Using Literature for Inter-Cultural Training

Abstract

Literary texts deals with reality; though, the reality literature offers is an aesthetic and subjective one that cannot be tested empirically, but this doesn’t lessen its validity and usefulness; for instance to convey the essence of a culture in a lively and innovative fashion. It doesn’t provide the social, historical, and cultural conditions of a society like texts of social sciences. Contrastively, literary texts provide a kind of non-discursive knowledge which is deeper than that of social sciences. Although a literary text is self-referential it mirrors the complexity of experience through its internal relationship. For example, dramatic voices in work, though fictional, represent the people who inhabit a given society at a particular period. Literature, hence, is somehow a different kind of knowledge which is important for human civilization, not in any way less important than empirical knowledge. The relation between literature and culture is reciprocal. Culture affects what one writes and what one writes affects our culture. Literature not only records culture but influences it. Literature offers insights into mentality, psychology, and attitudes which cannot be gleaned from conventional sociological and historical sources. They have an originality and aesthetic vitality that cannot be matched by the conventional materials for Inter-cultural training. An appropriately designed and presented use of literature-based modules can very well supplement the conventional materials of Inter-cultural training.