Last year, I was given the opportunity to teach World Literature for the first time in four years. In returning to the course, I decided to reorganize my course approach, moving it from a chronological approach to a thematic approach. I also spent my summer reading new titles and selecting new works to feature (and a few to shorten or drop). Here are my nine favorite titles to feature or excerpt in a World Literature course. Plus, I describe three titles I’ve given up on teaching effectively.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Hands down, my most popular unit in World Literature is Cyrano de Bergerac. And I don’t think it’s because I’m doing anything extraordinary—it’s because it is such a fantastic play.
If you’re not familiar, here’s the premise: Cyrano de Bergerac is a gifted man. He’s a talented poet and fencer, in addition to being gifted with a rather large ego. Even bigger, however, is the size of his nose. Cyrano is in love with Roxane, his childhood friend and distant cousin. Roxane is as brilliant as she is beautiful (making her a heroine that resonates today). Roxane, however, has recently fallen in love with Christian, a new soldier in Cyrano’s regiment. Christian loves Roxane too (from a distance, of course), but worries he can’t keep up with her conversationally. Cyrano proposes an alliance: he’ll write letters to Roxane, accurately depicting Christian’s love to her, in secret. With this ruse, Roxane effectively falls in love with both men: Christian’s face, but Cyrano’s words.
This plot alone invites so many discussion points. Despite being so deceptive, many students feel sympathetic to Cyrano because of his low self-esteem. But they also feel sympathy for Roxane for her deception. Add to this beautiful poetry, a conflicting villain, and brilliant comedic moments. Cyrano is a surefire student hit and the easiest play to teach in this class.
Teaching tip
Pair clips from the Gérard Depardieu French film (which earned Depardieu an Oscar nomination) with clips from the new musical, Cyrano. This adaptation features Peter Dinklage as Cyrano, and it’s dwarfism rather than a large nose that contributes to his low self-worth.
Things Fall Apart
This unit was a move from my AP Lit course to World Lit (I replaced it with Fences, if you care to know). My World Literature course was a survey course, so we only studied one novel, one novella, and two plays. The rest were made up of short stories and many excerpts. Things Fall Apart was my full novel.
Despite its slow start, Things Fall Apart has a huge offering for American students. The story is set in Nigeria before it was colonized by England and describes typical village life and Nigerian culture. This setting has almost nothing in common with life in America now. However, the protagonist, Okonkwo, is very relevant for American readers. Okonkwo is a misogynistic, power-hungry patriarch with father issues. Students love studying him, judging him, reluctantly sympathizing with him, and marveling at his choices throughout the novel. I’ve been surprised by my success with this novel, especially as I moved it from AP Lit to World Lit with almost no changes.
Teaching tip
Things Fall Apart does have an instance of suicide near the end. Be sure to offer students a trigger warning. For any that struggle with this, they can skip the final chapter or read an alternate title.
Homegoing
This was one of my brand new offerings this year. I only read Homegoing a few years ago and was very moved by it. However, I found its plot too difficult to study as a standalone novel to teach in AP Lit. I also found it easy to split the novel up into standalone chapters to teach it as an excerpt. My students just read the H chapter, following the story of H, son of Kojo and Anna. H was sent to prison as a young man and became a miner under the American South’s convict leasing system.
Teaching tip
I love this excerpt for the history lesson it teaches students. Ironically, it takes a novel by a woman from Ghana to teach students how slavery permeated throughout history decades and even centuries after it was outlawed, in the form of sharecropping and convict leasing. H is strong and angry, but for very understandable reasons. Still, he finds a way to channel his anger into working for change for his fellow workers and restores a sense of justice by the end of the excerpt.
I recommend showing the family tree found in the front of Homegoing to students before reading. It’s very hard to explain the narrative structure of this book, but her illustration in the book is a helpful visual aid.
Dante’s Inferno
This may seem like an odd choice for this list, and it’s definitely my oldest title on it. That being said, I’ve found that my students are fascinated by the concept and journey of The Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri conceived his own version of hell (and purgatory and heaven) based on his Catholic faith and his own regrettable expulsion from Florence, his hometown. We study Dante’s journey through hell only, considering how the various punishments match up with various sins, some of which have not exactly aged well. I find the text an interesting time capsule for Dante’s time period, as well an interesting juxtaposition between Catholic doctrine and one man’s individual faith.
Teaching tip
I recommend using the website The World of Dante, which provides relevant footnotes on all people, places, and allusions mentioned in The Divine Comedy. It also matches the text with any relevant art and music that was paired with it upon its composition.
A Man Called Ove
It’s no secret that this book is my all-time favorite novel. I’d like to teach it as a whole class novel one day, but until that point I have found great success in teaching a single chapter from it as an excerpt. I believe it is chapter 4 (sorry, I left my book at school), where Ove haggles with a store clerk over the application of a plant coupon. Throughout the whole chapter, he speaks tiredly of his wife’s habits, such as sneaking the thermostat up and accumulating far too many coats. At the end of the chapter, however, he visits his wife’s grave and we learn that she passed away months later.
There are many benefits to teaching A Man Called Ove, even in excerpt form. In a literary sense, it’s a strong study of characterization, point of view, and figurative language. Furthermore, Backman writes in a way where you can’t help fall in love with Ove, his wife, his band of ridiculous neighbors. Finally, one more vote in its favor is that it’s a relatively easy text to teach. It’s pretty plot-based, and because of the likable storyline it won’t be a struggle for students to keep reading.
Teaching tip
There is a fantastic foreign film version of A Man Called Ove, produced in Sweden (Backman’s home country). America is just releasing an adapted version of the story called A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks, as well.
The Kite Runner
This is a novel I wish I could teach in its entirety, but the jarring sexually violent scene in it makes me uncomfortable for a required whole class read. Therefore, we read only a chapter from the novel as an excerpt. I ask students to read chapter 3, exploring Assef’s complicated relationship with his father, Baba. Baba finds Assef scholarly and aloof, so different from his own ambitious boyhood. His friend Rahim Khan stands up for Assef, presenting an alternative father figure for Assef, complicating these relationships.
This chapter functions great as a standalone text, operating similar to a short story. I use World Literature to show students how characters from different cultures and time periods struggle with universal issues. This excerpt from The Kite Runner offers up a father-son conflict, one easily understandable in any culture.
Teaching tip
Several of my students ask to read this book after we read the excerpt. I make sure they know about potential triggers (rape and suicide) before reading, but do recommend it if they can handle those conflicts.
“Land Enough for a Man” or “The Bet”
I couldn’t decide between these two short stories, so I’m listing both. Tolstoy’s “Land Enough for a Man” has been translated into multiple versions, even with multiple titles (it is also called “How Much Land Does a Man Require?”). In some versions it features a devil figure, selecting Pakhom as his future victim by way of greed. In other versions, this parable feature is shortened and even removed. His story is quite long and uses repeated instances to demonstrate Pakhom’s greed. “The Bet” is shorter, but also uses a parable-like set up and a series of repetition, showing the lawyer’s self-education while in prison.
I have varying levels of interest and engagement with these texts because of their very different endings. “Land Enough for a Man” ends quite predictably, in an almost cliché. Tolstoy writes that Pakhom was buried six feet deep, as that was all that was needed for one man. “The Bet” ends surprisingly, with the lawyer intentionally losing his bet in his self-disgust for society. I have found that the students that hate “Land Enough for a Man” love “The Bet,” and vice versa. However, there is a great many that love both stories.
Teaching Tip
I introduce “The Bet” with a discussion of prison. I ask students, should prison be rehabilitative or punitive in nature? This opens up an interesting debate, similar to the one on capital punishment that leads to the bet in the first place.
I’m sure I left many wonderful titles off this list. What are your favorite titles for teaching World Literature?
