Choo, Suzanne S.

This study seeks to examine the challenges and opportunities faced by schools in facilitating cosmopolitan dispositions or virtues in their students, in particular, through literature lessons. The project is driven by three key research questions:

1. What forms of cosmopolitan dispositions are observed in students in literature classrooms and in sample assignments in the selected schools?
2. How do literary texts develop cosmopolitan dispositions in the teaching of literature in the selected schools?
3. How pedagogical approaches do teachers employ to develop cosmopolitan dispositions in the teaching of literature in the selected schools?

Since the late 20th century, Literature education has entered an ethical turn in response to hyper globalization, the intensification of digital technology, the dangers of post-truth and rising instances of intolerance worldwide. Consequently, influential scholars have rekindled the age-old connection between Literature and ethics. After discussing this turn to ethics and highlighting the pedagogical cosmopolitanization of ethical criticism, this article uncovers the ways in which cosmopolitan ethics grounds recent conceptualizations of ethical criticism and its various strands—relational, analytical, and historical. This paper examines these strands drawing from both “Eastern” and “Western” philosophical traditions. It then offers responses to criticisms of cosmopolitan ethical criticism, namely, arguments concerning moral reductiveness and moral determinism. It demonstrates how these arguments paradoxically reinforce subjectivity to the exclusion of intersubjective accountability and further justify cosmopolitan ethical criticism as tied to its teleological and plurivocal purposes respectively. Cosmopolitan ethical criticism provides the critical tools needed to counter parochial meta-narratives which are essential for human flourishing via societies characterized by hospitality, empathy and inclusivity.

Once regarded as the most essential subject in the national curriculum vital for civilizing the public, English Literature has now lost its place of prominence. In this paper, I focus on Singapore where the subject was a core aspect of the colonial curriculum and where it is currently facing declining enrolment at the national examinations. In the first part of the paper, I discuss how Literature initially functioned to propagate colonial values education in Singapore and how, following Singapore's independence, its goals were overtaken by a nation-state model of values education. Limitations of this model provide the grounds for a transnational model of critical values education that, as I argue in the second part, may be powerfully conveyed through Literature. It is Literature’s capacity to facilitate transnational critical engagements with values and explorations of identity especially involving highly sensitive aspects related to gender, race, and religion that represents the strongest justification in the light of its present demise. What Literature offers is the possibility of engaging with values beyond the confines of Empire or nation by grappling with essential questions about what it means to be a cosmopolitan as opposed to a nationalistic citizen inhabiting the world.