Academic Exchange Quarterly
Spring 2005 ISSN 1096-1453 Volume
9, Issue 1
To cite, use print source rather than this on-line version which may not
reflect print copy format requirements or text lay-out and pagination.
English Literature and Arab Students
Layla Al Maleh
Visiting Scholar, University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Layla Al Maleh is associate
professor of English literature at the Department of English,
Abstract
Teachers of English literature in non-Western
environments may find it more challenging to bring their students to an
appreciation of English literature, which offers social, moral, and cultural
values different from their own. This paper depicts the experience of teaching
English literature in the Arab/ Moslem world and recommends that, to avoid
alienating students, literature should be taught amorally and encourage free
interpretation.
The language in which we are speaking is his before it
is mine. How different are the words home,
Christ, ale, master, on
his lips and on mine. I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of
spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an
acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at
bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language
James Joyce. A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Teaching English literature in a non-Western
environment may entail more than the usual task of interpreting a text in the
light of current critical methodology, or helping students acquire analytical
skills which enable them acquire an appreciation of literary works. The teacher
of English literature in a cultural milieu that holds sets of values and codes
of morality different from its Western counterpart finds the teaching mission
both taxing and challenging. On the one hand, he/she needs to construe the text
by positioning it within the cultural and social setting that originally
produced it; on the other, he/she needs to relate the students to the assigned
work by creating a certain degree of referentiality
within their mental and emotional constructs so as to liaise them to it and
trigger identification and empathy.
This, naturally, touches on the major issue of how to
address the act of reading. Should not reading be viewed as an act leading to a
comprehension of a certain text, hence to a cognitive end? Or should the
reader/learner primarily seek an ethical use of that text? The present paper
wishes to explore, through examples chosen from personal teaching experiences,
the relationship between cognitive and ethical knowledge of texts taught to
Arab learners of English literature. More specifically, it hopes to highlight
the need to train students to read the ‘foreign’ text cross-culturally by
trying to bestride the cultural divide, and traverse moral controversy.
The task is not an easy one. My personal experience as
both a teacher and formerly a student of English literature in the Arab World
testifies to this. Regardless of my academic status, the problem of striding
worlds and bridging cultural divides seemed always to be both thorny and
pressing. In my younger years, I was aware of differences that existed between
the culture I belonged to and the one I was in the process of acquiring, To my
simplistic mind then, I had imagined the chasm to be merely of geography and
perhaps of some social habits: of trying to imagine in my mind’s eye why T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest of months or that
winter had “kept us warm”; or why Shakespeare wished to compare his sweetheart
to a summer’s day when ‘my’ summer was unpleasantly hot and disagreeably
enfeebling of the senses. Coming from a closely knit family and a warm and affable social
background with strong community ties, I also found it hard to understand
Eliot’s description of the self being locked up in its own prison, each “Thinking
of the key, each confirms a prison / Only at nightfall, aethereal
rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.”
Slowly but surely, I began to
parrot remarks on alienation and estrangement engendered by readings not of
Eliot, who seemed to appeal to us Muslim Arabs (for his respect of the past, of
tradition, and his call for a return to faith) but by other western authors and
thinkers such as Colin Wilson, Albert Camus, Jean
Paul Sartre, and Franz Kafka. I, the Muslim Arab, secure in religion and
protected and pampered by communal ethos, was straining to identify myself with
social outcasts, intellectual misfits, waiting along with nameless heroes for
nameless Godots ‘metamorphosing’ with Kafka’s
protagonists into new identities, preparing for a “Brave New World.”
I did not realize that
slipping into the foreign western literature meant a slipping not just into the
values of ‘the other’ but in their psychological ailments as well. The journey
back home, which I later embarked upon, was both strenuous and exacting. In
true Fanonian fashion, I had to struggle to
disentangle myself from the grip of ‘the other’ and find my own hold of my own
race, face and space. It took me time and energy to discover that my
‘alienation’—if ever I suffered from one, was not a Sarterian
existentialist alienation, or a Kafkan verfremdung but basically one resulting from an
‘overdose’ of intellectual estrangement.
Years later I found myself a
teacher of English literature at Arab universities standing in front of
be-cloaked, semi-veiled students explaining to them Stephen Dedalus’s
desire for flight from the ‘constraints’ of family, faith and religion to
‘forge’ his artistic career; expecting them to hail and approve. The absurdity
of the situation was soon reflected in bewildered eyes, dropped jaws and
disturbed looks. The whole question of anyone merely thinking of departing from
faith and family was unacceptable, let alone drawing sympathetic approval or
consideration. When a student of mine stood at the door of my office asking why
we teach Greek ‘pagan’ literature and why we permit the circulation of textbooks
with illustrations of naked gods and goddesses, it was my jaw this time that
dropped. Questions pertaining to the raison d’etre
of English departments, foreign literatures, etc. were naively thrust at my
bewildered face. More often than not, I was speechless.
The relevance of ethics to
aesthetics became a burning issue, and the task of any English literature
teacher trying to break boundaries and span divides was more pressing than
ever. One had to look for practical solutions to make the study of English
literature a worthwhile experience for students—an experience enriching without
being psychologically perturbing. One needed to offer some answers to those who
began to even doubt the viability and validity of English departments per se.
On this latter point, I am
more convinced than ever that English has established itself as the lingua
franca in this ‘global village’ we are all heading towards. English, more
than ever has become the language of communication, informatics, networking and
navigation, thus binding the inhabitants of the world into one linguistic
community. No doubt, teaching English language is a top priority on the agenda
of any academic institution. Naturally, teaching English literature can not
receive the same degree of attention. After all, the majority of Arab students
in English departments , whether they pick up the linguistic track of study or
the literature one, end up in vocations that mostly demand knowledge of the
language itself, namely: teaching, translation, mass media, the diplomacy, etc.
Even the literature taught in these departments is quite often presented as
examples of the wonders of literary expression—more of a “forceful rendering of
language”, as Professor John Munro asserts, or “the best manifestation of its
vigor.”[1]
But “language is the most
cogent and comprehensive expression of culture,” too. This is what Frantz Fanon
rightly asserted in his Black Skin, White Masks: “to speak a language is
to take on a world, a culture.”(38) What happens then when that world seems to
hold values so very different from those of the readers, to the point that such
dichotomy serves to bar enjoyment of the work and appreciation of its literary
merits? What happens when readers lack a common frame of reference or fail to
pin down the work’s relevance to their lives? What catharsis is there for them?
What purgation? Or is it just a matter of fear and terror but no pity?
English departments in the
Arab world are more or less replicas of their counterparts in the West, in the
sense that they frequently stick to the canon (with occasional departures),
follow more or less the same curricula and assign textbooks and reading
selections not too different from those at King’s,
The closest these departments
get to adopting indigenous identities of their own is reflected in their
attempts to introduce courses of comparative nature where the local and the
foreign cultures are juxtaposed with a view to highlight areas of likeness or
difference. The same tendencies towards bridging worlds and striding schisms
are noticed in the nature of the research work conducted by the departments’
Arab staff members. Scores and scores of them have embarked on studies that address
questions of acculturation, aesthetic encounters, cultural hybridity,
quests for identity, images of the self in the literature of the ‘other’, and
similar topics that actually characterize post-colonial discourse by and large.
Other than that, the departments have remained conventional in outlook to a
large extent, treading along in the footsteps of the “Great Tradition.”
Whether to teach the canon or
graft some local color on it, there remains the question of how to teach
English literature to students who come from a totally different cultural
background and how to indulge in critical analysis of such themes, characters
and plots which may project situational values of distant relevance to the
readers.[2] The issue involves matters pertaining to text selection, critical
approach and analysis, class stimulation, students’ participation, and, of
course, final assessment.
Text selection is usually
vigilantly considered by most Arab teachers of English, particularly in Gulf
countries. A self-imposed censorship is often piously observed when it comes to
assigning reading material or ordering textbooks. Books with radical or highly
controversial subjects are quickly excluded; no “Waiting for Godot”, no “Lady Chatterly’s
Lover” are ever considered, to mention just two examples. Selected works would
normally run in line with what is thought least perturbing to the dominant
value system of the educational environment. The same applies not only to the
written text but also to auxiliary material brought into the class-room, such
as video-films, audio recordings or transparencies. My attempts to show slides
of Ingre’s nudes, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the
People (with her stripped bosom showing), even Michael Angelo’s David
drew as much resentment as did my lectures on
But what price, what cost is
involved in this discriminatory practice? Is Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy
Mistress” to be excluded on account of its ‘licentious’ invitation to the
pleasures of love? What will happen to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath with her
promiscuous discourse on female sexuality? Even the more harmless works such as
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby
are apt to solicit discontent ( students found it hard to see the ‘A’
sign on Hester Prynne’s bosom change from that of
‘adulteress’ to one symbolizing ‘Angel’ or ‘Able’; ‘sin’ was not to be
exonerated , not to pass condoned) . What can happen to Ovid, to the
flirtatious Restoration drama, to
Is this then an invitation to
cut students’ minds from the reservoir of Western, particularly English
literature and culture in the name of compatibility of values? Are we to teach only
what has immediate relevance and bears reference to Arab and Moslem
experiences? When confronted with a choice between Adrienne Rich’s poem “Living
in Sin” or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”, are we to assign
the latter simply because it does not ruffle the reader’s emotions as might the
ideas of adulterous relations in the former? I have heard many say, “yes”, and
“by all means”, especially that this will not do the canon any harm.
To argue this, one needs to
indulge in issues pertaining to the relationships of ethics to aesthetics, the
moral exegesis and the literary exegesis of a work as well as to issues of
educational environments.
Since a literary text is
assumed to be the reflection or example of social, historical, and ideological
forces at a given time and place, and since it is usually “penetrated” or
“permeated” by the social, ideological, and ethical assumptions of its author
or his milieu, a certain “ethical moment”, a ‘moment of recognition’ (J. Hillis Miller, 4) is expected to establish a link or
highlight a similarity between such ideologies and the living practice of
readers. What happens when such moment of recognition, necessary to illuminate
comprehension and facilitate literary judgment, is lacking due to an absence of
a suitable referentiality is that the ‘estranged’
student fails to identify with the work and chooses to dismiss it as ‘foreign’,
or ‘alien’.
But does it follow that the
students expect to meet characters like themselves or to whom in emulation they
might liken themselves? As already mentioned, a written text is likely to churn
an ethical reaction as a response to a cognitive moment of realization. This
moment is value-bound as readers may be tempted to judge characters’ choices or
assess themes by drawing analogies between the ethical implications of the
literary works under study and their own referential value system. In other
words, the question at hand remains whether the ethical act of the protagonist
in the literary product corresponds to the ethical norms generated outside the
book—in this case a possibly adversarial reading environment.
This argument, J. Hillis Miller in The Ethics of Reading would say, is
no different from Victorian writers’ defense of realism. Trollope, for one,
believed that the function of realistic fiction was to give us fictional
characters on whom to model ourselves. His theory of the novel guaranteed
readers that they would get their money’s value when they bought The Warden
or Orley Farm .The guarantee depended
on the fact that the novels would have a constructive social function, namely
to reinforce the ethical values of the middle-class readers for whom they were
intended.
That literature conveys an
ethical message seems to be undisputed. But whose ethics? What ‘ethicity’?(to borrow a term from Derrida). And is a
literary text to be approached from an ethical perspective only or mainly?
We all know that the charges
against ethical judgment are legion. It is often monologic,
reductive, and proselytizing and thus does violence to the aesthetic
complexities in order to promote a moral agenda. It has no claim to objectivity
and can never end in anything but opinion, which is not knowledge. It is
frequently no more than a baseless positing, often unjust and unjustified,
therefore always liable to be displaced by another momentarily stronger or more
persuasive but equally baseless positing of a different code of ethics.
To the teacher of English,
there is a fear, undoubtedly a legitimate one, that interpretation of the
literary text from an ethical perspective may become strongly thematized to make reductive, dogmatic, monologic
claims about its moral content, or take the moral component of the work as its
sole theoretical and practical object. From a pedagogic point of view, teachers
indubitably strain to elucidate the work without subordinating the aesthetic to
the moral or the moral to the aesthetic; instead, both categories are to remain
intact in choice of forms and methods necessary for textual interpretation.
Surely, any teacher of English
in the Arab Moslem world knows for a fact that the first thing students look
for in a story is its “moral’. They feel that the moral values asserted or
implied in a literary work are worth noticing, examining, and evaluating.
However, this does not imply an acceptance of any particular moral code or a
particular view of moral judgment. For example, a teacher cannot assign Rousseau’s
Julie because the book will be good for readers as it provides advice
for husbands and wives. A practice of this nature would force us out of epistemological
subtlety into ethical naiveté. Any work needs to be assessed within the context
of the culture that produced it, and is not to be accepted or rejected because
it does not comply with the readers’ own set of beliefs or subscribe to their
code of ethics.
What is being said, then, is
that there is not and there should not be one univocal interpretation of a text
that depends on an endorsement of one’s own ethos and an annihilation of the
rest. Nowhere in our educational practices should we shift grounds from the
cognitive historical, political, and social connections of literature to merely
the ethical. Questions pertaining to social or moral values of a foreign text
should never be allowed to stand between the students and the assessment of the
work. Besides, it goes without saying that students should not be reading books
for their ethical content or import alone. They should be encouraged to look at
reading as primarily a cognitive process leading to some transnational awareness
of comparative ‘ethicity’. “If there is to be such a
thing as an ethical moment in the act of reading, teaching, or writing about
literature, it must be sui generis , something individual and particular, itself a
source of …cognitive acts, not subordinated to it.” (Miller 5)
Perhaps what a teacher of
English literature in a non-western environment should target as a way out of
this mesh of values is to pinpoint that particular paradigm which is universally
recognized by each and every one in a borderless world.
By reaching out for a universal
truth, a teacher is doing more than reasserting the presuppositions of a
certain race, religion or time in history; he is in fact confirming commonality
and accord of human experience, an experience that transcends locality and
forges recognizable frames of reference. In search for this paradigmatic model
into which all texts can fall, a teacher traverses the geographical borders of
learning.
What a teacher of English
literature in a non-western environment should also reflect on is how to train
students to read a text amorally without involving themselves in any moral obligation.
One needs to achieve, or be capable of, intellectual or moral detachment to
perceive merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with. Orwell disagreed
with Swift’s moral sense, yet found him one of the best writers in his age.
This rests on the assumption that there is a difference between acceptance and
agreement. For acceptance is not so tightly related to belief. If an argument
is right, then the reader can ‘accept’ the moral presuppositions of a work
without necessarily agreeing with them.
This is related to what has
already been stated regarding the relationship between cognitive and ethical
processes or practice. It can be affirmed time and again that the reading
itself should be “epistemological, cognitive, a matter of getting ‘the text
right’, respecting it in this sense.”(Miller 43-44) In other words, a certain
detachment or distance from the text can give the reader a better perspective;
and a certain lodgment of the text within the generative forces that shaped it
will allow such an amoral stance to emerge, thus minimizing any ethical
differences or moral conflict.
Post-modernism can also be seen
as coming to the rescue of multivocal
interpretations. The very advent of newer critical approaches such as deconstruction
gives way not to a univocality but to a multivocality of exegeses. Although deconstruction does
not, as it is often accused of doing, advocate a totally ‘free play’ of
language in the void, abstracted from all ethical, social or political effect,
it invites the reader—the sole proprietor of the text, as its author has been
declared dead (Roland Barthes), to make the text mean
anything he wants it to mean since any meaning is as good as another.
Such freedom of interpretation endows the
reader with a certain degree of detachment necessary for recognizing a work’s
merit regardless whether he/she is morally at odds with it. Muslim Arab
students can then accept the text, reject it, feel suspicious about it, adopt
it, or simply feel totally neutral towards it away from the hegemony of the
dominant criticism which, more often than not, is western oriented. Indeed l’auteur est mort, mais le lecteur sera plein de vie.
The choice, then, for Arab
teachers of English literature is not to ‘eclipse’ texts from the eyes of their
students as much as to encourage them to adopt an amoral stance towards them,
and to search for that universal paradigm which is found at the heart of all
great literature. By doing this, students can ‘tame’ a work’s foreignness and
turn it into a familiar space to which they can relate and with which they can
identify.
Endnotes
[1]John Munroe, “Teaching
English as a Foreign Literature,” a public lecture given at the American
[2]A special conference on
“The Problems of Teaching English Language and Literature at Arab Universities”
was held in
References
Booth, Wayne. “Are Narrative Choices Subject to Ethical Criticism?” In
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated from
French by Charles Lam Markmann. N.Y.: Grove Press,
1967.
Krapp, John. An Aesthetics of Morality:
Pedagogic Voice and Moral Dialogue in Mann, Camus,
Conrad, and Dostoevsky.
Miller, J.Hillis. The Ethics of
Norris, Christopher. “The Ethics of
Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. World’s Classics ed.