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The Land without the Canon Wars: Language, Literature, and New Freedoms in Myanmar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Amy K. Levin
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Extract

Landing in Yangon (Formerly Rangoon) in February 2013, Less Than Three Months After President Barack Obama's Historic trip to Myanmar (Burma), I wondered what I would encounter. Serving as the first Fulbright specialist at a Myanmar public university in thirty years forced me to alter my approach to teaching the literature of the United States that appeared during the time Myanmar isolated itself. It also compelled me to reconsider the relations among literature, human rights, and language. Locals who taught literature of the United States and Britain never experienced the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the expansion of the literary canon. Keats was on the syllabus in every undergraduate English course, while African American authors were absent, and some of my students were surprised that Americans no longer enslave Africans.

Type
correspondents at large
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1535 - 1539
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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