Cultivating a Hospitable Imagination: Re‐Envisioning the World Literature Curriculum Through a Cosmopolitan Lens

Abstract

When world literature as a subject was introduced to schools and colleges in the United States during the 1920s, its early curriculum was premised on the notion of bounded territoriality which assumes that identities of individuals, cultures, and nation‐states are fixed, determinable, and independent. The intensification of global mobility in an interconnected 21st century calls for educators to re‐envision the world literature curriculum through a cosmopolitan lens. I argue that such reconceptualizations necessitate reclaiming the primacy of the other which suggests the importance of cultivating an imagination hospitable to the other. In the first part of the article, I discuss inherent paradoxes underlying cosmopolitanism in both social and political domains which then point to the role of the hospitable imagination as a vital intervention disrupting individualistic and instrumental agendas. The hospitable imagination manifests in other‐oriented cultural creativity in which creativity is a means culminating in responsibility to the other. In the second part of the article, I utilize cross‐comparative case‐study analysis of world literature teachers in three cities—New York, Perth, and Singapore—to theorize cosmopolitan approaches, particularly curricula practices, that foster hospitable ways of imagining through continually problematizing the boundaries of openness toward the other. Ultimately, such practices aspire toward unconditional, absolute hospitality involving decentering the self and deterritorializing interpretations of the other.

Notes

Notes

Many scholars consider Goethe as the first to articulate world literature’s broad parameters as a vehicle for an international exchange of ideas even though he was not the first to use the term (Damrosch, ; Lawall, ).

As American literature became incorporated into schools, it correlated with the introduction of world literature. Carter () provides an example of an early curriculum in which American literature was taught alongside world literature.

There is no definitive history of how the subject world literature emerged in schools. My analysis is based on case studies of world literature curricula in schools described from 1900 to 1930 in two important journals—English Journal and The School Review. See also Pizer () and Damrosch () for a historical and contemporary overview of world literature education.

The fact that world literature courses involved the study of texts translated into English became a point of contention that eventually distinguished world and comparative literature college courses with the former designed as broad survey courses catered to undergraduate students and the latter involving the study of works in the original catered to graduate students (Pizer, ).

See Kant’s (1784/) discussion of the problems of achieving a universal cosmopolitan condition given man’s propensity to “unsocial sociability” (sec. 21, p. 15).

Individualistic and instrumental justifications of creativity have been popularized in research on creativity since the late 20th century. See Gibson () concerning distinctions between the two forms of justifications.

I have used pseudonyms instead of actual names to protect the teachers’ confidentiality.

This is with the exception of Sean whom I observed twice as he was recommended toward the end of my field work.

See Ricoeur () who argues that “All discourse is, to some extent, thereby reconnected to the world” (p. 46) and therefore the task of interpretation is to actualize this connection. Edward Said () similarly echoes this view in his arguments that texts are in the world and hence worldly.

Adorno’s () non‐identity thinking can be understood in his rejection of Hegelian dialectics in which he calls for a negative dialectics that does not aim at synthesis. Instead, Adorno argues for a disenchantment of the concept by pointing to that which cannot be conceptualized in the concept.

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss Derrida’s complex discussion of hospitality in relation to cosmopolitanism. Derrida () problematizes hospitality by revealing its inherent contradictions, for example, in his analysis of the implicit violence across the terms hospitality, hostility, and hostpitality (in which the foreigner or hostis is in a position of privilege). Essentially, Derrida challenges us to consider absolute hospitality not as an act but an orientation that is paradoxically ungraspable, incomprehensible, yet an aspirational force.