Literary education - (re)shaping our past/present/future perception of the otherŽivančević-Sekeruš, Ivana (Avtor) literatureSerbian literatureCroatian literatureliterary didacticsdidactics of literatureuniversity didacticseducationimagologyforeignersnational identitystereotipesculture of dialogueBearing in mind that literature, and hence the way of teaching it, is a way of understanding and changing society, three years ago at the University of Novi Sad (Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Serbian Literature) I prepared the course "Images of the Other in 19th and 20th Century Serbian and Croatian Literature", which also appeared in book form (Self-portraits - imagological variations, Novi Sad 2004). The course was directly inspired by "image studies". It is well known that literature also helps in the creation and expression of national identity; and an imagological approach takes into consideration the internal workings of the text and its interaction with the context. Joep T. Leerssen defines image studies as "the study of national and ethnic stereotypes and of the literary representation of intercultural confrontation" (Leerssen 1991: 128). The literary articulation of national stereotypes found in selected literary texts for the course (Nenadović, Lazarević, Vinaver, Crnjanski, Nemčić, Matoš, Kamov, Begović, etc.) served as a starting point for dialogue in the classroom on different topics: how do we construct narratives for others and for ourselves (hetero-images versus auto-images), how does literature depict the foreigner, what is the relation between literature and "historical memory", etc. Since classrooms can be seen as "sites of cultural making" (Hardcastle 1985), I was attempting to cultivate "a culture of comparison", "an awareness of difference" and "a culture of dialogue"20082024-02-20 12:11:56Neznano154535sl