Title: Heroic Ethnocentrism: The Idea of Universality in Literature
Abstract: have been disturbed for some time now about a concept frequently used in classroom discussions of literature and in critical interpretations of the written word: the idea of universality. In part, my questionings of this concept are the result of teaching students overseas, in Africa, and spending a number of years studying the emergence of contemporary African fiction. Certainly if there is any one thing that I have learned as the result of these two experiences, it is that our concept of universality rarely takes into consideration the experiential aspects of a culture that may, indeed, shape our interpretations of a piece of literature. What an African experiences when he reads a piece of literature is often not what we who are Western experience, and vice versa. In the fall of 1962, when I began teaching English literature to high school students in Nigeria, I encountered a number of stumbling blocks, which I had in no way anticipated all of them cultural, experiential. This was not a matter of science or technology and their various by-products as I had anticipated (What is a flush toilet?) but, rather, matters related to what I have learned to call culturally restricted materials. It was enough, to be sure, just for my African students to read through a 450-page Victorian novel (required reading in those days for the Britishadministered school certificate examinations); and, as I later learned, in the lower levels at least, students were accustomed to taking several months or even the greater part of a year to read through and discuss the plot line of a single novel. Length alone was enough to get them, since English was their second language
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 8
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