What is a national literature? Is it all the works produced in a a country? But what about translations? Appropriations? Interpretations? It's a difficult subject, one which is brought up and chewed over at the Guardian. The question they're asking is how to define a national canon for Australian Literature to teach in universities. However, the problem is that although it may be ok to teach national canons at school, this doesn't seem the right approach for university. Surely university should be about questioning national canons, about inquiring above and beyond borders and not just about learning the 5 most famous authors and their works etc. But then again, surely school would be better if you worked on books that your teachers actually liked, rather than ones that were deemed suitable by the government... It seems we have a long way to go for a better education, but at least we're on the way, right? And for me? I learnt more reading Dostoyevsky than Shakespeare!
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Film studies is still based on the idea of national cinema, I even had a subject with that in the title!
ReplyDeleteI read Dostojevskij in Swedish class in high school, and I never really thought about the fact that most of the classics we spoke about weren't Swedish, nor that the literature part of Swedish class was actually about WORLD literature, not just Swedish literature. When I was in France I was a bit surprised at how extremely focused on French authors their French classes were (which were actually literature classes). They did, however, read an extract from Strindberg (originally written in French though, I believe, since he had to leave Sweden and was fluent in French), which by then was very surprising for me. We also read Kafka in literature class, together with three French books.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the result of this is that a lot of Swedish students don't even know the typical Swedish classics (they are mentioned, but no one remembers everything that is just mentioned), whereas all French students know all about their French classics. I don't know which is better.
Well the French are very French! But joking aside I'm as clueless as you as to whether it represents a good or bad thing whether we have national literatures taught to us or not. Hmm!
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