I spend a lot of time thinking about how to teach English differently. At the best of times, my obsession with designing meaningful learning experiences feels like a deeply held moral commitment and a life-long pedagogical project. I cite theories from Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, and bell hooks, wrestle with empirical research from the field, and muse about the “good life of teaching.” This is how I feel in the fleeting moments between summiting a challenging project and remembering everything else I still have to do (including this Substack!). Much of the time, however, my ADHD-fueled drive for novelty—the next framework, the next connection, the next rabbit hole, etc. stays one step ahead of my best laid plans.
On the surface, this well reasoned and deeply considered commitment to particular forms of teaching feels like it should be incompatible with the unpredictable chaos that comes with chasing the dopamine dragon. In reality, that friction is the engine of my reading, writing, and teaching. It’s a lived sublation—the rabbit holes become the work, and the work becomes the thing that makes the next rabbit hole worth diving into1. They are not opposite. They are mutually constitutive. This cheeky little formulation is an example of ~the dialectic~ in action.
“There! Dialectically!”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the potential for dialectical forms of criticism and teaching for two reasons. Firstly, my interest in Fredric Jameson’s writing and pedagogy continues unabated. Secondly, and more relevant for this post, because it’s become the lynchpin of the World Literature course I’m teaching right now. Explaining Hegel’s dialectic (which is similar to but distinct from its Socratic, Kantian, and Marxist cousins) is either easy but kinda wrong or accurate and basically impossible to understand. For your consideration:
Lord knows I’m no Hegel scholar, but here’s my best attempt to explain his version of the dialectic: Essentially, it’s a productive way of thinking through supposed contradictions. You start with a position or idea, and then you recognize that it contains within itself a tension or opposition—something it can’t fully account for on its own terms. That internal pressure pushes the idea or position to develop, to move beyond itself into something richer that holds both the original insight and what challenged it. Hegel uses a flower metaphor in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit that I found helpful (sort of).
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they don’t merely contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.
The key thing is that the contradiction is not imposed from outside. It arises from the idea’s own logic. As philosophy professor Stephen Houlgate explains, pride doesn’t fall because something external intervenes. Pride is itself the source of its own fall. Freedom, pursued in particular ways, can itself produce unfreedom.
Jameson applies a similar logic to the relationship between base and superstructure when claiming culture carries within itself the very contradictions of the material conditions that produced it. As Clint Burnham points out in Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street, his dialectical criticism isn’t really focused on moralizing about Jordan Belfort’s (and by extension financial capital’s) ethical transgressions or excesses. Instead, it requires us to historicize—to examine how the film’s own production and logic are inextricably bound to the contradictions of the capitalistic system characteristic of its historical moment. It simultaneously asks us to consider how a crew of scrappy penny-stock hustlers operating at the margins of finance might serve as an unconscious allegory for the utopian impulses (e.g. a yearning for collective agency and class solidarity) latent within the very system their story indicts2.
The Problem with “World Literature”
The problematic that led me down this Hegelian rabbit hole is much more straightforward to grasp even if it’s still hard to solve. It’s something that many English teachers and professors have faced at one point or another:
How does one build a World Literature course without treating their curriculum like a buffet of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and/or identities?
This is a question that I agonized over all summer and much deeper into the first semester than I would have liked considering I had to build and teach a World Literature elective starting in January. Considering our student population, we wanted to expose our learners to different cultures, perspectives, and peoples but we didn’t want to turn our course into box checking books from the seven continents. We didn’t want to offer reductive “samplers” that flattened the complex interplay between race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality. We didn’t want to reify East vs. West or Global North vs. Global South, but we also didn’t want to ignore the material differences created by colonization, imperialism, and the flows of global capital. Also, as great as it is, we didn’t want to show them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Dangers of a Single Story” TedTalk for the 18th time.
That means we had our work cut out for us! Books were purchased. Curricular documents were consulted. Lot’s of reading, skimming, hemming, hawing, typing, deleting, and contemplating was undertaken.
Dialectics of the Global
Then one magical night my rabbit hole digging struck gold. I came across an abstract describing a series from the field of Transregional Studies (which I’d admittedly never heard of) and everything clicked. The series was organized around what they call the three “dialectics of the global” which they describe as:
Multiplicity and Co-Presence: “Globalization” is neither a natural occurrence nor a singular process; on the contrary, there are competing projects of globalization, which must be explained in their own right and compared in order to examine their layering and their interactive composition.
Integration and Fragmentation: Global processes result in de- as well as re-territorialization. They go hand in hand with the dissolution of boundaries, while also producing a respatialization of the world.
Universalism and Particularism: Globalization projects are justified and legitimized through universal claims of validity; however, at the same time they reflect the worldview and/or interest of particular actors.
Many of the tensions I'd been circling during my reading and research were named here: Does universalism always produce its own particularism? Why does globalization simultaneously unite and divide us? How does one account for the different types of globalization? Next, I needed to put them in more accessible, student-facing language.
Universalism/Particularism: Who gets to speak for “everyone”? What’s called universal vs. culturally specific, and who decides?
Integration/Fragmentation: When the world connects, it also divides. What opens and what closes?
Multiplicity/Co-Presence: There is no single “globalization”—there are multiple, competing world-systems operating simultaneously.
In an effort to bundle each of these together into an (admittedly dense) essential question, I created the following line of inquiry:
How does globalization impact what counts as universal, how belonging is made/unmade, and whose version of world literature we get to study?
And thus the heart of the course was born! Instead of trying to cover the entirety of World Literature in a single semester, we would discuss how the very idea of “world literature” came to exist in the first place. Instead of treating each text selection as the embodiment of a particular culture, nation, or people, we would treat them as invitations to examine how the global dialectics themselves undermine the coherence and possibility of such essentialist perspectives. The locus of each unit would shift from particular geographical regions to overlapping philosophical tensions.
The main takeaway I want to emphasize here is that I strongly believe English educators have to move beyond treating course design and reading lists like they’re the same thing. What we read matters, but absent galvanizing questions, overarching frameworks, and/or a deeper animating purpose, even the most engaging works become boxes to check instead of urgent invitations for humanistic inquiry. For those of us with the privilege of curricular autonomy, I’d go as far as to say we have a responsibility to show what’s possible in English classrooms when teachers are freed from the shackles of standardized testing, scripted curriculum, and corporations like College Board.
Concept Formation: Globalization
Before diving into each of our units, which I’ll share in a future post, it became clear that globalization would be a threshold concept students would have to start wrestling with early in the course. Instead of giving them a dictionary definition or playing a video that gave did the sensemaking for them, our first “real day” of class was a concept formation activity similar to the one I detailed in my post on creating/teaching my Tech and Text course last semester. First, I handed out a folder of artifacts, cut up so they could be manipulated, arranged, and organized.
Students worked in groups to read and comprehend the different artifacts. We then came together as a class (with me facilitating) to name and define what we decided were four different types of globalization: economic, cultural, technological, and political. Students’ efforts to categorize artifacts would require a mix of discussion, close reading, and visual analysis. For anyone experimenting with this more inductive, open-ended concept formation approach (explored in more depth in another recent article), keep in mind that it’s more about the capitalizing on the benefits of collaborative sensemaking and inductive reasoning than arriving at a 100% “correct” answer for each type.
Following a full class discussion of the categories, I asked students to arrange all the artifacts from “most optimistic” to “most pessimistic” to get a better sense of the wide range of opinions on globalization—and to have them consider what factors might shape those opinions. Students came to the conclusion that cultural forms of globalization tended to be more optimistic, inviting a sharing and blending of traditions, music, art, fashion, etc. while economic versions were most negative, particularly when they featured the perspective of scholars and politicians from the Global South. No surprise there!
The discussion that followed their mapping of these patterns flowed naturally into an introduction to the three dialectics that would structure the course. To consolidate what they learned from our initial forays into the course’s essential questions, students completed a discussion board post where they defined globalization and explained how their learning connected to the three global dialectics. It was a great teaser for the rest of the course and gave the students an outline of what we’d be exploring for the rest of the semester.
Wrap Up
As I write this, I’m wrapping up my first unit of the course. We paired Shakespeare's The Tempest with Aimé Césaire's postcolonial rewriting A Tempest as well as a smattering of theory excerpts from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Todd McGowan’s Universality & Identity Politics, Plato’s Republic, and Audre Lorde’s “The Masters Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.” The unit is culminating in a portfolio where students write a close reading of a self-selected scene from A Tempest and compose an original soliloquy that is informed by the interpretation shared in their essay. More on that soon. In the meantime, stay curious and don’t be afraid to jump down a rabbit hole or two if you get the chance.
Yes. Dressing up my anarchic workflow in fancy philosophical language does make me feel better about it.
I have a lot more to say about why I think English education would benefit from incorporating forms of dialectical criticism. Mostly because it moves us towards using texts to both understand and think beyond existing ideological systems, and because it moves us away from simply calling out authors/narratives/characters for being problematic.
I love the concept formation instructional strategy! Such a great start to a unit or course that really gets people interested in the concepts and connects to their prior understandings. I taught various high school world lit courses over the years and I preferred the thematic rather than strictly geographical approach to organizing the course —much more to talk about. Thanks for sharing!
Really interesting - a lot to think about!
(I have to admit, I got to this line:
"box checking books from the seven continents"
and started trying to imagine a course in the literature of Antarctica.)