Love and Death in Eden: Teaching English Literature to ESL Students

The several problems of cross-cultural teaching of English literature to Puerto Rican students whose second language is English are suggested by the obvious unfamiliarity of cyclical seasonal change which provides the fundamental mutability mythology of English literature. Compensation for this experiential lack is found in the cultural background of the students, their familiarity with nursing the sick and mourning the dead, and the recognized importance of procreation and extended family. Beyond compensation, student understanding of insularity, alienation, deviant behavior, etiquette, technology, sex, religion, and race are in many instances highly useful to the comprehension of English literature of the past. The profit in this discovery lies in the constructive humiliation of accepted modern critical and professorial perspective as bound by cultural presuppositions which are no more useful or similar to those of Chaucer or Spenser than those of Latin English majors-perhaps less so.