Making the unthinkable thinkable: Literary text recontextualization in the L2 tertiary setting

Literature teaching is widely considered to be of the essence in the cultivation of cultural enrichment and language proficiency. Culture enrichment has been brought to the fore in the literature classroom, with language acquisition playing a supplementary role in supporting and complementing text comprehension. Back in the late eighteenth century, modern literary education emerged by transmuting literary appreciation among privileged aristocrats into an institutional education medium (Hunter, 1988). This shift indicates the beginning of modern literary education from the nineteenth century, when English literature started to become a classroom subject. It was distinct from classical education in England characterized by its didactic instruction on grammar and rhetoric, and Romantic aesthetic education featured by its aesthetic commitment though restricted to a certain social stratum. Modern literary education was established in the way that the attribute of aesthetically and ethically cultural enrichment existing in literature was fully capitalized on by the government as a field of study, or a branch of knowledge, that could be accessed by the whole population under pedagogical guidance with a view to creating human civilization and sensibility (Hunter, 1988). It was in what Hunter (1988) called accidental historical contexts that the epitome of ethics embedded in literary works appreciated by certain social classes became a subject for the educational purpose of humanitarian cultivation among the whole population.