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World
literature provides window for understanding others
Don Ulin
English, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford
Why is diversity important to my
teaching? Perhaps because it
is about the most salient fact of life at this point in history, and
because understanding people is ultimately what education and life are all
about, whether you are in English or Business.
The Faculty Diversity Seminar (1999) created an opportunity to talk
about this important issue and to develop strategies that would help our
students to do so in more serious intellectual ways than they might
otherwise.
 Looking at my own field of British literature, it seemed a natural
move to expand that field to include literature written in those former
colonies where English had been foisted upon the population.
My course on Twentieth-Century British Literature already focused
on the issue of the British Empire and its decline, with a few texts by
Indian and African writers, and so I used the diversity seminar as an
opportunity to develop a new course on Contemporary World Literature in
English. At the smaller campuses we find ourselves teaching much
further outside our own areas of expertise (in my case Victorian Studies),
and so the seminar provided me with much needed time and resources for
this project. The seminar
also alerted me to the importance of including a more diverse range of
Britons (e.g., Asian Britons and Black Britons) in the existing course on
Twentieth-Century British Literature, an addition I am looking forward to
making next time I teach that course.
Another way the diversity seminar has affected English majors in
Bradford is through my new capstone course focusing on issues in
literature and literary study beginning with Plato’s eviction of the
poets from his Republic and ending with a long unit on multiculturalism
and the so-called “culture wars.”
In other words, we’re treating the issue of diversity in the
literature curriculum historically while also putting it into the larger
contexts of diversity within the institution and within society as a
whole.
Feminist
Views
I have also used some of the ideas from the seminar in a course on
“Critical Methods” (literary theory), required of several different
majors. In the section on
feminist criticism (the kind of topic that causes many students to retreat
into an intellectually debilitating mode of identity politics), I was able
to bring up some of these potentially polarizing issues in more successful
ways than I had previously. Based
on an activity we discussed in the seminar, I asked students to take 15
minutes to think and write about precisely what it meant to them to be a
man or a woman and, if possible, to identify one particularly defining
moment from their lives. The
results helped to demonstrate my point even more convincingly than I had
hoped. With only one
exception, all of the women wrote easily about what it meant to be a woman
and were usually able to give specific examples.
The men, however, with only one exception, opted out of the
assignment on the grounds that they saw themselves as “people” without
reference to gender. To be
male appeared as only incidental to their real identity as “human,”
whereas the women identified “female” as a defining element of their
identities. This experiment
called attention to the importance of gender in everyone’s identity and
to the necessity of a feminist criticism (what version of feminist
criticism was still very much subject to debate) as a means of bringing to
light unacknowledged or unrecognized facets of the human experience.
How
to begin
To consider and promote diversity in the curriculum, I think we
might begin simply by talking and listening openly and honestly to
students and colleagues from different backgrounds.
That does not mean an automatic or uncritical acceptance of
whatever we hear from those students and colleagues: doing so would not
credit either the diversity within any given group or the rational powers
of that individual. But by listening and by allowing our own understanding of the
world to be challenged—by going into those conversations with at least
what Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief”—we may,
like the students in my Critical Methods class, come to a more
interesting, more inclusive, and more representative understanding of what
it means to be human.
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