Teaching English literature in China: importance, problems and countermeasures

This paper seeks to argue for the importance of teaching literature in English departments in Chinese universities. The past two decades in China have heard ever–increasing outcries for making English courses ‘more pragmatic’, a policy which threatens to marginalize and even banish literature. Behind such a phenomenon lurks a prevalent assumption: that English education is a matter of ingesting information, of mastering techniques, and of acquiring facts and know–how, whereas literature is a soft option, an indulgence or a mere trimming to decorate the hard center of the market–oriented syllabus. In order to counter such a trend, we need first of all to address the following theoretical issues: What is the primary task of an English department in China? Is the teaching of English literature relevant to the Chinese market economy today? If yes, in what way is it relevant? How does one persuade a member of modern Chinese society that there is a profit in reading, say, Chaucer and Shakespeare, in harkening to any non–Chinese and, ‘worse’, non–modern non–Chinese voices? In answering those questions, the present paper suggests a number of countermeasures to combat those policies promoting a shallow ‘pragmatism’ in English teaching in China today.