(Re)placing Literary Texts in the Intercultural Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

In the history of language teaching, literary texts have gradually been reduced to a source for linguistic learning, as an informative representation of cultural traits or even dismissed from the foreign language classroom. This paper aims to add reasons that justify considering literary texts a vital presence in the foreign language classroom. One general aim is to promote the study of foreign literature as enjoyable and (inter)culturally significant.The classroom is inevitably a culturally heterogeneous setting since its elements are already socialized subjects. Instead of its limiting role of supplying knowledge, the classroom ought to foster reading critically through a pedagogy of questioning the text, searching for and building textual meaning. Teaching literature in a foreign language should underline how literature offers new perspectives and how these views are directly relevant to the world we live in and the lives we lead.