ABSTRACT

There is a growing consensus that the study of literature in English secondary schools is suffering a crisis: a fixation with knowledge and facts, a loss of creativity, and a denigration of students’ own experience, to name a few. This article argues that this is, in part, a result of the conception of culture embedded in the current National Curriculum; a conception in which the study of literature exists primarily to valorise and maintain a clearly definable national culture. In response to this, I suggest that recent thinking in the tradition of cultural cosmopolitanism can expose the inadequacies of this model and offer a set of conceptual resources for thinking about the role of identity and culture in relation to literary study in the secondary school. I also suggest that, as far back as the 1921 Newbolt report, fragments of this more capacious understanding of culture run through much of the most important thinking about the subject.

摘要

越来越多的人一致认为，英语中学的文学研究正面临一场危机：对知识和事实的执着、创造力的丧失以及对学生自身经历的贬低等等。本文认为，这部分是当前国家课程中嵌入的文化概念的结果；在这个概念中，文学研究的存在主要是为了维护和维护一个明确定义的民族文化。对此，我建议最近对文化世界主义传统的思考可以揭露这种模式的不足，并为思考身份和文化在中学文学学习中的作用提供一套概念资源。我还建议，早在 1921 年 Newbolt 的报告中，