EXPANDING THE IMAGINATION: MEDIATING THE AESTHETIC-POLITICAL DIVIDE THROUGH THE THIRD SPACE OF ETHICS IN LITERATURE EDUCATION

ABSTRACT

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant influence on the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature.

Keywords:

• literature
• ethics
• aestheticism
• third space
• cosmopolitanism

4. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers as well as my colleagues Associate Professor Angelia Poon and Ann Ang who provided helpful comments on the paper.

5. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this paper, I capitalize ‘Literature education’ to indicate the subject English Literature. I refer to literary texts when ‘literature’ is not capitalized.

2. For distinctions between Stoic and Confucian cosmopolitanism, see Chen (2016). See Delanty (2014) on European and Eastern varieties of cosmopolitanism.