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Towards Transcultural Competence: Scaling | World | Literature

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Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change

Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ((LCE))

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Abstract

This chapter inquires into the modes and protocols of reading world literature ecologically. For this, it discusses canon formation and canon work in educational settings and develops a model of transcultural ecology based on the scaling of perspectives that subsequent chapters seek to specify. Educational matters are not understood as matters of teaching suggestions or the usefulness of fiction for conveying facts. They are, rather, a call for novel engagements with the literary that help readers—both teachers and learners—to engage with the problem of scale productively. The chapter concludes with a model of transcultural competence built on readings of Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work that subsequent chapters seek to modify.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It might be important to note here the important distinction made by John Guillory between ‘the canon’ as an ‘imaginary totality of works’ to which no one can logically have access, and the actual, respective syllabus in the educational fields where it matters politically and aesthetically and as a ‘pedagogic imaginary’ (1993, 30). But since I am interested in the question of quality and evaluation that people readily associate with the task of ‘canon work’ and challenge the very notion of totality in the context of Anthropocene discourse, I will nevertheless stick with the term ‘canon’.

  2. 2.

    As will be argued in this book, the notion of scaling is not only a useful concept in literary theory but touches upon a genuinely pedagogical challenge. Greg Garrard’s Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (2012) devotes its first section to questions of ‘scoping scales’ (although it would be mistaken to assume that Garrard fully agrees with Clark’s ideas on scaling), and recent research on climate change pedagogies, especially in the humanities, repeatedly points to the challenge of scaling in various ways too (see Callicott 2017; D’Arcy Wood 2017, 99; Figueroa 2017, 115; Foote 2017, 192; Siperstein et al. 2017, 3; Slovic 2017, 165; Sze 2017, 187–189).

  3. 3.

    See Bartosch (2015a) for a sustained engagement with literary examples from the postcolonial world in the context of this argument.

  4. 4.

    For critical remarks on the latter notion of world literature, see Bessière and Gillespie (2015) and Etherington (2012).

  5. 5.

    See also Barnard (2009) and, for an insightful piece on ‘the limits of aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, Vermeulen (2013).

  6. 6.

    In German literature pedagogy, a similar, content-oriented approach to teaching in the environmental humanities has recently been discussed using the acronym TOLD (‘topic-oriented literary didactics’) (see Grimm and Wanning 2016) as well as the notion of ‘text ensembles’.

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  1. University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Roman Bartosch

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Bartosch, R. (2019). Towards Transcultural Competence: Scaling | World | Literature. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33300-3_2

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