of"world" and a syUabus Umited to Western tradition, have either broadened their horizons toward global coverage or, retaining their original scope, have reserved the term "world Uterature" for a second semester that conveys the rest of the world to students emerging from the Western survey. In either framework, competing possibilities remain; the same canonical books may be interpreted as "world- class," illustrating universal values and common humanity, or as proving, through increased attention to context, an "otherness" that chaUenges universalist assumptions. Still another academic format—one that focuses on individual and cultural differences, and has an immediate pragmatic aim— presents a range of diverse (usually modern) selections that ülustrate ethnic, social, gender, and class variations. Such courses, also titled "world Uterature" and situated as part of the new "multicultural" curriculum , are especially popular in modern high schools aware of the need to facilitate communication inside a diverse audience (Massachusetts Department of Education 76-78). The emphasis on communication through Uterature, rather than on the commemorative study of canonical works, recalls J. W. Goethe's exchange-oriented definition of world Uterature. In 1827, the German author coined the term "world Uterature" to describe a process ofreading across national boundaries that was cultural as much as it was literary. Reading a French review of his own work, he was struck by the possibility of seeing one's own image mirrored in another cultural vision and subtly transformed by different habits of mind. Goethe subsequently proposed that contemporary writers—"the Uving, striving men ofletters" —write with a transnational audience in mind, read each other's work Vol. 24 (2000): 39 CANONS, CONTEXTS, PEDAGOGY across national frontiers, and encourage such reading as the reciprocal grasp ofcultural identities and thus a route to world harmony. He never fully developed the notion or even went far beyond Western Europe in his examples, for his emphasis lay elsewhere: on world literature as an act of reading that involved transgression and exchange rather than overarching global structures (Lawall 12-15). This exchange model is implicit in modern attempts to open the canon and in recent calls for a multicultural perspective at aU levels of education. It also characterizes the intertextual practice of Comparative Literature: its juxtapositions, reflections, and interrogation of embedded reference. World Uterature and Comparative Literature share certain key perspectives ; indeed, the terms world and comparative have a similar function as they modify literature. Each impUes broad scope and attention to the play of difference. In both, Uterary-theoretical questions that might otherwise be addressed in a narrower focus require a diversified body of evidence whose heterogeneity frustrates any rush to judgment. Attempting to define the epic as a genre from within a single tradition, for example, is de facto discredited. The world literature instructor assumes that common organizational themes like identity crisis, heroism, good and evü, and individual and society, or the more technical concerns of genre, fictionality, narrative perspective, and the text's relationship with the reader, will be explored in a variety of linguistic and cultural settings. Such variety slows down the process of inquiry and highlights its procedures: üluminating assumptions, testing hypotheses, and buüding in an awareness of openness and ambiguity...