Poon, Angelia

"This project was an investigation into the ways in which the curricular coherence in the literature classrooms of two upper secondary literature teachers at average-ability schools in Singapore could be enhanced. Curricular coherence refers to the ways in which elements of curriculum, texts, different writers, themes, individual lessons, and classroom activities are related to each other (Applebee, 1996; Applebee, Burroughs, & Stevens, 2000)."-- [p. 1]

This article discusses the ambitious educational reforms of the Singapore government in response to the challenges of globalization vis-à-vis the specific issues arising from the case of teaching Literature in secondary schools. It shows how the Singapore state is invested in a particular view of globalization and argues how recent scholarly moves to recuperate the notion of cosmopolitanism may provide an alternative view. Turning to cosmopolitanism as an intellectual and ethical goal when considering curricular changes to Literature may also help revitalize the subject and garner a more significant role for it in the scripting of Singapore as a nation and global city for the future.

This chapter taps into the deep seam of literary dissent to trace and examines specifically the thematic of failed masculinity in three Singapore novels beginning with what is commonly regarded as the nation's first novel in English, If We Dream Too Long, by Goh Poh Seng. In an interesting continuation in subsequent decades, it is noteworthy that both the novels Abraham's Promise by Philip Jeyaretnam and City of Small Blessings by Simon Tay also center on the idea of failed men. The chapter focuses on Catherine Lim's satirical novel, Miss Seetoh in the World, which presents an interesting inflection of the problematic. In examining these Singapore novels through the optic of masculinity, the chapter draws upon both a tradition of feminist postcolonial scholarship about the gendering of nation and critical developments in gender and sexuality studies which have sought to make masculinity analytically visible as a gender rather than neutral, universal norm around which all else is organized and understood.

This article argues for the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies in achieving the goal of cosmopolitanism through Literature education. Having significantly redrawn the overall contours of literary study in the twentieth century, postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary critical tradition provides us with a conceptual vocabulary, analytical lens and interpretive protocols with which to interrogate rigorously many salient aspects of contemporary globalization in our world today. There are at least three main areas where postcolonialism’s contribution remains vital: i) in critical discussion about the nation and nationalism, ii) in countering Eurocentrism, and iii) in the examination of form, style and literary poetics or aesthetics. In this article, I explore each of these areas first before suggesting ways in which Anglophone Singapore literature may be taught and read through these critical emphases, with the ultimate goal of answering nation-centred goals while also fulfiling the national curriculum’s desired outcome of growing empathetic and global thinkers.