The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic"

Authors

  • Hannah Spector

Abstract

 

This paper aims to contribute to the small but growing field of cosmopolitanism in curriculum theory research and its intersection with literature education. While much of current scholarship in education and other disciplines tends to underscore cosmopolitanism as a normative project - as a principle or code of ethics which may or may not influence schooling from the top-down - I argue that when examined in the particularities of literature, cosmopolitanism functions in radically different, contextual ways. As a curricular case in point and examined in this paper, the cosmopolitan literary imagination illustrated in Philip Roth's short story "Eli, the Fanatic" contains a series of productive paradoxes that become a curriculum for cosmopolitanism.

 

Author Biography

Hannah Spector

Hannah Spector is a PhD student in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include cosmopolitanism, curriculum theory, and the political theory of Hannah Arendt. Her current work involves political cosmopolitanism and the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky. She can be contacted at hspector@interchange.ubc.ca.

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Published

2011-11-28

Issue

Section

International Curriculum Discourses