Mësimi i letërsisë
The teaching of literature

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, initially delivered as a lecture, I dwell on the universal value of teaching literature at the University, drawing on my own experience as a writer and literary scholar, as well as student and professor, having studied in Kosovo, Croatia, and France, and taught in Kosovo and Albania. I advance the idea of generating a scholarship and not developing a doctrine as the province of teaching literature. The literature curriculum – and indeed the teaching of literature – is all the more significant in the Albanian literary environment, because in this culture literature has for a long time underpinned knowledge in the fields of history and the humanities in general. The teaching of literature/lecturing on literature aims at instruction on the reading and the writing of literature, that is teaching literary reading and writing. This leads to a writerly reading and a readerly writing, and ultimately generates the pleasure of lecturing on/about literature and the pleasure of writing/reading literature. I argue in the talk/paper that experienced and trained readers and lecturers of literature generate their universal and universalizing theories through the close study of masterpieces of their national literatures, e.g. the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin through Dostoyevsky’s fiction, French scholars Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette through Proust (In Search of Lost Time) and other French writers, Ibrahim Rugova, anAlbanian scholar from Kosovo, through Pjetër Bogdani’s work, and his colleague Rexhep Qosja through Naim Frashëri’s oeuvre. The concluding part of the paper draws on my experience as a University professor of literature in Kosovo, including during the 1990s, when the Albanian-language University of Prishtina operated in exacting circumstances, as an underground university, in the Serbian-occupied country.

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