Teaching World Literature

by David Damrosch (Editor)

This is an exciting, and unsettling, time to be teaching world literature, writes David Damrosch. Because the range of works taught in world literature courses has expanded enormously, both historically and geographically, the task of selection--and of teacher preparation--has grown more challenging. Teachers of this field must grapple with such issues as coverage, cultural difference, and the role of translation in the classroom. Should one emphasize masterpieces or traditions, concepts or themes? How does one avoid making a work bear the burden of representing an entire tradition? To what extent should anthologies be used? Can a course be global in scope and yet focus on a few works, authors, moments?

This collection of thirty-two essays in the MLA series Options for Teaching offers an array of solutions to these challenges, reflecting the wide variety of institutions, courses, and students described by the contributors. An annotated bibliography is provided, with a listing of useful Web sites.

Genres: Nonfiction, Teaching

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. 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 (2008). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He is presently completing a book entitled Comparing the Literatures: What Every Comparatist Needs to Know, and starting a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.

Reviews

[Suhaib · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a comprehensive overview of World Literature. I especially liked the sections that discuss teaching strategies and offer several ways professors can design their courses.

[Zahra Meshkani]

Excellent on pedagogy of world literature.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read assigned chapters for coursework. This is a fantastic tool for teachers, not just of world literature, but also world religion, world history and so on because many of the same problematics plagued the teaching of world LIT appears in different manifestations in HIST PHIL RL ... and the teaching strategies as well as bag of tricks shared by the veteran teachers will prove transportable in teaching other things ...
I finally decided to get my own copy of this book, after reading it.