Abstract:
The purpose of this book is restore the centrality of pedagogy in governing the ways literary texts are received, experienced, and interpreted by students in the classroom. Utilizing a method of pedagogical criticism, it provides an account of core approaches to teaching literature that have emerged across history and the conceptual values informing these approaches. More importantly,
Reading the World discusses how these values have been shaped by broader global forces and key movements in the discipline of English Literature. To varying degrees, these approaches are aimed at cultivating a hospitable imagination so that students may more fully engage with multiple others in the world. Given the reality of an increasingly interconnected twenty-first century, literature pedagogy plays a vital role in schools by demonstrating how world, global, and cosmopolitan approaches to teaching literature can facilitate the prioritization of the other, challenge us to think about how we can be accountable to multiple others in the world, and push us to continually problematize the boundaries of our openness towards the other.
Advanced Praise
“While there are many published accounts of approaches to teaching literature, research on the role of reader in relation to texts, multicultural approaches to teaching literature, and critical and theoretical criticism of literature, I know of no book that provides a focused and historical discussion and presents a previously untapped focus on the centrality of pedagogy in the debates concerning the values and purposes of literature education. Reading The World, The Globe, and the Cosmos delves into the heart of how literature education has ‘come into being’ as a school subject, but one that has a contested and complex history of purpose and value.” (Ruth Vinz, Teachers College, Columbia University)
"Reading the world, the globe and the cosmos combines important historical and philosophical analysis with normative perspectives to teaching Literature for the twenty-first century. It recovers a vital role for Literature pedagogy in our time by inviting us to consider its essential connections to hospitality and hospitable ways of engaging the other.” (Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College, Columbia University)
Excerpts from the Series Editor's Forward
"With this wonderful text, Reading the World, the Globe, and the Cosmos, we must now add Suzanne Choo to this venerable list of feminist intellectuals who want us to consider a wider range of subjects concerning globalization than we normally explore. Choo writes from the perspective that all of these logics related to globalization are now fully articulated to schooling and must pass through the pedagogical encounter in the classroom. Ultimately, globalization must be brought into dialogue with pedagogical criticism. Here the task is to construct from the encounter with literature — reaching back into previous centuries and forward into the twenty-first century — models of thoughtfulness and meaningful, empathetic relationships. [...] The project here is ambitious but urgent. The teaching of literature has often insulated the literary text from the world, recuperating and preserving the “literary” for a vain form of aesthetics. On the other hand, teaching about the world in geography, social studies, etc. has often ignored the imaginative domain of literature. Scholars like Edward Said have sought to overcome this gulf in the disciplines in such powerful ripostes as Orientalism (1979), The World, the Text and the Critic (1994), and On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2007). Homi Bhaba, in his Locations of Culture (1994), also points to the critically important work of the text in relation to the vigorous life world of subaltern actors. For Bhabha, texts take on their significance in an encounter with human actors at the extremes of Empire: “a literature of empire . . . played out in the wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the Caribbean” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 102). The text then is conditioned by the play of globalization’s asymmetries.
Choo builds on these insights by introducing a form of pedagogical criticism that brings the globe into the literature classroom. Her interest here is not to describe the world as it is. Neither is it merely to improve the pedagogy of literature. Choo raises, instead, the issue of teaching new cosmopolitan values through pedagogy by integrating the “hospitable imagination.” The hospitable imagination is a space for the gestation of creative and critical reflexivity. The classroom, after all, may be the place of a kind of last stand in an age of the ever-expanding refeudalization of the public sphere. As such, it offers possibilities for elaborating networks to the world — networks for a New-World imaginative geography and the building up of subaltern knowledges. In this manner, the classroom becomes a space for the staging of a new enterprise in literature studies—for thinking about the world as we mediate aesthetics. The radical promise of Choo’s intervention here is to bring the entire range of aesthetic critique and “reply” (Paz, 1990, p. 5) to the West into a dialogue with globalization from below. Here the concatenation and plurality of voices might serve to reinvigorate the now deeply invaded space of the modern classroom where one might argue the future of humanity resides." (Cameron McCarthy, Director of Global Studies in Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
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