Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices Vol 2:1 6 Rewriting the Foreign Literature Syllabus from the Perspective of Critical Literacy Cielo G. Festino University of São Paulo, Brazil Introduction The aim of this paper is to reconsider, from the perspective of Critical Literacy, the design of the foreign literature syllabus, produced in what Spivak (2003:8) calls ‘European national languages‘: English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, and that Gates (1992:89) defines as inscribed by the metaphor of racial difference that seeks to pass the literary expressions articulated through them as ‘natural, absolute and essential‘. Our desire to rewrite the foreign literature syllabus comes at a moment when the discipline is being problematized because of the increasing relevance and centrality of postcolonial literatures that deconstruct the West versus the Rest divide (Gates 1992): the monolithic and univocal West that silences the multiple Others. I will consider the issue from the perspective of the English literature syllabus used in undergraduate Modern Language (English/Portuguese) courses in Brazilian universities. As an example, there was a radical change in the literatures in English after WWII, when the newly liberated colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean as well as the former settlement colonies: Canada, Australia and New Zealand, started producing their own national literatures in English, or better, in englishes, as Ashcroft et al (1989) announced more than a decade ago. These new marginal talents have acquired significant and representative voices, to the point that in the last years some Nobel Prizes and most Booker Prizes have not stayed in Europe or in the United States, but have emigrated to Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Canada. Therefore, the big names against which new writers in English measure their talent have not come from England or the United States lately, but from the former colonies. It is these literatures that have brought about a renovation to canonical literatures. However, if making room for these new literatures is thought by most as politically correct, one of the issues that needs to be addressed is how they find their way into the school syllabus so as not to re-affirm their marginal status, and the critical perspective from which they will be taught so that they do not become a mere celebration of newness, to borrow Bhabha’s term (2004). Another issue to be taken into account is that it is not the case that the so-called canonical literatures should not be taught any longer. Rather, what should be reconsidered is firstly, their place in this broader school syllabus and secondly, the way in which these texts should be approached, from a critical perspective. In turn, that calls for a reconsideration of some taken-for-granted categories such as the concept of literariness and literary value, the concept of the aesthetic, the role of literature and the relationship between literature and culture. This shows that, on the one hand, the foreign literature syllabus should first reflect all the different cultural groups that fight for a fair treatment at an ethical, aesthetic and political level. On the other hand, the foreign literature syllabus will always be inscribed in a moment of ‘transition’ (Bhabha 2004) because its elaboration implies the co-existence of different literary and cultural narratives in counterpoint whose relationship is never fixed or transcendental but is always in a process of change. In turn, borrowing Bhabha’s