Satire, as a mode, is not frequently employed in Chinese narratives. "Cat Country," or "Mao Cheng Ji," written by Lao She (pen name of Shu Qing Chun, 1898--1966) has come under much attack of its literary values. Whereas most critics have no doubt that this work sets out to satirize China through the portrayal of a society of…

The past decade has seen a resurgence of scholarship on world literature. The best-selling successes of "Great Books" arguments contained in Azar Nafisi's memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and in Dai Sijie's novel "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" seem to mirror, on the popular front, this scholarly return to the question of world…

As the number of international faculty members teaching in U.S. colleges steadily increases, greater attention needs to be given to how 21st-century college classrooms can be shaped by these multilingual teachers' linguistic and sociocultural "funds of knowledge" (Moll, 1990) and how their backgrounds can help native-speaking students to…

In bringing the insights of linguistic scholarship to historical inquiry, this study considers the language of a set of historical narratives of the Mons, who developed one of the earliest, foundational civilizations in Mainland Southeast Asia. A close reading of the language of the largest of the texts, the "Rajadhiraj" narrative,…

This article challenges the predominance of modularization across the UK university system, arguing that the fragmentation of the learning experience which results from this model undermines the possibility of a disciplinary understanding. It proposes instead a practice of imaginative writing which, by engaging students' experience, interest and…

This polemic paper illustrates the correlation between the original principles underpinning the British National Curriculum which was introduced in the late 1980s and the current quality of the nation's schools' poetry from a variety of poets including those "from other cultures and traditions". It argues that the conception of the…

Genbun itchi is conventionally described as an early Meiji-period movement which sought to rid written Japanese of archaic forms, and instead develop a written style closer to the spoken vernacular of the time. The overwhelming bulk of critical work on genbun itchi has centered around the introduction of Western literature during this period as…

My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse…

Electronic writing offers the opportunity to be creative, impromptu, personal, even improper--unstructured, in other words--while academic writing traps them, catches them up in, an impersonal, uncreative, unimaginative, structured, mechanical--and perhaps even ultimately noncommunicative--experience.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how communication preferences, learning preferences, and perceptions about online learning affect nontraditional African American students' participation in online world literature courses at a historically Black university (HBCU) in the southeastern United States. An instrumental case study was…

The author started in the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Princeton in 1992, a year after she graduated from college. She fell in love with mythology and the classical traditions and find herself teaching literature. In the remainder of her time at Princeton, she precepted for four or five more classes, got the chance to join the…

Engaging students with literature, including religious literature, provides a way to broaden their world view. In this article, the author shares how she uses literature to teach her Christian students about other religions. Because she teaches at an independent school, she has the luxury of teaching works that might not be allowed in public or…

In a world literature course, an instructor faces the challenge of engaging the students in classical texts that are historically, geographically, and linguistically "alien" to them. Through a three-step instructional model that includes approximation, thematic relevance, and application, the instructor tries to help students identify,…

Practically no one will dispute that the future of Russia depends on the successfulness of the multifaceted modernization of Russian society, a task that cannot be confined solely to the socioeconomic sphere. The most fundamental task is that of changing the societal system of values and institutions. If Russia is to modernize successfully, the…