Globalizing Literature Pedagogy: Applying Cosmopolitan Ethical Criticism to the Teaching of Literature

Abstract

With global risks such as terrorism, fundamentalism, and xenophobia permeating our everyday consciousness, there is a pressing need for educators to cultivate in their students a cosmopolitan hospitality toward multiple and marginalized others in the world. Yet, despite growing interest in ethics among literary scholars, theorizations of ethical criticism are predominantly observed among scholars working in university settings rather than at high schools, and major scholarly texts on ethical criticism focus on literary texts that provoke ethical responses rather than on pedagogical strategies. In this essay, Suzanne Choo aims to address these two gaps by arguing that cosmopolitan ethical criticism should be a core feature of literature pedagogy in schools and by describing its potential for developing students as global ethical thinkers. The article situates cosmopolitan ethical criticism by distinguishing it from two other disciplinary practices, aesthetic criticism and didactic ethical criticism. It goes on to describe what cosmopolitan ethical criticism may look like in the classroom by examining pedagogical approaches to teaching literature employed by four high school teachers in Australia, Singapore, and the United States.

‘I lost the faith in humanity.’ Using William Golding’sLord of the Fliesto explore ethical and moral issues through transnational, online literary exchange

“…The third source of 'turmoil' relates to the previous two and is explored, for example, in recent papers by Choo (2017) and Cascardi (2019). Like Nussbaum, they are receptive to the idea of what Cascardi describes as a 'crisis of the humanities' (p. 723) imposed by an 'economic and mostly utilitarian calculus' (p. 736); they also believe, like Nussbaum, that literature has an ethically and democratically charged obligation to fight back.…”

Literature unbound: William Desmond's metaxu and the opening of literary hermeneutics

“…Cultural studies and its many subsets, and the universities that hire specialists to teach these programmes, are indicative of a response to 'get something solid' from literature-be it political, ethical or otherwise. Given Choo's (2017) desire to limit the experience of literature to ethical cosmopolitanism, she is under the illusion of a univocal sense of hermeneutics, in this case wanting literature to 'do something' definitive in culture, effecting empathy for the other in her case and speaking as if it has the power to do it for every student. The metaxological, however, does not seek to return to univocity.…”

The Need for Cosmopolitan Literacy in a Global Age: Implications for Teaching Literature

“…At the same time, when ethical critics such as Booth, Gregory, and Nussbaum argued for literature as a vehicle for ethical inquiry, their arguments were premised not on a normative approach to ethics. Rather, their point was that literature is a site for analytical ethics concerned with the analysis of normative claims (Choo, ; Willmott, ). Such an inquiry raises such questions as, What are the grounds for claims that a character is good or evil, and who determines this?…”