world literature reflective essay

The Local as the Global: Reflections on Teaching World Literature

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The following essay argues for the importance of shifting world literature courses away from “survey” and toward the interrogation of categories of knowledge that typically organize the world. This is best accomplished by foregrounding minoritized literatures and beginning from “home.”

I n recent years I have been searching for strategies to demystify the unruly idea of “world literature” for a general undergraduate student population in a North American university. Although this search relates to specific concerns with college pedagogy, the insights it yields can be useful beyond my particular context. Upon taking up a teaching position in 2010, I was informed by my new colleagues that while I would teach advanced undergraduate courses on world/postcolonial literatures for English majors and graduate courses, I would also teach large numbers of non-English majors seeking to fill the university’s “diversity” requirement. Only recently did I realize that these circumstances and curricular conditions are, in fact, the natural habitat of world literature, where it has the most reach and can do the most work.

Initially, as a newly minted PhD, I was zealously committed to the imperatives of world literature on its own terms and for its own sake. Admittedly, I have not foreclosed on my early goals of producing readers of literary texts who are curious about the different and the distant and, with a little luck, inspiring them to go on to become polyglots and literary scholars. I now see my job, for the most part, as a very different one: less cloistered and more student-oriented in the broadest sense. As a teacher of world literature, I am accountable to all students, and not to English majors exclusively.

The peril of the “great books” approach is that it turns world literature into the instrument of some perfunctory “multiculturalism” that requires little mental labor from students, reducing them to impassive cultural tourists.

Realizing that my world literature course may possibly be the only one of its kind that many students will take, my challenge as a new professor was configuring a one-semester course that maximizes the intellectual rewards of world literature. It is still quite common to encounter the “great books” model, the idea that world literature is an aggregate of what Margaret Cohen calls the “great unread.” The peril of this approach is that it turns world literature into the instrument of some perfunctory “multiculturalism” that requires little mental labor from students, reducing them to impassive cultural tourists. Instead of this approach, world literature courses at the introductory and general level must unsettle students by making them “unthink” their worldviews, or at the very least be conscious of them. World literature must show them the synergies between the local, national, regional, and global.

To this end, world literature courses can, and perhaps must, begin at home, which for my students and myself is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. This way, students see how the local, the proximal, and the familiar are coordinates of this thing called the world; the world is not something exotic, menacing, and inhospitable but an accretion of what they consider home, a larger community to which they are native. More specifically, I have found that local literatures produced by minoritized writers are especially conducive to fostering an understanding of the traffic between the local and the global. This is one of the ways in which the conversations around “world” and “postcolonial” literature are finding confluence as categories of inquiry, where world literature takes valuable lessons from the enterprise of postcolonial studies. The latter insists that power and the way one is socially situated affect how one reads and writes the world, an idea that informs the way educators use world literature as a means of encountering and learning from difference.

Foregrounding local and minoritized literatures as an entry into world literature does have a historical antecedent. Johann von Goethe, widely credited with naturalizing the term “world literature” ( Weltliteratur ), famously declared, “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Less famous but related to this declaration was Goethe’s attention to local and regional literatures, or “subnational literatures.” I do not mean to ascribe to Goethe some vanguard iconoclasm against the established literary aristocracy, but it is clear that he pondered possible roles that literatures in the crevices and peripheries of the “nation” could play in deprovincializing literature, releasing it from the straitjacket of the national frame of reading. “Ethnic” and “postcolonial” literatures, which only tentatively belong to any national literature, are coming to occupy a special place in the conversations on world literature. They do not necessarily disperse the idea of “national” literatures, but they distress the critical practices around them and demand their rereading. They occasion thinking about literary canons in ways that converge with larger conversations about (un)belonging in lived social communities and how these communities are produced and policed.

I realize that beginning a world literature course in the United States, even with minoritized literatures, appears like a retrenchment of American and anglophone exceptionalism, but the alternative is to feign innocence of occasion and the way we are positioned in the world. Literary texts, like pedagogical situations, are “never from nowhere.” Therefore, an intellectually candid and responsible world literature course must acknowledge and grapple with those default positions and ideological latencies that will inevitably shape course structure and intellectual temperament.

The craft and storytelling of Pittsburgh’s greatest literary son, August Wilson, has had an inestimable impact on me. So much so that being in Pittsburgh made sense to me after I read his Pittsburgh Cycle. Though not a native Pittsburgher or a black American, I recognized my own yearnings and anxieties in this work. Wilson’s cycle also centered me as an educator given how organically (but intrepidly) it thrusts itself upon the world. While anchored to a specific place and time, the cycle is culturally agile, navigating and calling attention to the relationships among the local, regional, national, and global. Wilson’s cycle might not appear to be the most germane illustration of the local-as-global. This is because black American literature—unlike other “ethnic” and immigrant literatures, which readily give way to and summon other places and cultures—has primarily been understood as discretely American in its being and deeds. In recent years, however, literary scholarship has reimagined and reconstituted minoritized writings in the United States as voices of the “global south,” a larger conglomeration of communities that resist their silencing in national and linguistic contexts.

The Pittsburgh Cycle is comprised of ten dialogue-driven plays, each of which takes place in one twentieth-century decade as experienced by black Americans. Nine of them are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District where Wilson grew up, but the cycle also looks toward Chicago, an epicenter of the blues, a genre serving as a comprehensive philosophy of life for Wilson and his characters. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Seven Guitars , Chicago is even extolled as a place of deliverance for black Americans. The cycle also looks back to the American South, a place of untold and unfinished stories and gaping wounds, the ghosts of which freight Wilson’s characters. Many of Wilson’s characters are immigrants in all but the legal sense. They move from one cultural sphere to another in search of better prospects, even though they do not cross a geopolitical frontier. But like international immigrants, Wilson’s characters harbor a desire for “return.” For Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson , to give one example, the South is the only place where black Americans can be rooted, whole, and sovereign because they have a claim to the land itself.

Africa also looms large in the cycle. Largely imperceptible and irrecoverable, it is an absent presence that is known only through its effects. It makes only furtive appearances, as in The Piano Lesson . Boy Willie and Berniece’s ancestral piano is the play’s extended metaphor, and “its legs [are] carved in the manner of an African sculpture . . . mask-like figures resembling totems.” The Middle Passage haunts the plays that are set in earlier decades like Gem of the Ocean . It is the beginning of the African odyssey in North America, the chapter that sutures the West Africa of bygone centuries to modern Pittsburgh. The Middle Passage also explains Aunt Ester’s (a homologue for “ancestor”) salience. A three-hundred-year-old persona who embodies a history mired in slavery and its aftermaths, she is either present or invoked in almost all the cycle’s plays. Aunt Ester is a healer and sage who intuits other characters’ woes, making those who are world-weary and lost “right with themselves” by transporting them to the “City of Bones” in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There she awakens them to the injuries of a history that is felt and lived but not always understood, what Wilson called “blood memory.”

The Pittsburgh Cycle is even conversant with the diffuse yet generative organism known as the African diaspora—a macrocommunity of peoples of African descent living outside of a common reference territory. In Seven Guitars , the putatively mad Hedley channels a larger trans- and international black consciousness that exceeds the experience of being of black in Pittsburgh and the United States. He sees the expanse of the black world as his heritage, a cultural repository from which he freely draws to make sense of his historic conditions. Whether summoning the Queen of Sheba, Marcus Garvey, or Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hedley does so to defy his elementary school teacher’s declaration that he will “amount to nothing [and] grow up to cut the white man’s cane.”

World literature is neither an additive to the canon nor its abolition. It is a critical practice with targeted intellectual outcomes.

The cycle ends with Radio Golf , which is set in the 1990s against the quandaries posed by urban decay and renewal. Harmond Wilkes sacrifices his lucrative real estate career and mayoral aspirations to block the demolition of 1839 Wylie Avenue, Aunt Ester’s long-standing house. He makes this decision in part out of deference to Ester, who moored the black community to the Hill District and who signified “African survivals” for black American culture as it came into its own. Saving Aunt Ester’s house would mean saving the legacy of a person who represented continuity in a history of disruptions and disinheritances.

Readers of Wilson’s plays will notice an unmistakable sense of disquiet in most of the characters, which is caused by spatial and cultural impermanence. One of the reasons Wilson sets his plays in hyperlocal and domestic spaces like kitchens, backyards, living rooms, cafés, and diners is because these spaces are sancta from the uncertainty and tentativeness of their lives as minoritized people who belong everywhere and nowhere, who are and are not American, who are and are not African, simultaneously rooted and itinerant. But they inhabit rings of communities that go out like concentric circles, from their local communities outward toward this thing called the “world.”

W orld literature has its critics, of course. While I refuse to think of world literature defensively or apologetically, I always feel impelled to acknowledge these criticisms in academic forums, many of which invite productive discussions that can only strengthen world literature as an idea and an educational resource. They include the charge that world literature, like area studies, is a form of surveillance and that the reliance of undergraduate world literature curricula on translation sterilizes and domesticates other literatures for American consumption, erasing the very difference that makes them valuable (this view rests on unsound qualitative ideas about translation). Other critics argue that world literature poaches literary texts from elsewhere but grafts a critical apparatus and nomenclature onto them that are alien to the conditions of their own production. Older criticisms of world literature include the observation that it is Eurocentric. While this might have been true, “Eurocentric” is itself a category of diminishing returns because of its own vast omissions. Eastern and central European literatures hardly figured into that “Eurocentricism,” nor, for that matter, did a lot of “western” European literary traditions (Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, etc.) This is why the euphemism “NATO literatures” came to be. These criticisms may be dour and a little heavy-handed, but they are not patently wrong. Starting with the local is a way of allaying some of these concerns, if for no other reason than the fact that students will be conscious of their cultural bearings and the ways these will inform how they read their way outward, like Wilson’s plays, toward and through the world.

In the past three decades, the world has come to be characterized by prefixes like inter-, poly-, multi-, hetero-, trans-, etc. World literature should be at the forefront of unpacking these prefixes and confronting their social implications. World literature has to marshal the tools and dispensations of literary education for all students, especially those students entering business, the sciences, or law. Those students, no less than we who make our life’s work the reading and weaponizing of literature, will face the pitfalls of not possessing the cultural literacy literature can offer. World literature is neither an additive to the canon nor its abolition. It is a critical practice with targeted intellectual outcomes. It may not change the world, but it has the potential to reshape the way the world appears to a student. Teaching world literature does admittedly come with perils; it courts premature optimism by inviting students to trend toward “we’re all the same after all” based on what they feel to be universals in the texts they read. But this is only a beginning. If students feel that they can at least sense the Other—to “imagine precisely,” in the words of Amitav Ghosh—it can only lead to good things.

Duquesne University

Emad Mirmotahari is associate professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His interests are African fiction, world literature, and postcolonial literatures. He teaches courses on race and immigration through a literary lens on a regular basis.

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How to Write a Reflective Essay: A Step-By-Step Guide
Learn English
James Prior
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Updated November 8, 2024

Learn how to write a reflective essay with our easy guide. Follow step-by-step instructions to craft an impactful reflection on your personal experiences.

Reflective essays allow you to dive deep into your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. They help you explore how personal events have shaped you, whether in a classroom, a workplace, or in life. This guide will walk you through every stage of writing a reflective essay, showing you how to organize your ideas, craft a strong narrative, and present your insights effectively.

Table of Contents

What is a Reflective Essay?

A reflective essay is a personal type of writing that focuses on your thoughts and reactions to a specific experience or event. It’s often a personal response rather than an objective recounting of facts, as seen in academic essays. Reflective essays are commonly used in academic settings for subjects like psychology, literature, nursing, and even education. However, they’re also valuable for self-reflection and personal development, helping you analyze experiences that shape your identity.

In a reflective essay, you narrate an experience and then explore its significance, impact, and meaning. This isn’t about providing only external details; it’s about looking within. Reflective essays encourage critical thinking and help you understand how your experiences influence your beliefs, values, and attitudes.

How to Write a Reflective Essay

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft a thoughtful and well-structured reflective essay. Follow these points to organize your experiences and insights, guiding readers through your journey of personal growth and discovery.

Choose a Topic

Selecting the right topic is crucial for a meaningful reflective essay. You should choose an experience or event that impacted you emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually. Reflective essays require introspection, so your topic should provide ample material for self-examination.

Examples of Reflective Essay Topics:

A memorable event, like a family gathering or significant achievement.
A challenging experience, such as overcoming failure or dealing with a loss.
A learning experience, perhaps a class project or workshop.
An impactful conversation or advice that changed your perspective.

Tip : Pick a topic that sparks strong feelings or has lasting meaning for you. Avoid topics that feel too superficial, as deeper emotions and thoughts make for a richer essay.

Reflect on the Experience

Reflection is the core of this process. Before you begin writing, take time to think deeply about your chosen experience. To understand it fully, ask yourself the following questions:

How did I feel during and after the event?
What new insights did I gain from this experience?
How did it change my beliefs or attitudes?

Reflective essays require honesty, so it’s essential to look beyond the surface. Think critically and examine how the experience shaped you. Reflecting helps you gather the insights you’ll need to write a meaningful essay.

Outline Your Essay Structure

While reflective essays are personal, they still need a clear structure. Using an organized format ensures your essay remains coherent and readable. Here’s a basic outline to get you started:

Introduction : Introduce the topic and provide context. Mention the significance of the experience briefly.
Body : Describe the experience in detail, analyze its impact, and explore your reflections.
Conclusion : Summarize your insights and explain how the experience has changed you. Emphasize personal growth.

Tip : Writing a brief outline can help you stay on track and avoid straying from your main points. A structured approach gives your essay clarity and keeps the reader engaged.

Consider Your Language

Once you’ve established the outline of your reflective essay, it’s important to remember to use the right sort of language before you start writing. You should:

Use a Reflective Tone and Personal Language

Reflective essays are personal, so use a conversational tone. Writing in the first person helps make the experience feel relatable. Avoid overly formal or academic language; instead, write as though you’re sharing with a close friend.

Example : “At first, I felt nervous, unsure of how to handle the animals. But as the days passed, my confidence grew.”

This conversational tone makes the essay feel more intimate and relatable.

Use Descriptive Language

Descriptive language helps your reader visualize your experience. Reflective essays benefit from vivid descriptions that pull readers into the story. Describe sounds, colors, and emotions to make your writing come alive.

Example : “The dog’s brown eyes sparkled with excitement, and his joyful bark filled the room.”

Adding descriptive details like this will make your narrative engaging and immersive.

Include Specific Examples

Specific examples add authenticity to your writing. Instead of vague statements, focus on concrete moments that highlight your emotions or insights. This detail creates a more vivid and impactful story.

Example : “When I first walked into the shelter, a little dog wagged his tail and looked up at me. In that moment, I realized how much I wanted to help.”

Balance Description and Reflection

Reflective essays require a balance between describing events and analyzing them. While it’s essential to set the scene and narrate what happened, don’t let the description overshadow your reflections. Spend equal time explaining what you learned or how you grew.

Stay Honest and Open

Authenticity is key in reflective writing. Embrace vulnerability and share your thoughts sincerely. If an experience was difficult, discuss that honestly rather than glossing over it. Readers connect best with genuine reflections.

Example : “It wasn’t easy facing my fears that day, but doing so taught me courage.”

Write the Introduction

In the introduction, set the stage for the reader by providing essential background on the experience. Introduce the event or topic you’ll discuss and briefly mention why it’s significant to you. The idea is to hook the reader and make them want to read on. The following structure works well:

Start with a Hook : Begin with an engaging sentence to grab the reader’s attention. This could be a memorable moment, a strong feeling, or a question that reflects the main idea of your essay.

Introduce the Experience : Briefly introduce the experience or topic you’ll be reflecting on. Provide just enough context to orient the reader without giving away too much detail.

Present the Thesis Statement : Conclude your introduction with a thesis statement for your reflective essay. This statement should encapsulate the main insight or lesson you gained from the experience. Unlike a typical thesis statement, a reflective thesis is personal and sets up the reflection to come.

For example:

“Through my experience volunteering, I discovered the transformative power of empathy and how small acts of kindness can make a lasting impact.”
“My journey through unexpected failure taught me resilience and helped me realize that growth often stems from adversity.”

Remember to keep the introduction short; it should give the reader a glimpse of what’s to come without going into too much detail.

Full Introduction Example : “Last summer, I volunteered at a local animal shelter. I thought it would be an easy way to help, but the experience deeply impacted me, changing my perspective on responsibility and empathy.”

This introduction sets up the reader with a clear expectation of the essay’s topic and why it matters to the writer. It engages the reader while leaving space for more details in the body paragraphs. Here you can expand on specific events, reactions, and reflections.

Describe the Experience in the Body

The body of your essay is where you’ll describe the experience in detail and reflect on its significance. Using sensory language can help create vivid imagery and immerse the reader in your experience. Describe sights, sounds, smells, and emotions to paint a clear picture.

Elements to Include in the Body :

Chronological Description : Explain the experience step-by-step so the reader understands the sequence of events.
Personal Feelings : Discuss your emotions at different points in the experience.
Key Insights : Share the lessons you learned and reflect on their impact.

Example : “When I arrived at the shelter, I expected a light workload. However, within minutes, I was helping feed over a dozen animals. The task was challenging, but I felt an unexpected surge of responsibility, realizing that these animals depended on me.”

Here, sensory details and emotional responses make the narrative more engaging.

Connect with Personal Growth and Insights

Reflective essays aim to show growth. After describing the event, examine how it shaped your perspective or values. Think about how the experience influenced your behavior or attitudes. Consider questions such as:

Did this experience shift your outlook on life?
How did it help you develop as a person?
Are there new values or beliefs you now hold?

Discussing these aspects will show the reader your growth. Link your reflections to real changes in your thoughts or actions, showing how this event contributed to your development.

Craft a Strong Conclusion

The conclusion should summarize your key insights. Reflect on the long-term significance of the experience and how it will influence you in the future. This section should leave the reader with a sense of closure.

Questions to Consider in the Conclusion :

How did the experience change you?
What new understanding did it bring?
How will this insight affect your future choices?

Example Conclusion : “My time at the shelter taught me that empathy and responsibility go hand-in-hand. Today, I feel more equipped to make a difference in my community, and I look forward to volunteering again soon.”

This conclusion emphasizes the long-term impact, rounding off the essay with a forward-looking statement.

End with a Call to Action or Thought-Provoking Idea

A reflective essay should leave the reader with a lasting impression. Consider ending with a thought-provoking question or a statement of purpose for future growth. This reinforces your theme and gives the reader something meaningful to ponder.

Reflect on the Future

To emphasize personal growth, think about how the experience will affect your future. Mentioning how you plan to use these lessons reinforces the significance of the event and underscores your development.

Edit and Refine Your Essay

Once you finish your draft, set it aside for a day before revising. Reviewing it with fresh eyes helps you spot areas for improvement. Focus on clarity, coherence, and flow, ensuring that each paragraph transitions smoothly to the next.

Editing Tips :

Read Aloud : This can help you identify awkward phrasing or unclear sections.
Grammar and Spelling Check : Proofread carefully for grammatical errors.
Ask for Feedback : Get a second opinion to spot overlooked issues.

Reflective Essay vs Narrative Essay

When it comes to personal writing, reflective and narrative essays are often confused, but they serve different purposes. While both can center on personal experiences, each type of essay has a unique focus and structure.

A reflective essay emphasizes introspection, where you analyze the impact of an experience and what it taught you, while a narrative essay centers on storytelling, focusing on recounting an event with rich detail.

Reflective and narrative essays may seem similar because both involve storytelling, but they have distinct purposes and structures.

Understanding these differences can help you choose the right approach to effectively convey your message.

Here’s a breakdown of the differences:

Reflective Essay : The primary aim is self-examination. You analyze how an experience affected you, what you learned, or how it shaped your views. Reflection and introspection are the main focuses.
Narrative Essay : This type of essay mainly focuses on storytelling. The goal is to narrate a personal or fictional experience in a compelling, often descriptive way, without necessarily delving into personal insights or lessons.

2. Structure

Reflective Essay : While it includes a narrative element, it’s organized around your insights. After narrating an experience, you’ll explore its impact on your thoughts, beliefs, or behavior, usually using a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.
Narrative Essay : It follows a straightforward story arc (beginning, middle, end) without needing extensive analysis. While some narrative essays may have a lesson, the main emphasis is on the plot and character development.

3. Tone and Perspective

Reflective Essay : The tone is introspective and often more formal, though it remains personal. Writing is in the first person, as you focus on your thoughts and feelings about the experience.
Narrative Essay : The tone is more flexible and can range from formal to conversational. The essay may use first or third person, depending on whether it’s a personal story or a fictional narrative.

4. Focus on Analysis

Reflective Essay : The emphasis is on analyzing the experience. Reflection is key, so you spend time examining the “why” and “how” of your reaction to the events.
Narrative Essay : The focus is on describing what happened. While you might touch on emotions or lessons, detailed analysis is generally not required.

Example Topics

Reflective Essay Topic : “What volunteering taught me about empathy and resilience.”
Narrative Essay Topic : “The time I got lost in a foreign country.”

In short, a reflective essay emphasizes personal growth and insights gained from an experience, while a narrative essay prioritizes telling a vivid story without necessarily requiring deep introspection.

Writing a reflective essay can be challenging, but it’s a powerful exercise in self-discovery. By carefully selecting your topic, using vivid language, and connecting your experiences with personal insights, you can create a compelling narrative that resonates.

Reflecting honestly, structuring your essay well, and balancing description with introspection will help you craft an engaging and meaningful essay that truly reflects your personal growth.