Countering the hegemonic English curriculum : intercultural competence through poetry

Abstract

I discovered world literature at the age of 16. Despite always having been a bookworm, my literary diet up to then had been restricted to novels penned by American and British writers. My family travelled to England every summer on holiday and I remember badgering my parents for cash to spend on the stacks of second-hand books at the charity shops we passed by whilst visiting towns and villages in Devon and Cornwall. My parents could only afford to spare me one or two pounds but luckily the books were dirt-cheap and so I worked my way through writers as diverse and uniform as Enid Blyton, Jeffrey Archer, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and many others. My literary sensibility was not sufficiently refined to allow me to discriminate between Archer and Dickens; all I was after was a good story.