Literature, Culture and Language Learning

In the teaching of modern European languages such as German and English, there has been renewed interest in engaging with foreign language (FL) literature in order to develop knowledge of the culture in which the text is located and to raise awareness of intercultural attitudes, values and beliefs. However, there has been a reluctance to correspondingly reconsider theories of reading and literary interpretation. In pedagogic textbooks, reading is still theorised almost exclusively in terms of cognitive or psycholinguistic approaches, especially »exemplar models« such as schema theory (Barsalou, Cognitive Processes 18: 2003, 517–519). Although less widely promulgated, approaches derived from hermeneutics and phenomenology such as reader response theory (Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974; The Act Of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 1978; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, 1989; How to Do Theory, 2006) have also been used to describe the reading of FL literature.