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The prize-granting committee: A learner-centered approach to teaching contemporary world literature
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This article describes a course in World Literature taught by Dr. Emily Wittman, who co-authors with undergraduate English major Danie Vollenweider. Making significant use of Web 2.0 technology, the course is run as a literary prize-granting committee loosely modeled on the Nobel committee. In this class it is the students themselves who, after reading about a number of international literary prizes, come up with their own evaluative criteria and prize name. Throughout the semester they discuss--in class and anonymously on wiki pages--the merits of several novels from across the globe. On the first day of class, students discuss what foreign-language books they have read; on the last, they debate and decide which novel should win the prize.
I. The iSWALTH Committee
The time is 4:30 p.m. It's the fifth of December, the last class of the semester at the University of Alabama. The final meeting of the iSWLATH (The Introductory Survey of World Literature At Ten Hoor) literary prize-granting committee must end at 4:45 p.m. The seventeen members of the committee are down to the wire. Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare's Broken April is the clear third choice, but the debate over the first place book is more heated than ever. Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is in the lead with seven votes. South African writer J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is one vote behind. Emotions are running high. One student, passionately in favor of Coetzee's Disgrace and outraged by a committee that she accuses of voting according to personal preferences as opposed to the committee's self-selected criteria, rises from her seat and storms out of the room. A minute later she stomps back in, sits back down, arms folded in protest.
The frustrated student is self-consciously borrowing from a repertoire of stock theatrical moves. Over the course of the semester, we study various scandals in the history of literary prizes, including the tensions between members of the Nobel Prize Committee, one of whose members, Knut Ahnlund, quit when the button-pushing Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won the prize in 2004. A sympathetic student reminds the class to vote "according to the criteria that we came up with ourselves." This award is "not about the book that we like best," she insists. Another student concurs, arguing that Murakami's novel might appeal more to students simply because the characters are "young and hip like us," whereas Coetzee's Disgrace deals with a self-centered aging professor forced to acknowledge his diminished social position in a post-Apartheid South Africa.
If the appeal of novels is linked to the pleasure principle--a notion we discuss at various points during the semester--it seemed clear that the class would sympathize more with the troubled and compelling Japanese youth who people Murakami's novel about the sentimental education of Toru Watanabe, a disaffected undergraduate. Yet Coetzee's Disgrace generated the most intriguing discussions and the most heated debates. Students agreed that Disgrace is the most universal in scope and also the most thought-provoking. Disgrace won the highest scores in the category of human complexity by making us explore a voice that "we had never heard from in literature." The protagonist, David Lurie, is a 52-year-old professor, a man in decline, who has lost his looks as well as his social status. Students agreed that David Lurie was a character on whom we did not want to pin our imagination, a human being with whom we could identify only unwillingly. Our heated discussion did not change the slate: Norwegian Wood won by one vote. Nonetheless, we profited from the discussion. As Azar Nafisi reflected, after serving as a judge for the International Man Booker Prize in Literature, "more important than the actual prize given is the debate and controversy it generates." (2)
II. World Literature: A Contested Field
World literature is increasingly finding a home in English departments. Much like the planet they purport to represent, courses in world literature offer a host of possibilities, as well as missed opportunities. Some schools, including our own, have world literature minors. In this article, we are concerned primarily with the contemporary courses in world literature that are taught to (usually) monolingual students in English Departments. At Alabama, as at many peer institutions, an upper-division course is traditionally offered as an elective. The course we describe, EN 411, sometimes serves as a forum for professors with broad interests to teach world literatures as well as area studies:
EN 411 Advanced Studies in Comparative or Multicultural Literature. Three hours. Designed for advanced English majors, a special topics course that focuses on issues involving comparative literatures and/or cultural studies.
At the University of Alabama, 411 is the course in which faculty are assumed to teach the greatest global hits, yet it is not clear exactly what this list is. The professor who teaches World Literature must place book orders long before the course begins. Teaching this course for the first time, this professor, Emily Wittman, thought long about what to include and what she could teach with integrity. Her Ph.D. is in Comparative Literature and she has studied, to various degrees, French, German and Classical Arabic. She has lived in France, Germany, and Turkey, and has also spent considerable time in Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco. Should she select literature that will allow her to make use of the knowledge granted by first-hand experience, linguistic familiarity and scholarship? Should she settle on one particular national literature--French literature, for example--and consider this course just one piece in a world-shaped puzzle to be filled out by the complementary expertise of her colleagues?
Both of these approaches are problematic and certainly steer the course away from the objectives of an introductory survey course, the kind of course that is typically built on the philosophy of maximum exposure. When drawing up a syllabus for a course in World Literature, the professor runs the risk of creating a cramming exercise for all involved. The professor felt hesitant about teaching writers whose work she did not know well, writers from cultures of which she had only a cursory knowledge. She also feared a syllabus of celebrated names that would result in "a parade of universally consecrated texts yielding themselves to purely formal analysis" (Harrison 211). In many ways, Franco Moretti is right to suggest that we are all charlatans in the field of world literature; we are only ever limited citizens of the world, no matter how cosmopolitan in spirit, no matter how many stamps grace our passport (148).
The field of world literature is contested precisely because scholars apply so many distinct strategies. The conceptual tools that organize the courses in which world literature is taught can allow it to go in so many different possible directions. For instance, discussions of world literature bring highbrow and lowbrow distinctions to the fore. After all, Paolo Coehlo's The Alchemist (1988), a stock and sentimental pseudo-bildungsroman written in the voice of an adolescent Andalusian peasant, is one of the most widely-read works of fiction in the world. If there is a canon of books for American and English literature, there is not yet one for recent literature from around the world. Furthermore, many of the recognized greatest hits are no longer contemporary. Two exemplary novels often taught in world literature courses, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Tayib Saleh's Season of Migration to the North, were published in 1958 and 1966, respectively. Additionally, in the case of non-English language works, issues of politics or culture join with the constraints and pressures of translation, making the teaching of world literature seem even more of a grasping art.
What, after all, is the world? What does it mean for us to try to be representative? How do we avoid falling into what Wendy Moffat has so aptly termed "the myth of coverage" (2)? By teaching geographically representative courses we risk reinforcing the practice of reading along national lines. Jahan Ramazani warns against the pitfalls of "passport studies." Wai Chi Dimock wonders will "history and literary studies ever free themselves from the nation" and notes the dangers of conducting our reading in world literature as "citizenship studies" (2001: 225, 226). We are always in danger of ossifying world literature into a static and ultimately unhelpful category.
Overall, recent scholars of world literature, including those represented in Christopher Prendergast's collection Debating World Literature (2004) and David Damrosch's recent collection Teaching World Literature (2009), argue that flexibility is needed in order to teach such courses with integrity. The goal of offering a panoptic survey of world literature in one course is simply unrealistic. Moreover, as Ramazani points out, our efforts to be inclusive may be counterproductive; transnationalism is not "inherently emancipatory, any more than nationalism is always emancipatory" (335). Oftentimes, as in our department, contemporary world literature and postcolonial literature occupy the same course number. It is then at the professor's discretion to teach world literature and postcolonial literature, a genre that, as Victoria Rosner points out, often does the literature in question a disservice when it "asserts the fact of past colonization as the defining feature of a diverse literature" (58).
III. Creating a World Literature Course
Clearly, the appropriate scale for the study of world literature is--and must remain--a topic of debate. In the meantime, we must teach it. We argue that the best way to teach this course is to invite students right into these debates. In part, this involves making use of Web 2.0 technologies with which students are already familiar. We propose as a model a version of this course that has been taught here at the University of Alabama for four semesters, with particular attention to the Fall 2009 course in which co-author Danie Vollenweider enrolled. Here is the course listing that students received during advising period:
English 411 "World Literature" Course Description: The category of "world literature" is a difficult one to define, particularly in a country where only 3% of books published annually are translated. In fact, the United States may be the only place where the concept of world literature still has currency. In this course we will interrogate this category and the conditions that birthed it. What is world literature and how are the foreign-language texts published in the United States deemed meritorious? Is the category of world literature geographically determined or is it more of a stylistic and aesthetic category? There has perhaps never been a time when issues of nation, language, and translation have been more important or more troubling than they are today. Much foreign-language literature--in particular "third–world literature"--is published and read precisely because it is (often unfairly) apprehended as non-modern. We will investigate how literature arrives on the global stage with a look at international prizes. Coursework may include the creation of our own prize-granting committee. Possible readings include work by Ismail Kadare, Thomas Bernhard, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk, Adonis, and Wislawa Szymborska.
Ours is a learner-centered course that makes the issues transparent and forces us to inventory and examine our assumptions. The professor is honest with the students--she cannot teach Gabriel Garcia Márquez with the same confidence with which she teaches Elfriede Jelinek or Orhan Pamuk. The course alternates between close reading and discussion of wider contexts. Some literature courses resemble a truffle hunt to the extent that they concentrate on close readings of canonical texts. Other courses also introduce students to the scope of the field in question. The latter courses are particularly useful when it comes to contested fields, such as world literature. Pascale Casanova notes: "[B]y its very nature, it [world literature] requires the critic to continually shift perspective... one moment looking to clarify a view of the whole by what might seem to be an insignificant detail, the next to explicating the most particular aspect of a work by taking a detour through what might appear to be the observations of the most general sort" (351). Alternating, as we must, between close reading and a broad overview of the debates that have energized cosmopolitan readers from Goethe forward, the critical evaluation of literarature from around the globe is an enormously difficult enterprise.
Marjorie Garber counsels that "the future importance of literature studies--and, if we care about such thing, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world--will come from taking risks, and not from playing it safe" (13). In drawing up her first world literature survey course, Professor Wittman looked for ways to introduce contemporary debates about world literature into her course. Ultimately she realized that it is useful to drop the expert mantle from time to time. But many questions still remained. She wanted course readings to represent as many geographical regions as possible. However, this meant choosing books of manageable length. For instance, the first semester she taught the course, she hoped to include Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a staple in both world literature and postcolonial literature courses. At 533 pages, it was simply too long for the course that she wanted to teach. Genre was also an issue in the pilot course. Hesitantly, she chose the Syrian poet Adonis and the British playwright and Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter. The pilot class decided unanimously that judging books across genres was simply too difficult and so she decided to include only prose henceforth.
This course was conceived as a seed planting course and we propose it to you as such. When it goes smoothly, it can plant seeds of interest and desire that blossom into related fields of inquiry. The critical thinking and knowledge that this course provides will allow students to further their understanding of the complexities inherent in the category of world literature. This course also encourages further acquaintance with the writers on the syllabus and others who write outside of the nationally-defined boundaries of the English Department. As Moretti indicates, at some point meta-questions about world literature must give way to courses taught by specialists in various fields, "in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of labour" (66).
World literature courses are typically advertised to students by means of exciting course catalog entries, full of intriguing titles and thought-provoking descriptions for the intellectually curious student. But in order for us to deliver responsibly on their promises, innovative course construction is urgent. The approach to teaching world literature that we propose in this paper stems from our belief that it is important to be forthright with students about the enterprise of world literature as well as the choices that are made when making up the course syllabus. We submit that it is important to discuss why, as Moretti maintains, "[r]eading more is a good thing, but not the solution" (55).
One of the chief goals of this course is to create a community of practice, a crucial element of an upper-level course. We begin with simpler but important tasks--i.e. the gathering of information about prizes and prize-giving controversies, and progressively move to more difficult topics. We establish criteria for our own international prize; we then evaluate course books according to these criteria, debate the choice of the winner from a short list and, once the winner is selected, collectively design a statement that both announces and justifies the award.
The course was designed with a focus on the works of consecrated writers--writers who had won or were rumored to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in literature--and the rise of these writers to the global stage. World literature is sometimes understood to refer to literature that was originally written in a language other than English, but the course also included novels written in English and challenged the class to rethink their limited interactions with world literature and also to question the category. For example, we read Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. Students were quick to ponder, "Is America part of the 'world' of world literature?" After reading Roth's coming-of-age novel, we concluded that American literature can be productively included in a world literature class. Furthermore, the world described by Roth was as foreign to most committee members as that of any of the other novels that we read.
What follows is a full list of the works we read. It includes one Nobel Laureate and seven perpetual betting favorites.
Algerian White – Assia Djebar (Algeria)
Broken April – Ismail Kadare (Albania)
Disgrace – J.M . Coetzee (South Africa)
Goodbye, Columbus – Philip Roth (USA)
Lady Oracle – Margaret Atwood (Canada)
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami (Japan)
Rhyming Life and Death – Amos Oz (Israel)
The Joke – Milán Kundera (France/Czech Republic)
In addition to reading novels by these eight notable writers, students learn how books arrive on the global stage. We research who judges what good literature is and how prize committees work. We discuss how and when books are translated out of their original language and ponder why we Americans read so little foreign-language literature. We ask ourselves if we, as readers, have different expectations when we read foreign literature. We question whether we seek to confirm or enrich what we already know or if we look instead to answer a fixed subset of questions. We follow the workings of the Nobel Prize Committee and look also at a number of other international literary prizes. At the same time, we remind ourselves that in our classroom in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we ourselves comprise a discrete prize-granting committee with our own evaluative criteria and our own unique sensibilities. Our preliminary and final votes may echo or differ from the choices of these other better-known prize–granting committees.
In The Economy of Prestige, James English explores the function and importance of cultural prizes. He notes the astonishing proliferation of prizes in the arts, doubting with an implied sigh, that "any of the business of culture can be conducted without recourse to them, not even the business of resisting their putative effects" (106). English explores the famous scandal that erupted when Tolstoy lost the Nobel Prize in 1901 to obscure French poet René F.A. Sully-Prudhomme, detailing how the Stockholm committee attempted to save face by making sure that they never awarded him one. He argues that such apparent perversity serves to enhance the prize's prestige by assuring it as an autonomous albeit mysterious and frustrating entity, "possessed of special power, special capacity to make distinctions where others cannot" (147).
Students are already well aware of the role that awards play in our culture, from the Oscars to American Idol and even beauty pageants. But few are aware of either the international literary prizes that bring writers onto the world stage or of the debates and controversies generated by these prizes. In this course we interrogate the notion of intrinsic literary merit as well as the universality and timelessness of aesthetic standards. Fortunately, there will always be new trends, currents and scandals for us to discuss. Will the books we read enter into the realm of literary timelessness? Will they remain in print after five years or else be available only as e-books? Will more women be awarded prizes in the near future? Will wars leave great works unpublished for decades? Will domestic politics continue to influence the arrival of books on the global stage? For instance, we discussed the French press's response when the American Jonathan Littell won the Goncourt, France's most prestigious national literary award, in 2006 for his novel Les Bienveillantes (published in English as The Kindly Ones).
IV. World Literature and Web 2.0 Technologies: The Course Wiki
For much of our iSWLATH committee work, we used the website PBWorks, a collaborative web 2.0 technology which utilizes the evolving wiki format, one that students are quick to understand. A wiki is a website that allows for easy creation and editing of linked pages, as everyone who has access to the wiki can edit it. It offers an easy way for users to collaboratively author webpages. The wiki format creates a way for students to express opinions and engage with fellow committee members outside of the spatial and temporal confines of a classroom. The online engagement enriched our in-class discussions. Our seminar evolved from a scheduled class into an academic society, whose members were invested and well-informed. The class used information pages created by both students and the professor as well as other resources, to study other international prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize, as well as a variety of national literary prizes. Students made use of these wiki pages in order to research questions about the translation, circulation and reception of world literature. With the help of the collaborative wiki, students learned from the professor, but also from each other.
Web 2.0 technologies are usefully defined as "a collection of dynamic web-based resources that enable the construction and publication of text, audio, and video products within social networks" (Lee, Young). Our adoption of Web 2.0 technology clearly enhanced our course and contributed to its success by offering us a shared forum for assessment, information sharing, and course assignments. It is essential for professors as well as students to keep up-to-date and learn to utilize new technology if we are to continue to effectively integrate it into the classroom. Not every experiment will be successful, and not every technology will remain useful. Web 2.0 technologies provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Overall, the global platform of the Internet has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. It has also fostered a new culture of sharing--for free. The wiki in particular affords the professor both immediate and long-term feedback with respect to its usefulness. The valuable history tab provides a record of all contributions, effectively serving as an archive of the course and the decision-making process.
Wikis offer students a way to share their thoughts anonymously and in a user-friendly format. Before using the wiki, each student was assigned a random number from one to seventeen and was instructed not to give away his or her identity. After finishing a novel, students contributed 250-word narrative evaluations to the wiki in which they explain and defend their rankings. The anonymous ranking system gives students an outlet for things they felt could not be said in class, especially at first when they were not yet comfortable as a prize-granting committee.
An essential virtue of the wiki is that it provides an anonymous forum for students to rank and review books in a group setting. Students responded favorably to the unlimited access, the easy editing tools, and the spell checker featured on the wiki. The wiki afforded us a barometer reading of all of our opinions about course readings at various points in the semester; it thereby freed us from an audience of one (the professor) or the solipsism of a blog. We also appreciated that we could post on the wiki wherever and whenever we liked without the professor's permission. Yet the fact that the professor could match numbers with names helped keep our excited squabbles civil. Not once did we find ourselves in the bilious pit into which so many Amazon reviews and Youtube comment debates often slide. The wiki also allowed for a "greener" paperless classroom that the professor and committee members could access anywhere at anytime. The timestamps for postings certainly encouraged us to submit our assignments on time.
After completing each book and several in-class discussions, students logged on and gave their feedback according to the criteria that they established at the beginning of the semester. These helpful categories guided our studies and altered how we read the texts. In-class discussions of the feedback left on the wiki generated lively debates, some of which led students to change their initial opinions of a work. Particularly remarkable was the change in attitude towards a novel over the semester. Many original feelings about some novels changed dramatically by the end of November; Ismail Kadare's Broken April, for instance, became a dark horse in the race for the prize, whereas initital responses were rather tepid.
Although students also evaluated their subjective responses to books by means of the "fun" categories (see below), they concentrated their efforts on evaluating the books according to the main criteria. They assigned point values from one to ten--ten being the best possible score--to each book for every category. They then calculated the overall average score. The fun categories included questions such as, "Would you recommend this book to your parents?" and "Would you read another book by this author?" Because students responded to these questions on the wiki, we were able to stay focused on the course goals. The fun questions satisfied our curiosity, and occasioned reflection, but also allowed us to shelve the sort of discussions that often eat up valuable class time, particularly when it comes to contemporary literature.
However, many of the fun questions were instructive and interesting to ponder. One reason for this is that the iSWLATH committee met in a classroom in West Alabama, where students themselves often object to sexually explicit content in literature as well as open discussions of suicide and abortion. How would our committee, formed in the heart of the Bible Belt, react to the narrator's vivid sexual imagination in Rhyming Life and Death – and for that matter, the suicides and the sexually explicit lesbian encounter in Norwegian Wood? How would they respond to the issue of abortion as it is foregrounded in Disgrace after David Lurie's daughter Lucy faces pregnancy after a gang rape? Some students did indeed register their discomfort during our discussions. Ultimately, however, all students were able to manage the content, even if they responded on the wiki with a definitive "no" to the question: "Would you share this book with your parents?" At the time of our final, all students openly discussed these works, even if a student jokingly looked forward to a summer reading "happy books" characterized by "repressed sexuality and, of course, quotation marks."
Students were asked to numerically rate the novels on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best score, in the fifteen categories that they created at the beginning of the semester:
1. Substance (Does the novel deal with subjects that are significant? Does it succeed in giving an accurate, convincing portrayal of the situations at hand?)
2. Augments (Do we grow from it in learning or sophistication?)
3. Readability/engaging (Does the novel feature complexity/layers/facets, is it well-crafted?)
4. Universal (Could people everywhere relate to the themes of this novel?)
5. Relevance (Is this novel still relevant? Was or is it culturally significant?)
6. Thought-provoking (Or does it leave us indifferent?)
7. Makes us interrogate our beliefs (Do we find our opinions changing after finishing the book?)
8. Opens up a line of communication between us the work (Does this novel inspire inner conversation?)
9. Honors human complexity (Is the novel true-to-life? Do the characters jump off the page?)
10. Cohesive (Is it well-crafted overall, do all the parts work?)
11. Linguistic fluidity (Is the novel stylistically accomplished? Does it read well?)
12. Convincing (Is the novel true to human experience? It's not propaganda, not something where it's there to make a point.)
13. Credibility (Is the author successful in writing about this particular subject? Is it persuasive, authentic?)
14. Innovation (Is the novel original?)
15. Holistic score (After ranking the books, enter the average for the fourteen previous categories).
Fun questions: (Answer Yes/No, Except for #9)
1. Did this book ever make you feel uncomfortable?
2. Would you recommend it to a friend?
3. What about a parent?
4. Would you read another book by this person?
5. Did this author make you want to research the topic/culture/country, etc. further?
6. Did this book make you curious about the author?
7. Is it entertaining?
8. Would you like to see it made into a movie?
9. If so, which actors would you pick?
10. Did you think it was a good title?
11. Were you satisfied with the ending?
V. Student Response to the Wiki
The adoption of committee-selected criteria received largely favorable reviews from the students as the course progressed. In her final paper, one student observed, "the criteria are something that I will always keep and take with me while reading other books because now I have a way to judge a book aside from 'like' and 'dislike,' and I am able to understand why I like or don't like a book." One student noted in the course evaluation that the approach helped committee members to "formulate less subjective ideas of a work." Yet the criteria generated further discussion and debates over the course as we weighed their limitations. As one student wrote, "Even the criteria can be subjective. One person's idea of originality or timelessness may be completely different from another person's idea of these criteria." Another student commented that the course "gets everyone involved. I loved hearing the opposing viewpoints." Because they designed the criteria, students also felt that they had more of a voice in the evaluative construction and outcome of the course. With no set rubric, they were free to create a ranking system unlike any other course offered at the university. One student, in her award speech/final paper spoke to this anomaly: "Yes, gentlemen, not one but two of you managed to inspire verifiable fanatical passion in University of Alabama students over a subject not pertaining to binge drinking or contact sports; a fanatical passion so fervent that the last class ran over close to fifteen minutes as we attempted to sort out the winner."
The final papers, in which students were assigned to write a speech as if they were committee members awarding the prize, included harsh critique. Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, a book that originally scored high, fell significantly by the semester's end; "It just kept going, like a severed artery that just refuses to completely bleed out," one student opined. Another student held nothing back in her discussion of Disgrace: "Coetzee is like a surgeon, the novel is like a body, and the controversial issues are like vital organs... In a way, I think that if Coetzee is not going to treat the issues in some way or add to my understanding of them, then he has no right to be rummaging around so invasively in the first place." Another student also had strong feelings about Disgrace: "Disgrace does not allow the reader to be indifferent, as evidenced by a fellow committee member who threw the novel across her bedroom in frustration upon finishing the last sentence. Regardless of whether one loves or hates the book is a matter of taste; one must still recognize that it is, all in all, a remarkably well-crafted work."
By the end of the final class, students had settled on Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, and the first and only iSWLATH prize, The Capstone Cup, was awarded. Murakami received high praise from committee members; Norwegian Wood scored perfect tens across the board in the category of "Honors Human Complexity." In the following paragraph, one student justified her vote for Norwegian Wood.
Murakami's spell sets in, leading each of us to press forward even when it seems that we cannot go on, that we cannot bear another loss. More than a love story, more than a young man's search for life's truth, and more than an account of a survivor, Murakami brings forth every human emotion as a conductor might lead each member of an orchestra, one at a time, into a hauntingly spiritual solo. This novel is beyond the humanity it smoothly sculpts – it is transcendent and a champion of the unforgettable.
While Mr. Murakami himself will never be notified of his achievement, the students were proud of their accomplishment. It changed the way that co-author Danie reads literature and text in general. She now looks for what could be missing in a text, questions the way in which it is translated, and evaluates with criteria similar to those from our class. She also thinks significantly less about whether or not she liked a novel and more about the themes the book presents and if it presents them effectively. We suspect that other students feel the same way about the reading style they developed from the course, from the way they talked about how different reading was for them at the course's end versus the beginning. In her final wiki evaluation, one student remarked, "I can say comfortably and without a doubt that ranking the books we have read this semester is one of the most interesting and challenging final assignments that I have embarked upon in my college career." Another student wrote playfully, "I would like to conclude this speech by recognizing all seven of the books we read this semester. I consider my experiences with each one of them in much the same way that [Coetzee's] David Lurie considers his experiences with women: 'By each of them [I] was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them... Like a flower blooming in [my] breast, [my] heart floods with thankfulness."
Questions of translation are an integral part of any course in World Literature. With the exception of a few English-language writers including Doris Lessing, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, and Philip Roth, we read in translation, just as Nobel Prize committee members read all short-listed books in Swedish translation, even if they have mastered the language in question. For many in the class, it was their first encounter with contemporary literature in translation. If we address this responsibly, questions of translation are a gain for our course. As Catherine Porter, 2009 president of the Modern Language Association, argued in her Presidential Address: "After all, anyone who has seriously attempted to learn another language has realized that to know any language in its intricacy is at some point to translate it and to translate into it, to encounter the untranslatable within and without, to mark the gains and losses and compensatory strategies inherent in translation, to discover the ways in which languages converge and diverge" (553). The use of this kind of world literature in our course is "justifiable not only as a practical necessity but also as a heuristic device that enables the teacher-scholar to stress the linguistic similarity of the original and to present the text of the translation as an act of critical interpretation" (Porter, 553). Indeed, discussions of translation offer us a new and rich angle of approach. As Lawrence Venuti notes, reading in translation can enrich the study of world literature "in unexpected ways" insofar as it "broadens the range of questions that students might ask of languages, texts, tradition, and cultures as well as of the relation among them" (86, 87).
Our course allows and indeed encourages our students to make effective use of their foreign language skills. This is an important but unusual opportunity. Porter argues that "[a]rticulation between high school and college foreign language programs is haphazard at best" (547). Our course gave students the unusual opportunity to make use of their foreign language skills within the context of an English course. Our discussions offered students a forum in which to make use of this knowledge. For instance, one native Arabic speaker contributed valuable insight into the politics of language in Assia Djebar's Algerian White. Another student contributed helpful information about various aspects of Japanese language and culture when we read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. A third guided us through various features of Czech as we read Kundera.
VI. The iSWALTH Committee and the Nobel Prize
As the chart below shows, the first semester's syllabus included the work of four Nobel prize winners: Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Harold Pinter, Elfriede Jelinek, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as four other writers who have collected numerous national and international prizes and are rumored to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature: Milan Kundera, Adonis, Amos Oz, and Haruki Murakami. Teaching the course in the fall semester grants the professor an exciting pedagogical thread--from late August, when the course begins, through mid-October when the Nobel prize is announced--the committee follows the rumors, the betting sites, the drama and speculations in the press, and evaluates its expectations. We create shortlists and discuss possible scenarios.
Of course, modeling our course on the Nobel is not a celebration of the Swedish prize, but rather an acknowledgment of the heuristic possibilities that it offers.
Because so little non English-language literature is translated, many Americans have little interaction with such works, and perceive the Nobel Prize as highlighting an up-and-comer on the international scene for a specific work, although it is, in fact, more of a lifetime achievement award. In an earlier year, Horace Engdahl, the then-spokesman of the Swedish Academy publicly opined, "The U.S. is just too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature... That ignorance is restraining" (1). We analyzed the possible reasons for Engdahl's outburst during a year when two Americans, Philip Roth and John Updike, were betting favorites. Was this a kind of qualification before the committee awarded the prize to an American writer like Philip Roth? Was it preparation for yet another European writer? From his office at The New Yorker, editor David Remnick barked back at Engdahl via the AP: "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures."
The Nobel wields a huge amount of power over what the world sees as literature at its most transcendent and elite. It creates a huge demand for translations of books by laureates. The Nobel Prize thus awards writers more than money; they also win translations, new forewords by esteemed critics, and a guaranteed welcome on the international literary stage. We as a class were certainly wise to such moves; on the first day of class we discussed the committee's refusal to grant the award to Tolstoy. In a previous year, students' eyebrows raised knowingly when the prize was awarded to a lesser known French expatriate writer J. M. G. Le Clezio.
In our class, students quickly began postulating who would win the Nobel that year, and why one writer might deserve it over another student's favorite. In class we watched the Nobel lectures of former winners and followed press speculation. When Herta Müller, a German-Romanian writer none of the students had never heard of, was victorious, we talked at length about prize-granting committees and their inner workings, and how the Nobel committee shrewdly awarded it to a relatively unknown writer in order to generate more buzz. A few of the students commented on each other's Facebook walls when the winner was announced, generating excitement among their friends. One student, camping on that day without access to the internet or a TV, frantically called her mother and ordered her to get online. A number of students ordered Müller's novels, further illustrating the power of a prize-granting committee to influence the circulation of world literature.
It was around this time in October that the students truly began to inhabit their roles as members of a committee participating in a literary debate with high stakes. After this point, the wiki pages really started blowing up with opinions, and discussion became heated as students bonded as a committee and a class. Students engaged with other students' narrative evaluations, both to agree and to disagree.
VII. Conclusions: From Online Committee Members to Offline Readers
Our world literature course recognizes the importance of social learning both inside and outside the classroom. It has long been known that students learn and retain significantly more material when they actively participate, when they play a role in designing the course. In class and through their independent use of the course wiki, students learn, in a first-hand manner, the complexities and difficulties inherent in the project of creating and deploying universal criteria. They gain insight into the pressures that weigh on the choices of literary prize-granting committees. They are forced to consider the extent to which their ranking criteria, even the ones that attempt to account for universal relevance, are informed and colored by their specific heritage. They must also consider the role played by their previous reading. For most students, this reading has been almost exclusively in American and English literature. In several class discussions, including days on which we discussed Coetzee and Pamuk, students opined that the work that we were reading felt as if it were written in order to win an international literary prize, thereby prompting us to consider if some literature is written with the global stage in mind, and what--in the case of each author's style and nationality--this might mean.
Our approach in the course has proven a fruitful one. It is also, we feel, an honest approach, insofar as it makes students aware of the debates and contests, the infinite possibilities, but also the fragility inherent in the term world literature. The course leaves students familiar with the essential debates about the genre. We learn about questions pursuant to the circulation of literature from what is often termed "the periphery," and we consider the various ways in which national literature finds itself on the global stage, through the "waves" of the market (Moretti's term), and, with some critical differences, through the logic of literary history and the politics of literary consecration, so thoroughly outlined in Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters. We consider the relationship between politics and aesthetic interests, noting, for instance, the proliferation of translations of Arab writers after 9/11, again forcing us to question, as a class, what brings literature to the international stage and for what reason.
There has possibly never been a time when issues of nation, language, and translation have been more important or more troubling. This raises another important question: are the "world literature" texts that we read available because they reflect our current interests or current domestic literary trends? The "global village" notwithstanding, less literature is translated into English than ever before. Giles Gunn asserts that various world literature texts widely taught and highly acclaimed, from "Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World [to] Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude would never have acquired the authority they still possess if they did not reflect interests widely shared in Anglo-American literary studies" (17). How significant is it that the international awards are traditionally given by wealthy European countries and former seats of empire? Is much foreign-language literature, third-world literature in particular, published and read precisely because it is unfairly apprehended as non-modern?
In a discussion of world literature, Vilashini Cooppan notes that the concept itself is worthy of debate, arguing that "[The] world in world literature does not denote an object of knowledge" (39). We offer an approach to the field that invites students to participate in the debates in a responsible, respectful, and energized fashion. We submit that this method of teaching World Literature does justice to the topic, removing it from the realm of courses that Rosner aptly terms "Not the Main Story," and putting it into dialogue with required courses in the English major (59). In the 19th century, Marx and Goethe engaged with the concept of Weltliterature. What does this concept mean to us now? "[W]hat we make of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate," as Moretti writes; it's a "continuing discussion" (vii). Students profited from their experience with "a talented group of committee members," whether on or offline. World literature is humbling for all involved. But, we argue, it humbles us in an instructive and exciting way. As one student reflected after our final class, "I am no longer a selfish reader, who judges a book based on a heightened sense of emotion and personal epiphany."
Clearly, we can turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage by being explicit about it, by adopting one of what Emily Apter has termed, "macrocomparative approaches to literary history" (44). Both professor and student grow in knowledge and indulge in the fundamental questions and debates that surround the contested field of world literature. Moretti has suggested that the study of world literature demands a new angle of approach. He cites the sociologist Max Weber to suggest that it is imperative to have different categories, and to ground the idea that studying world literature entails a conceptual shift towards talking about new kinds of problems. As Moretti argues, world literature is thus not merely a magnification or expansion of our current approach to literature: "That's the point: world literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That's not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager--a hypothesis to get started" (55).
In both class and wiki discussions, students learn to ask new questions. In her final course rankings, one student noted that the course had made her question the consequences of the "kind of narratives" she subscribes to, both as an individual and as an American living in a certain place at a certain time. David Damrosch reassures readers of world literature that "we cannot expect to approach all these works with the fund of cultural knowledge that readers share within a single tradition" (2009: 1). World literature can also force us to ask such "new" questions about the national literatures that we think we know and master. As Morettti argues, "[T]here is no other justification for the study of world literature.... But this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literature--especially the local literatures..." (68). At its best, a course in world literature should defamiliarize the familiar and inform the courses students take in English and American Literature. The course we present thus augments both previous and future reading.
Works Cited
Apter, Emily. "Literary World-Systems." Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009: 44-60. Print.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.
Cooppan, Vilashini. "Ethics of World Literature." Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009: 34-43. Print.
Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print.
---, ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009: 86-96. Print.
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Literature for the Planet." PMLA 116.1 Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (2001): 173-188. JSTOR. 15 Nov. 2008. Print.
---. "Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational." American Literary History 18.2 (2006). P219-228. Print.
English, James. The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Print.
Garber, Marjorie. A Manifesto for Literary Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Print.
Goldenberg, Susanne. "No Nobel prizes for American writers: they're too parochial." Guardian.co.uk. The Guardian, 2 October 2008. Web. 30 April 2010.
Gunn, Giles. "Globalizing Literary Studies." PMLA 116.1 Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (2001): 16-31. JSTOR. 15 Nov. 2008.
Harrison, Gary. "Conversation in Context: A Dialogic Approach to Teaching World Literature." Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009: 205-215. Print.
Lee, John, and Carl Young. "Building Wikis and Blogs: Pre-service Teacher Experiences with Web-based Collaborative Technologies in an Interdisciplinary Methods Course." THEN (2010). Web. 28 Oct. 2010.
Moffat, Wendy. "Figure and Ground: The Transformation of the Dickinson College English Department's Faculty and Curriculum." ADE Bulletin. No. 133, Winter 2003: 11-15. Print.
Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature," New Left Review 1, Jan-Feb, 2002 (54-68). Print.
Nafisi, Azar. "Spoilt for choice." Guardian.co.uk. The Guardian. 4 June 2005. Web. 9 September 2010.
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. London: Verso, 2004. Print.
---. "The World Republic of Letters." Debating World Literature. London: Verso, 2004. Pages vii-xiii. Print.
Ramazani, Jahan. "A Transnational Poetics." American Literary History. 18.2 (2006): 333-359. Print.
Remnick, David. Quoted in "Nobel Gas: The Swedes Have No Clue About American Literature." Slate. 3 October 2008. Web. 5 October 2008.
Rosner, Victoria. "Are We There Yet? The Road to Globalized English Studies." ADE Bulletin, No. 138-139. Fall 2005-Spring 2004: 57-63. Print.
Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print.
Ungar, Steven, "Writing in Tongues." Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. "Teaching in Translation." Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009: 86-96. Print.
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