Although the focus on English as a global language is apparent in the Swedish curriculum today, many educators do not take advantage of world literature and non-native English authors in their ESL classrooms. With the help of empirical research, we investigate the benefits of using such literature for gaining global awareness. Furthermore, we analyze the activities and teaching approaches used in the empirical studies. Through this essay, we summarize the empirical research used for this essay and synthesize the results to find out what implications were found. It shows that using non-native fiction helps students to learn and explore different cultures, which also expands their global view. Apart from this, teaching methods such as discussions, literature circles, presentations, blogging and collaborative learning deepened students' global view and cultural awareness. The teaching methods that were used while working with world literature showed that students were conscious of their own learning and developed this ability by working in a social environment. This paper concludes with describing the limitations of writing the study, and presents a future research project that involves the field of world literature.

Föreliggande studie är inriktad på hur lärare i gymnasieskolan ser på möjligheten att inkludera världslitteratur och texter från olika kulturer i svenskämnet. Syftet är att undersöka lärares beskrivna arbetssätt och motiv till att välja denna litteratur till sin undervisning. Postkolonial teori, interkulturellt lärande och det litteraturteoretiska begreppet främmandegöring utgör tillsammans ett teoretiskt ramverk för studien. Det empiriska materialet består av fyra semi-strukturerade intervjuer med svensklärare på gymnasienivå. Resultatet indikerar att lärarna finner det aktuellt att genom världslitteratur lyfta fram allmänmänskliga teman, demokratiska frågor och kulturell mångfald. Således är likheter och skillnader mellan människor en av flera aspekter som lärarna berör. En potentiell problematik som resultatet påvisar är att lärarna uppfattar att elever tolkar skönlitteratur dokumentärt. / The present study focuses on how upper-secondary school teachers consider the possibility of integrating world literature and texts from other cultures in the Swedish subject. The aim is to examine teachers' narrations of their teaching and their motifs for choosing world literature as part of their teaching. Postcolonial theory, intercultural learning and the literary term estrangement constitute the theoretical framework. The empirical material involves four semi-structured interviews with Swedish subject teachers. The result suggests that the teachers find it relevant to use world literature as a context for discussing universal human themes, democratic issues and cultural diversity. Accordingly, similarities and differences between people are one of several aspects that the teachers address. The result raises one potential problem where the teachers report that students tend to interpret fiction documentary.

Some colleges and universities require their business majors to take literature classes; others do not. Some businesspeople, as well as many educators such as Donna M. Kish-Goodling (1999), William McCarron (1980), and Philip Vassallo (1991), support the need for business students to study literature in order to improve their communication skills and degree of human understanding. Over the past fifty years, however, Virginia Tech's literature requirements for business majors have gradually diminished to none. The twelve participants who were interviewed in this qualitative study were all business majors who graduated from Virginia Tech before 1990, when the business school, and the university at large, still required students to take one or more literature courses. The vast majority of participants agreed that they had benefited from studying literature as part of their undergraduate business degree. Participants most often credited the classes with broadening their world view, developing their analytical skills, making them more well-rounded, improving their communication skills, and helping them better express themselves. Participants agreed with Vassallo's suggestion that reading literature helped students to put their own lives into perspective (1991) and with poet Billy Collins' argument that exposure to literature was the key to learning how to write well (Lenham 2001). Even in today's highly technological society, the skills and insights obtained through the humanities, especially those involving writing, are still considered quite relevant by the participants. The research suggests that core curriculum could benefit from being more balanced, as suggested by Chester Finn, Dianne Ravitch, and Robert Fancher (1984), so that it includes literature and humanities to the same extent that it currently includes math, science, and social sciences. Literature courses, however, need not be exclusively relegated to English Departments and could even be specially designed for Business Departments, such as Kish-Goodling's class that used Shakespeare to teach monetary economics (1999). Literature courses that stress analytical reading and writing could prove quite useful to business majors. / Ph. D.

This dissertation explores the presence of the divine feminine in Indic river myths of the Ganga, the Narmada, and the Meenachil as represented in the three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It challenges masculinist nationalistic narratives, and identifies itself as a feminist revisionist work by strategically combining Indian debates on religious interpretations with Western phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspectives to open up productive lines of critical enquiry. I argue that the three postcolonial novelists under survey resurrect the power of the feminine by relocating this power in its manifestation as the turbulent and indomitable force of three river goddesses. In their myths of origin, the goddesses are “unchaste,” uncontainable, and ambiguous. Yet, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian patriarchy manipulated and coerced women for their political purposes. They denied female agency in order to promote a brand of nationalism bordering on religious zeal and subjugation through imposed paradigms of chastity. The patriarchy conflated the imaginary chastity of the mother goddess in her multiple manifestations--including but not limited to the River Ganga--with the exalted position forced upon the young Indian widow. Popular art of the colonial period in India dismantled the irrepressible sexual ambiguity of the divine feminine for the Indian population, and reinvented her as a chaste, mother figure (Bharat Mata, or Mother India), desexualized her, and held her up as an iconic, pervasive figurehead of the Motherland. Ironically though, the makeover of the uncontrollable, “chaotic” feminine into this shackled entity during and after the Indian freedom struggle is just the kind of ambiguity that appears in discourses of nation building. By reaffirming the archaic myths of the feminine, Ghosh, Mehta, and Roy dislodge the colonial project and the patriarchal Indian independence movement that sought to “chastise” the divine feminine. I suggest that in these three novels pre-colonial images of the river goddesses--presented in all their ambiguous, multiple, and fluid dimensions--are a challenge to the Indian nationalist project that represents the goddesses one dimensionally as an iconic figure, unifying the geo-body of India and symbolically projecting her as the pure, homogenous Bharat Mata.

This dissertation explores the presence of the divine feminine in Indic river myths of the Ganga, the Narmada, and the Meenachil as represented in the three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It challenges masculinist nationalistic narratives, and identifies itself as a feminist revisionist work by strategically combining Indian debates on religious interpretations with Western phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspectives to open up productive lines of critical enquiry. I argue that the three postcolonial novelists under survey resurrect the power of the feminine by relocating this power in its manifestation as the turbulent and indomitable force of three river goddesses. In their myths of origin, the goddesses are “unchaste,” uncontainable, and ambiguous. Yet, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian patriarchy manipulated and coerced women for their political purposes. They denied female agency in order to promote a brand of nationalism bordering on religious zeal and subjugation through imposed paradigms of chastity. The patriarchy conflated the imaginary chastity of the mother goddess in her multiple manifestations--including but not limited to the River Ganga--with the exalted position forced upon the young Indian widow. Popular art of the colonial period in India dismantled the irrepressible sexual ambiguity of the divine feminine for the Indian population, and reinvented her as a chaste, mother figure (Bharat Mata, or Mother India), desexualized her, and held her up as an iconic, pervasive figurehead of the Motherland. Ironically though, the makeover of the uncontrollable, “chaotic” feminine into this shackled entity during and after the Indian freedom struggle is just the kind of ambiguity that appears in discourses of nation building. By reaffirming the archaic myths of the feminine, Ghosh, Mehta, and Roy dislodge the colonial project and the patriarchal Indian independence movement that sought to “chastise” the divine feminine. I suggest that in these three novels pre-colonial images of the river goddesses--presented in all their ambiguous, multiple, and fluid dimensions--are a challenge to the Indian nationalist project that represents the goddesses one dimensionally as an iconic figure, unifying the geo-body of India and symbolically projecting her as the pure, homogenous Bharat Mata.

<p>Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.</p> / Dissertation